Muslim Profanities

On February 22 the Al-Askariyya Shrine was bombed in Samarra.

I don’t know why the sight of a broken dome makes me cry.

It’s not as if Muslims don’t die every day. And it’s not as if Muslim homes and Muslim lives have not already been bombed to rubble. Every morning brings new deaths.

But I look at pictures of the ravaged Al-Askariyya dome, and I want to know: what is the religion of a mosque-destroyer? The tenth Imam is buried there, with his sister. And the eleventh. The twelfth Imam, Imam Mahdi, hid there for a time, before disappearing, going into occultation, to await the end of days. His mother is buried there.

Did it matter that these were the Imams? Did it matter that they were the descendents of the Prophet, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him? Did it matter that they had been leaders of a whole community of Muslims? That swarms of Muslims pick up their lives and their dreams, their prayers and their anguish, and come to these graves to bless the memory of these dead, and their own dead, to pray for themselves and their loved ones, to commune?

Does a bomber say Fatiha over the people he’s killed? What is the religion of a grave-defiler?

Muharram is about mourning. We’ve given ourselves much to mourn. Some bigot drew hateful cartoons of the Prophet and we rampaged across our own cities, set fire to McDonalds restaurants (local franchise), broke windows on cars (local owners), and still made it home in time for supper. In Pakistan, whole livelihoods have been destroyed, Muslim livelihoods, in defence of the Prophet, may he still intercede for us on the day of judgement. Further west, Iran is offering financial aid to the Hamas government and drawing cartoons of the Holocaust.

And then, Wednesday morning, someone set off a bomb in one of the most venerated Shi’i holy sites.

I don’t know what to tell you about us. Sometimes I think, Qayamat aa rahi hai. Namazein parrho. (Doomsday’s coming. Say your prayers.) And then sometimes I wonder if the world ends every generation. I’m 26 and Sunni, living in Lahore. Today my heart is breaking because the Golden Dome of Samarra is gone, kicked in the teeth by people who can’t see past the end of their politics, who have no sense of the cosmic and no faith in the world to come. In 1971, my father was 29 and secular. His heart broke when the Pakistan army massacred other Pakistanis in what is now Bangladesh, commanded by people who had no sense of the integral and couldn’t see past the end of their politics. Maybe he also thought the world was ending.

Maybe it was. But we’re 23 days into the new year and already it feels like Aam al-Huzn. When the Prophet’s wife Khadijah and his uncle Abu Talib died in the same year, the year became known as Aam al-Huzn, the Year of Sadness. Cartoons, riots, protests, bombings. Hamas. Iraq. So many things in Pakistan. What will the next eleven months bring?

Does an impotent ummah, dying from the bombs of others and the bombs of its own, have the presence of mind to say inna lillah, all things unto God, and inna ileyhi raji’un, to Him is the return?