The reciter’s mournful voice echoes through the electric amplifier, soaring over the south Beirut living room full of 15 women, all clad in black.
“Oh, Hussein!” cries Soukaina Issa. She is a longtime reciter at these annual religious gatherings – hosted by a neighbour – where some of the women cover their faces with their hands, as others gently sway, crying into tissues handed to them at the door.
Fighting back tears, Issa continues the tradition of chanting the story of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad. This prayer session in the neighbourhood of Laylaki in Beirut’s southern suburbs is called a majlis. It’s an important part of Ashura, a 10-day religious commemoration during which Shia Muslims commemorate Hussein’s martyrdom.
Shias, who make up around 32% of Lebanon’s population, believe Hussein’s descendants were the rightful successors to lead the faith after his killing in the year 680 (a dispute over this eventually led to the split between Shia and Sunni Muslims). For many, the memory of Hussein’s death, in what is now the Iraqi city of Karbala, still reverberates as an important symbol of martyrdom and the forces of right versus wrong. It is always a meaningful time. But this year, Issa and the other women around her say, the lead-up to the final day of Ashura on 17 July has been particularly heavy.
For the last nine months, Israel has been engaged in a deadly onslaught on Gaza; local health officials say its military has killed nearly 39,000 people in the Palestinian enclave, and committed what the International Court of Justice, the UN’s top court, has said could plausibly include acts of genocide. This came in response to a 7 October Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw more than 250 others taken hostage.
Over that time, Israeli forces and the predominantly Shia Lebanese militant group and political party Hezbollah have also engaged in heavy cross-border fire. The UN says 435 people have been killed inside Lebanon. Ninety-seven of the dead were civilians; the remainder were mostly Hezbollah fighters.
The violence has also forced some 97,000 people to flee their homes in southern Lebanon. Some have headed for the southern city of Tyre; others further north to the majority-Shia southern suburbs of Beirut, like Laylaki.
Many of the places hit hardest in Lebanon were majority-Shia, and that is an undercurrent in this year’s Ashura. “There isn’t anybody who hasn’t been affected somehow,” Soha al-Sayed, an attendee at Issa’s prayer session, tells The New Humanitarian.
Fleeing the bombs
In Lebanon, Shia faithful mark Ashura with black mourning clothes, stalls handing out free food and coffee on public streets, and cathartic sessions like the one led by Issa, filled with prayer and storytelling of that fateful day in Karbala. Some engage in public self-flagellation, although not usually in Beirut, where the practice is frowned upon.
Issa reads about that day in Karbala to her women neighbours from stacks of heavy notebooks she has tenderly filled over the years with her own handwritten prayers and laments.
In the streets outside them, the food and coffee stalls blast lamentation poetry on loudspeakers. This year, they also bear the names and photos of Hezbollah members killed in action since October on the south Lebanon front. This part of Beirut is largely controlled by the group, and one giant screen at a busy traffic circle loops between portraits of fallen Hezbollah fighters and clips of speeches from its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Dozens of people, all in black, look on.
Among those taking part in this year’s Ashura are those displaced by the war. Sisters Batoul and Zahraa al-Sayed, 15 and 12, attended one of Issa’s readings last week with their mother, as their father waited outside on the veranda. This gathering is for women only (others are just for men, and some are mixed gender).
The girls had little choice of whether to attend, or at least listen. Their grandmother has long hosted the gathering Issa leads in her Laylaki living room, and since October the sisters and six other family members have been crammed into the tiny house.
Violence forced the family to flee their home in the southern Lebanese village of Borj Qalawayh. Now they are sharing one bedroom, one bathroom, a room their grandmother uses as a beauty salon, and the living room where the majlis is held.
“We had to start at a new school here, and make new friends,” says Batoul. She had to study for her final grade-eight exams earlier this summer in the packed house, and struggled to find a quiet place to revise.
“Sometimes I just studied in the bathroom,” she laughs. Usually a talented student, Batoul says she ended up scoring 9.5 out of 20 on her exams, a much lower score than she’s used to. “They let me pass anyway,” she says. The school understood her situation.
Batoul and Zahraa say they are the only girls from their friend group who left Borj Qalawayh. Their father, Mohammad al-Sayed, suffered from shock and signs of PTSD as bombs began falling on the outskirts of their village, so they decided to leave.
It isn’t Mohammad’s first war. After the recitations end, he goes into the bedroom to fish out an old photo album. On the first page are handwritten block letters: “Memories of the 33-day war, 2006.”
Inside are photo after photo of crumpled apartment buildings in the southern Beirut suburbs. Mohammad captured them with a disposable camera after the end of the deadly war between Israel and Hezbollah that lasted from July to August 2006, when he was 19. At the time, Israel pummelled south Beirut, southern Lebanon, and infrastructure across the country, killing more than 1,100 people.
Before that, “I didn’t know bombs,” Mohammad says. “I heard the first bombing of the airport when the war began, and I thought it was thunder.” He and his mother remained in Laylaki for the entirety of the 2006 war, even as the bombs fell around them.
Now he’s all too familiar with the sounds of war.
So is 88-year-old Sabah Ezzen, whose life has been punctuated by war since childhood. She sits, tired, in a plastic chair in the alleyway next to the house where the al-Sayeds live, and where Issa recites during Ashura, surrounded by residents relaxing before sunset.
“I’m from [south] Lebanon, but I lived in Palestine when I was little,” Ezzen remembers. Her father owned a bakery there.
Then, when she was 12 years old, came Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence, the ensuing deadly war, and what many refer to as the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe), that included the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Ezzen and her family were forced to flee back to Lebanon. They were never able to go back to her childhood home.
“My father had to leave his business and become a labourer,” she says. Today, Ezzen observes Ashura alongside her family, but as the years go by, she is less able to walk her way across the jagged alleyway to join Issa’s prayer circle. Instead, she listens in from her perch outside.
Security tensions
Ashura this year has also seen heightened tensions inside Beirut’s southern suburbs, known colloquially – and often derogatorily – as “Dahieh”. What has been called a “personal dispute” ended with one Hezbollah member shot dead and heavy gunfire near a local Ashura gathering last weekend. The funeral the next day also saw heavy gunfire.
Public Ashura rallies in the southern Lebanon cities of Nabatieh and Tyre were cancelled altogether due to the cross-border fighting, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah announced in a speech on 15 July.
Still, crowds of thousands of people continue to stream into southern Beirut’s streets each night over the Ashura period, attending evening readings and stopping for free coffee, juice, and sandwich wraps.
At the busier intersections, young men in Hezbollah t-shirts keep a careful watch; past Ashura rallies have faced threats of attack, including from the so-called Islamic State. Lebanese army checkpoints dot the entrances into the southern suburbs, monitoring who comes and goes.
‘100 years of Karbala’
The crescendo of each night comes with the latmiyat – poetic lamentations about the events in Karbala performed mostly by men, after the end of prayer sessions. As the thumping, mournful chanting swells, the men pound their chests in dramatic unison.
“We just follow the beat of the chants,” explains one young man attending majlis in an alleyway, in the southern Beirut neighbourhood of Hayy Sallom. He wears a black Slipknot t-shirt.
“When it intensifies, we intensify our movements, too,” he says. The readings there are set up in the street, beneath strings of red lights, because the local mosque simply can’t hold the several hundred women and men in attendance. The sheikh reads prayers from his cell phone to the crowd of people in plastic chairs.
Fifty-year-old construction worker Basel Kandeel’s apartment balcony overlooks the crowded scene. He says he has been helping neighbours organise the gatherings every Ashura for the past 15 or so years by collecting donations to pay for the chairs, pulpit, and tent.
For Kandeel, today’s deadly war is woven into the 10 days of Ashura mourning.
“For 100 years, we’ve been living what happened in Karbala,” he says from his living room sofa, a Quran recitation from downstairs thundering through the window. It’s one night before the last day of this year’s Ashura.
“In Lebanon, it’s all wars. Our grandparents had war…Turks, French, WWI, WWII. In 2006, I was here! Amid the bombs, the warplanes.”
“Ashura is like a school. Anything that happens to us here, wars, everything, it has something to do with Ashura,” Kandeel says.
The holiday “is a refusal of injustice”, says Zaher Khatib, a young man in the crowd. “In Gaza, children, babies, and elderly are being bombed to pieces and the world doesn’t care. Trump was shot in the ear and the world paid attention to him. But not to Gaza.”
Around him, the loudspeakers go silent. Women and men get up from their chairs and stack them up.
Khatib and others form a giant circle. As the thumping chant begins, they begin pounding their chests to the beat, their faces emoting mournfully with the lyrics.
Around them, the women gather to watch, some of them quietly thumping their chests along with the men, others filming the scene on their cell phones. Children stand up on crates to join in.
After 15 minutes or so, the chanted lament ends. The crowd dissipates into the dark surrounding alleys, past the freshly printed posters memorialising people killed in the latest war.
Edited by Annie Slemrod.
