Some Difficult Questions
Reading Simone Weil to illuminate certain nagging questions on the meaning of Karbala.
There are some profound questions that Karbala raises that haven’t been satisfactorily addressed by Muslim scholars dominating the pulpit, or better known scholars of seminaries although Muslim poets and sages have to an extent engaged with them. As such certain inadequately theorized notions have been persisting making us oblivious of deeper issues. Depending on one’s background or prejudices, one finds certain elements or stories in transmitted accounts either unbelievable or lacking historical credence or incongruous. How come, for instance, Imam Hussain’s camp should beg for water? How come he was seeking safe exit or embraced death after he had no other option? What about attempts to exonerate Yazid or even mildly reprimand Hussain or downplaying meta-historical or mythic or cosmic significance of Karbala or asking what was God doing when little children who had not sinned against either Yazid or God were crying for water. Are required to imagine them being atoning for sins of the community? Aren’t there significant parallels with the accounts of heroes suffering cross or death and subsequent rebirth elsewhere in the world? If things are ultimately to be judged from God’s viewpoint and all things contribute to good or can be justified in aesthetic terms isn’t the emphasis on the tragic and mourning only half truth that misses deeper or higher supra-moral ontological intellectual aesthetic viewpoint that is in a way deeper one? I think these questions are better addressed if we take note of insights of Simone Weil whose thought converges in significant manner with great sages/Sufis.
Weil’s statement “At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, 'Why am I being hurt?', then there is certainly injustice” should help settle the question of exonerating Yazid. Who doesn’t feel that justice or good has been defied under the desert sun of Karbala? Although complex trajectory of events in which much theology has been later invested can’t be incontestably reconstructed and adjudicated in legal terms in any court retrospectively, it is indeed the case that the verdict expressive of collective conscience of humanity represented best by the poets across cultures is for Hussain and against Yazid and as such no apology on behalf of Yazid really matters when Hussain and Yazid have become symbols of good and evil in mytho-poetic space of mankind, especially Islamic world.
Weil further explains why to be human is to seek martyrdom: “God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales on initiation. If I accept this gift it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization… Humility is the refusal to exist outside God. It is the queen of virtues. The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a being.” The idea of martyrdom is basically witnessing God alone or consuming oneself manifesting His glory. This may be achieved by what Simone Weil calls decreation. Decreation may be effected through horrendous evil and may involve in many cases extreme violence, extreme humiliation, deprivation and distress or forced detachment from everything that binds one to the order of creation. Affliction, as distinguished from mere suffering, is what better describes the mechanism of decreation. Understanding this point means we don’t ask for compensations to heroes of Karbala and don’t think of any filler of the void like comfort from this or that quarter to sully the innocence and dignity of spirit. It dissuades one to think that we could have been of some use to the heroes. If we weep, it is ultimately for ourselves, for what we share with our beloved heroes, for desecration of the impersonal sacred that grounds our fellowship of spirit. Let us avoid facile apologies for what happened in Karbala and face the heat and thirst and rain of arrows that wrench the attachment to flesh, to pleasure, to all what is not eternal and thus not deserving to be saved. Here is Weil’ scorching logic of grace and redemption:“I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.
To accept what is bitter. The acceptance must not be reflected back on to the bitterness so as to diminish it, otherwise the acceptance will be proportionately diminished in force and purity, for the thing to be accepted is that which is bitter in so far as it is bitter; it is that and nothing else. We have to say like Ivan Karamazov that nothing can make up for a single tear from a single child, and yet to accept all tears and the nameless horrors which are beyond tears. We have to accept these things, not in so far as they bring compensations with them, but in themselves. We have to accept the fact that they exist simply because they do exist.” And “We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering. “We should make every effort we can to avoid affliction, so that the affliction which we meet with may be perfectly pure and perfectly bitter.” Since “to say “I’ is to lie” one can be redeemed by smashing oneself as if “using a hammer to strike a nail with all the force one can muster, a nail whose tip rests on the self.”
What happened in Karbala is believed to be providential (traditionally believed to be predicted in important details decades before it happened) – or has been redeemed by the result with around 70 people carrying cross (one can make exceptions of one or more children who couldn’t be imagined to freely consenting to die). Those who understand the passion of the Christ and are abreast with the great tradition of literature on mediations on the cross (Muslims have, generally speaking, been superficially engaging with that theme as their interest has been more polemical and political disguised as theological than properly philosophical or religious in what happened before the finale of crucifixion – whether crucifixion is a crucifiction, as Ahmed Deedat would popularize the expression, doesn’t affect the significance of the fact that Jesus was persecuted, humiliated and taken to the cross and suffered so much before his ascension to heaven in Muslim account), will readily understand Karbala. Let us note why decreation is needed for each one of us and a sort of Karbala must be enacted or chosen for redemption for vast majority of mankind – God anyway makes us taste something of Karbala in many ways, detailed below. To understand how it could be providential, we may invoke Weil’s notion of decreation (equivalent of Sufi notion of fana or dying before death): “Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated.
At each moment our existence is God’s love for us. But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being. Our existence is made up only of his waiting for our acceptance not to exist. He is perpetually begging from us that existence which he gives. He gives it to us in order to beg it from us.
Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burden of poverty and of labour which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease—all these constitute divine love. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough ‘I’ in us to make it possible to surrender the ‘I’ for love’s sake.”
She explains further, “The contemplation of human misery wrenches us in the direction of God, and it is only in others whom we love as ourselves that we can contemplate it. We can neither contemplate it in ourselves as such nor in others as such. The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.” Few know that our state in this world is worse than those who were left to mourn on that fateful night (sham-i gareeban).Our extreme poverty, wretchedness and misery is known to prophets, saints, great tragedians and such philosophers as Pascal and Weil. Modern philosophers and writers have aptly presented our penury. Our sin is our very being as Sufis and ascetics would put it and this necessitates radical operation of decreation through such mechanisms as reliving sham-i gareeban. As Weil puts it:
What happened in Karbala is believed to be providential (traditionally believed to be predicted in important details decades before it happened) – or has been redeemed by the result with around 70 people carrying cross (one can make exceptions of one or more children who couldn’t be imagined to freely consenting to die). Those who understand the passion of the Christ and are abreast with the great tradition of literature on mediations on the cross (Muslims have, generally speaking, been superficially engaging with that theme as their interest has been more polemical and political disguised as theological than properly philosophical or religious in what happened before the finale of crucifixion – whether crucifixion is a crucifiction, as Ahmed Deedat would popularize the expression, doesn’t affect the significance of the fact that Jesus was persecuted, humiliated and taken to the cross and suffered so much before his ascension to heaven in Muslim account), will readily understand Karbala. Let us note why decreation is needed for each one of us and a sort of Karbala must be enacted or chosen for redemption for vast majority of mankind – God anyway makes us taste something of Karbala in many ways, detailed below. To understand how it could be providential, we may invoke Weil’s notion of decreation (equivalent of Sufi notion of fana or dying before death): “Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated.
At each moment our existence is God’s love for us. But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being. Our existence is made up only of his waiting for our acceptance not to exist. He is perpetually begging from us that existence which he gives. He gives it to us in order to beg it from us.
Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burden of poverty and of labour which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease—all these constitute divine love. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough ‘I’ in us to make it possible to surrender the ‘I’ for love’s sake.”
She explains further, “The contemplation of human misery wrenches us in the direction of God, and it is only in others whom we love as ourselves that we can contemplate it. We can neither contemplate it in ourselves as such nor in others as such. The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.” Few know that our state in this world is worse than those who were left to mourn on that fateful night (sham-i gareeban).Our extreme poverty, wretchedness and misery is known to prophets, saints, great tragedians and such philosophers as Pascal and Weil. Modern philosophers and writers have aptly presented our penury. Our sin is our very being as Sufis and ascetics would put it and this necessitates radical operation of decreation through such mechanisms as reliving sham-i gareeban. As Weil puts it:
- “In a sense God renounces being everything [by creating the universe. Indian scriptures’ allusion to the world or creation as sacrifice is similarly explicable]. We should renounce being something. That is our only good.
Once we have understood we are nothing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing. It is for this that we suffer with resignation, it is for this that we act, it is for this that we pray.
May God grant me to become nothing.
In so far as I become nothing, God loves himself through me.”
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