A Human in Making: The Act of Becoming, Through Karbala
Man is an animal. A social animal, to be precise. A thinking, imaginative, worrying, and often confused animal, to be more precise still. Imagination is one of the qualities that distinguishes us from other animals. It allows us to envision what does not yet exist and transform possibilities into reality. But imagination explains only part of the human story. It helps us understand how we build civilisations. It does not fully explain what keeps us going. What compels us to persevere through suffering, to rise after repeated failures, to strive not merely to live, but to make life better?
We imagined, invented, cultivated, and constructed. Yet another quality has allowed humanity to persist in this endeavour: the capacity to care for one another. Compassion. Empathy.
Human beings are selfish. Most of us, to varying degrees, place our own interests before those of others. And yet, by the grace of Allah, the history of humanity is also a history of kindness, sacrifice, and love. Across generations, people have nursed the sick, fed the hungry, protected the vulnerable, and risked their lives for strangers. These acts have kept the fragile flame of our collective existence alive. We strive not only for a better life for ourselves, but for those we love and those whose suffering we cannot bear to ignore.
Of course, whose lives we consider worthy of dignity is a far more complicated question. Humanity has often reserved compassion for those who resemble us, belong to us, or serve our interests. Perhaps this, too, is part of the human condition: we possess the capacity for compassion without always possessing the courage to practise it universally. Literature, philosophy, and religion have tried to close that gap, and religious institutions, like all human institutions, have not always lived up to what they profess. Power, greed, and political convenience have at times prevailed over compassion.
This does not invalidate the ideals. It exposes the distance between a moral principle and its practice. Compassion may be enshrined in scripture and celebrated in sermon, but its worth is revealed when practising it becomes difficult, costly, or dangerous. The question, then, is not simply whether a tradition teaches compassion, but how it keeps compassion alive in the consciousness of those who inherit it.
It is in this context that Karbala assumes a significance far beyond the historical tragedy of a single day.
In 680 CE, on the plains of Karbala, Imam Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), was killed alongside his family and companions by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. For Shia Muslims, the tragedy was not merely one of physical violence. It represents a profound confrontation between power and conscience, and between preserving life at any cost and refusing to surrender one’s principles for the sake of survival.
The tragedy did not end with the killing of its martyrs. It continued in the suffering of the survivors, in the captivity of the Prophet’s family, and in the struggle to ensure the events were remembered. In the centuries that followed, this memory was preserved through elegies, poetry, gatherings, processions, and rituals of mourning, a constellation of practices known as Azadari.
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Azadari is an expression of grief. But to understand it only as mourning is to overlook something. It is also a practice of remembrance: a refusal to allow suffering to become anonymous, injustice to become ordinary, or the sacrifice of the innocent to disappear into the silence of history. Through it, Karbala is not recalled as something that happened long ago, but brought into the emotional and moral consciousness of each generation.
This is where Karbala offers something particularly profound to the human condition. It places compassion at the centre of a remembered tragedy. It asks us to look closely at suffering, recognise the humanity of those who endure it, and consider our obligations when confronted with injustice. It transforms remembrance into an encounter with conscience.
Consider the figures through whom this empathy is cultivated. Ali Akbar, a young man whose future lay ahead of him, invites us to contemplate lives cut short before they could unfold. Ali Asghar, an infant, confronts us with a vulnerability so absolute that it becomes difficult to look away. Bibi Sakina brings us face to face with a child’s suffering in the aftermath of violence, while Maula Abbas embodies devotion, loyalty, and the willingness to place others’ needs before one’s own. They give suffering a face, a name, and a story. They invite us to grieve for people we never knew, whose lives ended centuries before our own began.
Perhaps, over time, this repeated encounter begins to shape how we see suffering elsewhere. The child who learns to grieve for Sakina might grow up more conscious of the helplessness of a child suffering today. The one who remembers Ali Asghar might find it harder to regard the deaths of innocent children as statistics. The one who mourns Abbas might reflect on what loyalty and selflessness demand of them. This transformation is neither automatic nor guaranteed. But the possibility is worth taking seriously.
We live in a world where suffering is increasingly consumed rather than felt. Deaths become statistics, tragedies become headlines, and misery becomes content to scroll past. Shia youth are not exempt. But they inherit something remarkable: Muharram. For roughly two months and eight days, according to the observances followed in many Shia communities, they return to shared spaces and shared remembrance. They gather to listen, mourn, and reflect, and are repeatedly invited to step outside their own concerns and encounter the suffering of others.
This is not to suggest that other communities lack such traditions, or that Shias are inherently more compassionate. But for those who return to Azadari consistently, it guarantees something real: a recurring opportunity to practise empathy, question oneself, and resist the gradual numbing of conscience. And a heart that truly grieves for the oppressed of the past, year after year, is unlikely to grow deaf to the oppressed of its own time.
Remembrance of this kind does not always stay within the community that keeps it. In Srinagar in July 2024, thousands of Shia mourners in a Muharram procession carried Palestinian flags and raised slogans for people suffering in the present. The two tragedies are not identical and should not be conflated. But the gesture suggests that grief, rightly cultivated, can look outward: that mourning one suffering can teach us to recognise another.
For me personally, Muharram is a time of recreation in the truest sense: a time of being recreated. No single moment does it. It is the whole process: weeks of gathering, listening, and mourning, each day building on the last. The human side of me, whose intensity diminishes amid the distractions, ambitions, and material compulsions of everyday life, begins to awaken again. I feel returned to myself, not the person I was before, but a fresher, more mature, and more human version.
Mourning Karbala, then, is also an act of becoming: of becoming more conscious of suffering, more sensitive to injustice, more reflective of our own conduct, and more compassionate towards those whose lives intersect with ours. It is an invitation to carry the tenderness we feel in the majalis into the world outside, where suffering rarely comes accompanied by elegies, where the oppressed do not always have someone to mourn them, and where the stranger’s pain is so easily overlooked.
Some traditions offer us the means to return to ourselves when we begin to lose our way. For me, Azadari is one such tradition. Muharram reminds me of the human being I wish to be, and of the distance I must still travel to become him. That is what it means to be a human in making: to never consider our humanity a finished achievement, but a lifelong act of becoming.
