Oppressed for centuries—Kashmir’s Shias get their due as Muharram procession restored

From the time of before Aurangzeb and EIC to the Dogras and now. Shias have been sidelined and systematically targeted. This procession is a step towards coexistence.

Muharram procession in Srinagar on Thursday. | PTI

Lit up by the fire from torches, the majlis congregation would gather at the home of the great merchant Mirza Muhammad Ali. From there, in the darkness before dawn, the Muharram procession of Zuljanah—the loyal and courageous stallion which fought with Husayn ibn Ali at the great, tragic battle of Karbala—would slowly draw out. Ten men, or so, would lead the way, softly reciting the profession of their faith. There was no reading of marsiyas, elegiac poems which commemorate the martyrdom of Ali, nor rhythmic beating of chests.

Then, architect and historian Hakeem Saleem Hamdani records, in his magisterial telling of the Shia community’s history in Kashmir, a defiant gesture that changed the course of history. Two mourners, Mian Ghulam Muhammad Khan and Yusuf Ali Khan, began beating their chests and reciting noha lamentations as they reached the main road. They were joined by many others, and the procession ran to dusk.

Exactly a century ago, in 1923, Kashmir’s Shia community emerged from centuries of having to cloak its faith in the cover of darkness.

Late on Saturday morning, Kashmir Lieutenant-Governor Manoj Sinha waited at the home of a local notable to join the procession marking Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram, on which Husayn ibn Ali was beheaded at Karbala in 680 CE. Two days earlier, the procession of the eighth day of Muharram had been restored to its traditional route from Srinagar’s Gurubazaar to Dalgate, after 34 years—a gesture demonstrating decades of poisonous clashes and curfews surrounding congregation worship are ending.

Kashmir’s small Shia minority is estimated to make up just 10 per cent or so of its population and played only a marginal role in the long jihad which began in 1988. In 2018, though, two men displayed posters of slain jihadist pop icon Burhan Wani at an Ashura procession, sparking florid speculation the community would join Kashmir’s jihadists.

The irony is almost self-evident: in Kabul, an Islamist regime is savagely repressing Shia, while in Pakistan jihadists have massacred the community for decades.

For historians, contrafactual speculation is not always a useful exercise. No one can know with any certainty what might have happened if humans had never tamed fire, or invented gunpowder. But in this case, it’s hard not to engage in just such idle speculation. What would the lives of Kashmir’s Shia have been like, had it never become part of the framework of Colonial India?

Libel and blood

Early colonial travellers to Kashmir were often struck by the reach and intensity of communal propaganda against the Shias. Large-scale riots had broken out in 1801, Geofrey Vigne was told, when he visited Kashmir some twenty-five years later, because the Shias “compelled a boy of the Sunni persuasion to eat salt; then tantalised him with water; and when he was about to drink, they shot him to death with arrows, so that he might die like Husayn, in the desert of thirst”.

The governor, Abdullah Khan, ordered Shia properties razed. Women were raped, and men killed. Later, dozens of Shia prisoners were paraded through the streets, dragged by a rope running through their noses.

Late medieval accounts gathered by Hamdani, it is clear blood libels—of the kind used to malign Jews in medieval Europe—suffused popular culture. The Shia were rumoured to use the yandir-i sitzhen, or tip of the spindle, to draw blood from Sunni children. Faith was also, however, enmeshed with power. The Turkistani mystic Syed Sharf-Ud-Din Abdul Rehman Shah, who is said to have introduced Islam to Kashmir in the 1300s, is claimed by both Shias and Sunnis—but elites would soon instrumentalise faith.

Emperor Humayun who first forayed into Kashmir in the mid-sixteenth century, through his uncle Mirza Ḥaidar Dughlat,  oversaw the beginning of an effort to construct a theocratic identity for the region. Like other Mughal regions, Kashmir was to be a Sunni state, governed by Hanafi law. The chronicler Sayyid Ali smugly recorded that Dughlat had destroyed the shrine of the Shia mystic Mir Shams-ud-Din Muhammad al-Iraqi, and suppressed the community’s religious practices.

Kashmiri king Ghazi Shah Chak, who ascended to the throne in 1561, a decade after Dughlat’s death, restored the Shia faith to the heart of the court—provoking the enmity of Sunni nobles. In one case, a Shia soldier, Yusuf Inder, was executed for killing a Sunni cleric. “The flesh of his body was cut into pieces which people carried as gifts for their womenfolk, and many people drank his blood as sharbat,” records the contemporary Baharistan-i-Shahi chronicle.

Husayn Shah, Ghazi Shah’s successor, was however later compelled to order the trial of the cleric who sentenced Yusuf Inder for giving false judgment. Three Sunni clerics were now condemned. Elite Sunni courtiers began petitioning the Mughals for help, casting the Chaks as a threat to their religion.

Liberal and cultured, the next Chak Sultan, Yusuf Shah, realised his fractured court could not survive and switched sides to Emperor Akbar. Yusuf Shah’s son, Yakub Shah, tried to rally the faithful by ordering his clerics to read Friday prayers in the name of the first Shia Imam, Ali ibn Abi Talib. The Qazi refused and was executed.

Akbar’s army conquered Srinagar in 1586—extinguishing Shia power forever.

Long persecution

From the middle of the eighteenth century, Kashmir fell under the power of the Durrani kings of Kandahar. Faith became a fraught political issue. Two subedars, or provincial governors, Amir Khan and Sukh Jiwan sought to secede from the court at Kabul. The fact that the first was Shia and the second Hindu did not pass unnoticed. Like the Mughals before them, the Durranis saw heresy as a political threat and worked to brutally impose religious order.

Governor Buland Khan, following claims that the Shia of Zadibal had used indecent language against a Sunni preacher, ordered the neighbourhood burned down. The ears and noses of some of the survivors were cut off.

Frenzied mobs attacked Zadibal again on Muharram in 1801, killing, looting and raping their way through the largely Shia neighbourhood. The provocation, by some accounts, was an effort by the Shias to take out a procession from their closed shrine and recite martyrdom elegies. A dispute between merchants in 1793 had led to similar large-scale violence in 1793.

The crushing of the Afghan power by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1821 saw Kashmir come under Sikh rule. Though the new rulers enforced several anti-Muslim measures, for the Shia this was to prove a turning point. For the first time in centuries, the state itself was no longer controlled by Sunni élites. In 1841, Sheikh Ghulam Mohiuddin, an ethnic-Punjabi Shia, was appointed to govern Kashmir by the Lahore court, followed by his son Sheikh Imam ad-Din.

In spite of its expressly Hindu ideological moorings, the Dogra state which succeeded the Sikhs was nudged by British India to follow a policy of religious indifference, if not tolerance. In 1872, large-scale rioting broke out in Zaidbal again, amidst simmering tensions between Sunni shawl artisans and Shia factory owners. This time, though, Shia imambara in Srinagar, destroyed in the violence, was rebuilt with support from the state.

The Shia, Hamdani notes, were also able to capitalise on expanding opportunities in trade that opened up during the Colonial period. Early in the twentieth century, both Shias and Sunnis were able to join together, in the pursuit of independence. Then came that day in 1923, when the Shia faith revealed itself in the light of the sun.

Fearful silence

Even as the long jihad exploded in Kashmir, Shias watched events across the border with fear. In Gilgit, just across the Line of Control in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime massacred hundreds of Shia, following a rising trend of killings since 1983. Ten years later, the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, would slaughter hundreds more Shias in Mazar-e-Sharif. For the most part, Shias in Kashmir maintained a wary distance from the Islamists who were fighting to tear the state out of India.

Even though Shias had limited political space in post-independence Kashmir—Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’s governments did not include a single minister from the community—memories of life under Sunni authority tempered any enthusiasm for secession.

Low-level communal did, and does, of course, survive. In the course of Akbar Jehan Abdullah’s election campaign to the Lok Sabha in 1977, her workers appealed to Sunni voters not to allow her to be humiliated by the Shia, a reference to her rival’s faith. And in 1983, some Shia homes in Zadibal were set on fire by National Conference workers, after the Congress’ Iftekhar Husain Ansari won an assembly seat from Pattan.

The single Shia jihadist group, the Hizb-ul-Momineen, was set up by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate “to claim responsibility for the assassination of pro-Indian Shiites who were actually being killed by Sunni jihadis,” journalist Arif Jamal has recorded. The last major incident of violence against Shias was carried out by one of those Sunni groups, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which killed twelve civilians in the course of an attempt to assassinate Ansari.

Like all religious communities in Kashmir, the Shia know their long-term prospects are dependent not just on the state, but coexistence with all communities, and the construction of a durable peace. This month’s Muharram processions are a significant step in that direction.

The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)