By: The Religious Authority H. E. Sayyed Muhammad Hussein (a.s.) Fadlullah

The Ashoura tragedy blurs the struggle and the person overshadows the symbol that it turns into rivers of tears as long as one can remember instead of triggering storms of revolution. Also the emotional and historical conception presents it as a characteristic of the self, in such a way that the broad cause becomes a personal affair instead of the opposite in which the movement of the self is a product of the cause.

This atmosphere has made the commemoration acquire a kind of tradition in the popular and historical reality that it turned out to be a mere popular tradition of emotional tragedy, pride in heroism, and absorption by excitement. In each period, the emotion has been nurtured with new tidings and analyses till the truth has got lost in a flood of lies, and imagination has been set off without restraint that the emotions have formed the significance of the tragedy. Also, a new context has been added to the intellectual content that can neither apply to original Islam nor does it relate to the main issue.

In this discussion, I would like to limit myself to some main points related to the significance of the commemoration, its influence upon both the intellect and the feelings. This is meant to go deeply into the Islamic context within this cause based on our need to enrich the Islamic experience currently through the liveliness of the experience in the past; it should be enriched here where the legal extension of the Islamic truth is available through the practices of the Imam apart from the personal characteristic.

In addition, some concepts should be corrected as they are misrepresented in the commemoration, something that does not fit the Islamic concept in the human sense, while a struggle is going on.