A General Shia Amnesty… to Step into the Age

I once followed a long speech by the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, in which he recounted in painstaking detail the events of “the day the Prophet’s family women were taken captive.” He was visibly and deeply moved throughout. I remember being genuinely struck by the way this painful episode was summoned as though it had occurred two or three days before, presented in a manner admitting no question of its veracity, as if transmitted by eyewitnesses whose testimony stood beyond all doubt.

Images of village women weeping in churches on Good Friday, listening to the chant “Wa habibi” or “I Am the Sorrowful Mother,” came naturally to mind. But those rituals remain anchored in their spiritual dimension, not in the precise time, place, and circumstances of the event itself, unlike the Ashura commemorations and the days associated with them, among which figures “the captivity of the Prophet’s women.”

I say today that this may well be the greatest paradox embedded in the collective memory of the Shia majority: to remain captive to the moment of “al-Taff,” as if time had stopped there, in Karbala, in the year 61 of the Hijri calendar. And just recently, at the opening of 2024, Baghdad witnessed a scene of surrealism unsurpassed in kind: the trial of Yazid ibn Muawiya, as though a contemporary court could settle a conflict fourteen centuries old by judicial decree.

The truth is that this profoundly sensitive matter will find no resolution in the corridors of courtrooms, but in the labyrinthine depths of a psychology and a mentality that refuse to this day to exit the condition of “eternal mourning.”

The time has come for a bold step, perhaps “shocking” to some, yet necessary for those who genuinely wish to cross the bridge of history toward the future. We need a “general Shia amnesty,” not as a form of forgetting the crime, but in acknowledgment that what occurred was a struggle for power, like thousands of conflicts that peoples and states have traversed across the ages, from pharaonic Egypt to the Persian and Mesopotamian empires, from Athens and Rome to Paris and the Americas.

This amnesty must encompass everyone, including the accused Shimr ibn Dhi al-Jawshan, on the basis that “they know not what they do.” All were instruments in a merciless machinery of governance, fuel for a purely human struggle over throne and influence.

If the concern is “justice,” al-Mukhtar al-Thaqafi attended to that task in his time, putting the sword to the necks of the killers and all, or nearly all, who had participated in that catastrophe, closing the blood account with blood. As for the perpetual psychological summoning of revenge, day after day, that is a formula for unending disasters, calamities, and catastrophes forever and ever.

Opening a new page is not a luxury; it is an imperative. Entering the modern age is impossible when memory is laden with blood, with remorse, with historical enmities and calls to restore a wounded dignity. We human beings need forgiveness to find peace, need “amnesty” to move forward. History is something we read in order to learn from it, not to inhabit it.

Turn the page. Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than being born anew each morning.