The Presence of the Past: Re-memorying Trauma as Religious and Political Resistance in Shia Ritual Practice

Abstract (English)

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chicago in July 2023, centering on the Shia ritual of azadari as a site of embodied memory and political resistance. During a visit with my interlocutor, Sister Shamsha, a moment of intimate ritual reflection unfolded when her young son revealed the marks on his back from a ritual practice known as matam. When asked if it caused him pain, he responded, “it never did,” to which Sister Shamsha added, “any suffering endured for Imam Hussain (as) is not felt as pain.” This exchange reveals the complex affective and epistemological dimensions of azadari mourning practice. Present paper aims to reflect on Shia azadari practice not as passionate expression of grief or sorrow, but as performative-subversive historiography. Central to this practice is rememorying—the invocation and reanimation of historical trauma in the present—through which the boundaries of time and space collapse. Azadari practice involves invoking the memory of the past in the present through the act of re-memorying the pain. However, as evident in my interlocutor's speech and his son's explanation, this bodily experience is not perceived as pain. Influenced by their interpretation, this paper theorizes mourning ritual as a process of re-memorying trauma. It aims to understand how the embodied experience of pain is reconfigured through sacred veneration, transforming suffering into a spiritually meaningful act. Drawing on the concept of ancestoring, I examine how the Shia body becomes a living archive—mediating between the material and the spiritual, the living and the dead—through the continuous performance of azadari. Enacting an alternative mode of Islamic political consciousness azadari functions a subversive grassroots response to the erasure of Shia history. It challenges dominant Sunni historical authority grounded in embodied memory, spiritual continuity, and affective resistance.