Today, Shia Muslims commemorate Ashura, which marks the death of Hussein Ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad in the year 680.

Last Friday, we tried to answer the question: why do some Shia Muslims flagellate and cut themselves at Ashura? (the practice is called Tatbir)

Many of you commented to let us know that you were shocked by the post and the picture, many of you felt that it reflected badly on the Shia community and did not give a proper image of Ashura.

Our deepest apologies if you felt that way: our objective was never to shock nor give a bad idea of the Shia community (one of the co-founder of L&F is herself Shia after all).

We chose to answer this question because…it’s a question we asked ourselves!

We discovered this tradition and we wanted to know where it came from. So we did some research and shared the results with you. It is what we do at L&F: we ask the questions that as Lebanese, we may ask ourselves, even if we don’t always dare to ask them out loud;  and we try to answer them.

As for the picture, it was taken by a journalist friend of ours in Lebanon during Ashura a couple of years back, and we felt it illustrated well the question we were asking, which was specifically about Tatbir.

Now we tried to make clear in our post that Tatbir is not the most common practice among Shia groups, and that most of them discourage it. Maybe we were not clear enough about it, apologies if that was the case.

As some of you mentioned, Ayatollah Khomeini indeed went on record against it: for many Shia, it is considered self-harm and as such is “haram”- religiously forbidden.

To add some historical fact about Tatbir, the first time that the practice was recorded was 3 years after the death of Hussein, when the leader of the Shia community of Koufa organized a procession to repent for not having helped Hussein. Tatbir spread in the region during Shia dynasties (as the Buyid one in the 10th century), but was banned during the Sunni ones (such as the Ottoman one).

Sources : Dictionnaire historique de l’Islam de Dominique Sourdel, NYTimes