Âshûrâ: This Blood Spilled in My veins

Jalal Toufic
2002. Lebanon. No dialogue

Al-Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the son of the first Shiite imam, Alî, was slaughtered alongside many members of his family in the desert in 680. This memory is torture to me. But, basically, one can say this memory is torture to me of every memory, since each reminiscence envelops at some level the memory of the origin of memory, the torture that had to be inflicted on humans in order to make them remember (Nietzsche). The memory that the yearly commemoration of "Âshûrâ" is trying to maintain is not only or mainly that of the past, but the memory of the future, namely the promise of the Parousia of the twelfth imam, the long-awaited Mahdî not with standing the passage of a millennium since his occultation as well as the corresponding promise of Duodeciman Shiites to wait for him. "Âshûrâ": a condition of possibility of an unconditional promise.