A BBC report headed Iraq blasts kill Ashura pilgrims contains this sentence:
Ashura, the most important Shia festival, has witnessed serious sectarian violence since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
That, alas, is true.
But the BBC should have made clear (as it did in the report from 2004 I am about to link to) that the reason for the relative absence of of bombings of Shia pilgrims at Ashura prior to the US-led invasion was not that the Americans had not yet arrived to spoil the bucolic peace. It was because Saddam Hussein suppressed Ashura. In the same way, his Sunni-dominated regime suppressed as dangerous to his rule many other expressions of the Shia branch of Islam followed by the majority of Iraqis.
These public commemorations of the death of Husayn Ibn Ali – the self-flagellating aspect which I admit I find somewhat distasteful, but if the practice is meaningful to these pilgrims, then it’s (literally) no skin off my back – have only freely taken place at all in Iraq since the OK-BBC-we-get-it “US-led invasion.”
*For an explanation of “sincing”, see here.