Introduction
“The ta’ziyah drama of the betrayal and murder of Imam Hussayn does not cease to bring an Iranian audience to tears no matter how many times they have seen the martyrdom enacted. On the contrary. They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.”
Susan Sontag opens an incredibly interesting box with this supposition. Why do religious faiths tell martyr stories? By what mechanism are these stories supposed to bring the reader or listener closer to their God?
I will explore this with three martyr stories from each of the three Abrahamic faiths. The first is the ta’ziyah of Imam Hussayn Sontag mentions—specifically, the earliest authoritative and comprehensive retelling of the story, Maqtal Al-Husayn by Abu Mikhnaf, translated by Hamid Mavani. (available: here). The second is the Old English poem Daniel, as found in the Junius XI manuscript and translated by Daniel Anlezark—specifically, the tale of three Hebrew boys Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael surviving the fire. The last is the Old English Life of St. Margaret, from Cotton Tiberius A.
Maqtal Al-Hussayn: Plot Summary
Given this text is outside the course, a quick primer is in order. In 680 CE, Yazid I succeeded his father Mu’awiyah I as ruler of the Islamic empire. Imam Hussayn, the grandson of Islam’s Prophet (who had died 48 years prior), saw the new ruler as an illegitimate tyrant, a view shared by most mainstream Muslims today. After receiving promises of support from the people of Kufah in modern-day Iraq, Hussayn set out to lead a revolt against Yazid. However, upon his arrival in Iraq, the people of Kufah betrayed their promise, instead fighting with Yazid’s army of several thousand in the Battle of Kerbala, a massacre of Hussayn and a troop of fewer than 100 of Hussayn’s followers and family.
The Purpose of the Texts
In both the Greek that underpins Daniel and Margaret, and the Arabic of Maqtal Al-Husayn, the words for “witness” and “martyr” have the same root. As Derrida explains in his Demeure, martyrdom implies testimony. “Testimony always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie…[it is] never […] able or obligated […] to become a proof.” Religious faith, by definition, cannot be “proven” by empirical science: in place of that proof, we have the martyr, who seeks to prove to others the truth of their religious faith by making the ultimate sacrifice for it.
We can assume that religion’s purpose in telling martyr stories is to make people more pious. I believe the three texts use three different mechanisms to achieve this. The Maqtal uses what I will call “guilty remembrance:” the notion that the reader should have been there to save the martyr, and that expressing guilt and sorrow over their absence will inspire penance in the form of compensatory piety. Daniel is the emotional opposite: it is “wonder,” in which the reader comes away impressed with the power of their faith to work miracles, and more invested in that faith than before. Margaret is a subtle mix: it may be called “wondrous remembrance,” in which the martyr’s suffering proves the strength of their faith, providing an admirable template for the flock to emulate.
I will now examine how various elements of each of these works are aligned with these goals.
The Provenance & Language of the Texts
Abu Mikhnaf’s Maqtal is a plain, informational text. It is the first systematic collection of reports and testimonies regarding the martyrdom of Imam Hussayn. In the 200 years following Abu Mikhnaf’s death in 774 CE, other Maqtals were written by authors such as Baladhuri and Ibn A’tham, beginning a process of layering on artistic interpretation and flourish which continues to this day through the elegies and poetry prepared every year for the remembrance of the martyrdom. It is striking to compare this tradition to Abu Mikhnaf’s original work. True horrors, familiar to everyone in the audience Sontag pictures, are done to Hussayn: he is deprived of water for three days, the tents housing women and children in his company are set ablaze, and his body is mutilated and scavenged after he is slaughtered—but all of these, collectively, are described in just a few sentences. The most stunning case is that of the killing of Hussayn’s infant son, Abdallah: the Maqtal plainly describes how a soldier from Yazid’s army “fired an arrow that smashed into him.” Tens of thousands of hours of elegy and art have blossomed from these terse descriptions over the last 14 centuries.
By contrast, the newer Daniel (10th century CE) and Margaret (11th – early 12th century CE) have both already received a few layers of that kind of embellishment and polish. Daniel is the furthest removed: in the interests of comporting the story to the strictures of Old English meter, and of communicating which “team” the author is on, Nebuchadnezzar is called “obstinate king,” “pagan prince,” “wolf-hearted king”—almost anything except what he is called in this same story as told in the New International Version of the Bible, which is…”Nebuchadnezzar.” Margaret, too, is in many ways a miracle story, not a history—the reader must place themselves in Margaret’s cell as she battles the dragon and the devil.
While both Margaret and Daniel employ grander language than the Maqtal, employing elevated descriptions of the beauty in their martyrs’ physical presences, there is a subtle difference. Daniel is miraculous totally in the positive: it places the three boys in a cocoon of calm, beauty, and wonder, totally shielded from the ugliness of their torture. They are “blissful,” and “inside [the furnace] it was most of all just like when the sun shines in summer, and dewdrops are scattered by the wind when it becomes day.” After the torture, their beauty is unscathed: “their looks were not harmed, nor was any damage done to their clothes, nor hair scorched by fire.” By contrast, Margaret’s beauty is revealed by the gruesomeness of her torture: “the executioners beat her tender body so that her blood flowed on the ground as water does from the purest spring.” The Hebrew boys’ faith protects their bodies and souls alike; Margaret’s enables the miraculous juxtaposition of a body disfigured by horrors, and a pure, unblemished soul.
These contrasts reveal the alignment of each text around its ultimate goal, as I described. The Maqtal confronts its reader with cold, hard facts, and makes an appeal that strikes at the deepest center of the heart: where were you, reader? Whose side were you on? Would you have been on? Hussayn is not hopeless, a victim of monsters: he is a political actor, one part of a discourse over what values govern the Islamic empire. Abu Mikhnaf’s matter-of-fact style tells us that Hussayn does not need our pity; Hussayn needs what he tells us he needs as he embraces his dying nephew Qasim and says “By God, the number of people who are prepared to kill us are many, and the helpers few.” At the time of the Maqtal’s writing, the Umayyad dynasty that killed Hussayn had just been overthrown by the Abbasids; to this day, analogies are explicitly drawn between its characters and current political, military, and religious leaders in the Islamic world. It is an inescapably political document. It seeks to incite “guilty remembrance,” and induce political action: don’t let Hussayn be martyred again. Daniel, on the other hand, seeks to inspire a sense of “wonder.” The miracle of the boys’ emergence unharmed from the fire converts even Nebuchadnezzar. The total opposite of the Maqtal, the entire agency and responsibility for the boys’ salvation or incineration lay with God himself—the reader has no involvement, and is asked only to reflect on the wonders of the Lord and praise Him. Finally, Margaret combines the two, and provides a template for an appropriate response in the text itself: when she survives the boiling water after other gruesome tortures, “fifteen thousand men from the crowd believed.” Margaret, like the Hebrew boys and unlike Hussayn, is a victim of monsters, and overcomes them in miraculous ways; but like Hussayn and unlike the Hebrew boys, she does suffer, and invites the reader to experience that suffering and convert it into piety—to engage in “wondrous remembrance.” Indeed, as we will see in the next section, she is incredibly explicit in this ask.
The Martyr’s Knowledge of their Fate & Communication with their God
Imam Hussayn, in the Maqtal, absolutely knows that his betrayal and death has been pre-ordained. Responding to one of many who beseeched him to turn away from Iraq and return to Mecca, he states: “sound decisions are not concealed from me—but the decree of God prevails;” and it is even suggested that upon reaching Kerbala, he recognizes the land from a prophecy of his killing delivered by an angel to his grandfather. Despite this knowledge, Hussayn persists in his journey despite a number of opportunities to escape. Even more interestingly, despite being predestined to die in battle against Yazid’s vastly larger army, he approaches the battle as a serious military exercise, setting fire-traps around his camp to defend against rearguard attacks.
The three Hebrew boys in Daniel do not appear to have such knowledge. Their defiance of paganism is a matter of faith, and thus a matter of choice: they reject conversion “even though the bitter death was offered to them.” They enter the fire expecting incineration, and when saved, praise their God and even offer “thanks […] that you have made this punishment for us.”
Margaret’s knowledge of her fate undergoes a fascinating evolution. At first, she prays for physical salvation—to be “delivered from the hands of the wicked and from the hands of this executioner.” Then, after she is tortured, she holds fast to her faith, declaring that she will “give my body over to torments, that my soul may be victorious in heaven” and that “Christ himself has blessed my body.” She continues to endure torments as a testament to the strength of her faith, and the more hideous the torture, the greater the effect: when she is plunged into boiling water, she prays not that it land cool upon her as the fire did to the boys in Daniel, but that it “cleanse me for the eternal life.” At this point, once she has completely abandoned any care for the body and is focused purely on the soul, she communicates directly with the heavens and is called there. Finally, at the last moment, she has attained the same level of knowledge that Hussayn had: when her executioner hesitates, she demands that the deed be done, implying predestination.
Once again, the narrative choices of each author are aligned with their purpose. Hussayn’s entire purpose is to “bear testimony” in the sense Derrida meant: to ensure that the events he always knew would transpire—the many betrayals, the cruelties of Yazid’s army—would manifest into recorded, visible historical fact. Despite having divine knowledge that he will be betrayed and killed—a visibility into the future in the same space as the present, harkening back to our reading of Boethius—Hussayn provides the opportunity for people to make their decisions and demonstrate them in the physical, temporal space. Indeed, the Maqtal even provides a template story of redemption: that of Hurr, who defects from Yazid’s army to join Hussayn on the eve of the battle. The message is “guilty remembrance.” “Reader! Are you not being given every opportunity to make the right decision? Didn’t Hussayn die just to ensure that we would know of the betrayals in this time and space, not just hear about them as divine prophecies? Are you going to do that kind of thing again with [X Y Z analogous figure to Hussayn]?” The God of Daniel is a clear contrast: He rewards the blind faith of the Hebrew boys by saving them. Accessing this miraculous power requires of the reader only that they have the same faith the boys did. Finally, Margaret is once again subtle and complex in combining attributes of these two works. Her faith initially resembles the Hebrew boys’: blind, willing to endure suffering rather than blaspheme. Her reward, however, is more like Hussayn’s than theirs. Rather than directly having her physical body saved, she gains what is far more precious—a direct channel of communication to her Lord, and an eternal testimony to the truth of her faith, proven out by her readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice. She is very explicit about what she wants the reader to do: “the person who makes a book of my martyrdom […] the person who builds a church in my name and writes out there my passion or buys one with what he has earned.” Like Hussayn, Margaret’s entire purpose is that her story should be told to increase the people’s piety: both end up as co-authors with their Lord of that story, and as such are logically required to know its ending.