ABSTRACT
In the Western imagination — at least until modernity — the passion story of Christ’s violent death on the cross has figured as the original scene, the ur-szene, of meaningful suffering. This chapter investigates analogies to that emblematic event in the Islamic cultural memory. The officially accepted forms of public emotional display are therefore strikingly spare — an impression that historical sources seem to suggest is also true for the early epochs of Islamic history. In Shi’ite culture, martyrdom is still alive as a source of imagination, celebrated in literature and art. In this ritual, the martyr’s mother obviously represents the Palestinian collective, to whom “her sons” offer the sacrifice of their own blood. The vitality of the martyr cult would hardly be understandable without both the centuries-old tradition of self-castigation as well as the re-enactments of martyrdom in the so-called passion plays, or ta‘ziya, which originated in the sixteenth century.
