Violent trend restored from Umayyad heritage

In his famous book “Violence and the sacred”, the French anthropologist René Girard argues that conflict or rivalry is the main title of people’s relationships with each other. According to this theory, the presence of a counterpart who wishes to obtain the same desired object increases the proportion of a person’s desire for it, so that the catalyst for demand becomes preventing the competitor from obtaining it, and not simply wanting it. , and thus desire becomes an abstract excitement in the battle of appropriation and domination. Here, the two theories of appropriation and the desire to explain the violent behavior of the human being, according to which he seeks to completely displace the other, simulates the animal world in which animal aggression is due to the issue of belonging to the place and to the sense of owning it, as Colin Wilson considered that all wars throughout history revolved around owning the place. .

Power and Hegemony is the title of the war that Muawiya bin Abi Sufyan declared against Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, peace be upon him. A battle inherited by the new Umayyad Caliph Yazid bin Muawiyah, who demanded that Imam Husayn bin Ali take the pledge of allegiance, provided the Imam was slapped in the face in case he could not pledge allegiance.
In 61 AH, Imam Hussain bin Ali bin Abi Talib was assassinated in the Battle of Karbala, increasing the ambition to consolidate his authority on behalf of the Islamic Caliphate. Country. Introducing the Banu Umayya a new element in Islamic culture that was not practiced before Karbala, except by the governor of Muawiyah in Mosul when Amr ibn al-Hamiq al-Khuza’i beheaded, and sent to Muawiyah. But according to al-Tabari, al-Husayn’s head was the first to be lifted from a tree. This indicates that the beheading of Amr ibn al-Hamiq was not very well known among Muslims, unlike al-Husayn’s chief and some of his companions whose heads were subjected to a selection process according to their location within their tribes. and cities in order to kill His popular base and the suggestion to the public that the revolution has ended it.
Sacrifice … a behavior through which the Umayyad authority worked to rationalize violence and make it organized and legal after Islam worked to contain it by eliminating violent human tendencies, as a metaphor for a society where blood and blood murder occupied a central position in its cultural sphere.
Today, after some 14 centuries, heads have been cracked once again, in the restoration of the scene of the beheading of Hussein and his family and companions, so that this behavior is dramatically featured on screens and social media, and work to produce it through the most important technical techniques. Making such practices part of the behavior of some groups that have arisen in some Arab and Islamic countries, which are attributed to the true Islam, and work to equate the murdered man with the animals, and the legislation of the slaughter becomes a celebrated cult. under the title of sacrifice, after creating religious and legal justifications for its practice.
So why were the heads cut off? What is the meaning of this violent behavior?
The head occupies a special place within the general symbolism of the human body, since it is a symbolic structure from which innumerable perceptions can arise that seek to give it meaning, since anthropologists see that the glorification of skulls or heads means the moral veneration of the head in which Gilbert sees the rotation of the human sign and its abstract abstract. In addition to being the sprout through which a person grows in body and mind. Therefore, the beheading takes political, religious and psychological dimensions to gain power, demonstrate capacity and appropriate this organic part as a metaphor for victory, victory and pride.

Sacrifice is an important death theme that has a very fundamental original typical meaning.

In Karbala, Al-Shammar bin Dhi Al-Jushan advances to cut off the head of Imam Hussein, who was thrown to the ground, after which the head of Al-Hussein and his family and companions were raised on spears. This scene, drawn from historical texts confirming that Yazid bin Muawiya’s army beheaded and placed in front of al-Husayni’s knees on his journey from Karbala to Kufa and the Levant, confirms that this parade was loved by the Umayyads as an expression of the victory over Hussein and the hunting of his head, that is, possession of this capital and symbol, in addition to Pride, pride and a show of force, as well as the threatening message that this scene carries to warn people not to dare stand up to the Umayyad authority and its system. The same behavior was reestablished by takfiri groups, who turned to murder as deterrent messages, circumventing traditional methods of killing, to produce scenes of violence to convey political messages to all those who were hostile to them, and in an effort to activate the idea. of pantomime, especially for adolescents and children, to respond to violent behavior that serves the political project of these organizations.
On the other hand, the scene of the decapitation and resuscitation rooted the concept of sacrifice. In many ancient societies, decapitation was practiced as part of sacrificial rites, as the motivation behind this was the ancient belief that gods and humans are not exempt from the law of death, and such belief imposed on those societies a rebirth. The memory of this fact. They saw that a person’s life cannot be satisfied except by sacrificing man’s happiness and giving up his most precious possession. Followers were willing to sacrifice all their loved ones, whether they were firstborn or lonely children, to save themselves.
Sacrifice is considered one of the main themes of death that has a very basic and original typical meaning. Primitive tribes feel they are motivated to offer sacrifices or offerings to the gods, and many times these offerings are human and of high value. Likewise, in Christianity, “it is believed that the total sacrifice that a loved one makes, a perfect child is a sufficient sacrifice to atone for all the sins of the human race forever.”
Apparently, many psychological mechanics often include a sacrifice motive. First of all, there is penance, that is, the feeling that someone has to suffer for our sins and the sins of society. Hussein, as a sacrifice, has become a price of faith that expresses a reformist position, where his pain and wounds are transformed into a new life, and the victim becomes a symbol and capital, as a result of the tax he paid in a game. . Sacrificial equations, and this appears in the scene of Hussein surrendering to death by slaughter in order to gain God’s approval, to be an offering awaiting God’s acceptance. This is confirmed by Mrs. Zainab, Hussein’s sister, saying, “Oh God, accept this sacrifice from us.” Ali Shariati sees sacrificial merit as the historical opposite of the danger of the final death of humanity, when the death of a man is a guarantee for the life of a nation and a basis for the survival of a belief, so his sacrifice and testimony is proof of a greater crime and a violation of the masks of the ruling power and its deception and falsehood. Cutting off Hussein’s head will be a path towards that life that God wants, for the saint, as David sees it, Le Proton is not a human being who lives for himself, because the community penetrates his existence from one side to another, he He lives only through her and for her, and thus without pain he can sacrifice his life.

* Lebanese researcher

Subscribe to «News» on YouTube here