Introduction

The battle of Karbala stands for the shift in political power from the Early Caliphate of the four companions of Muhammad – Abu Bakr, Umar, Usman and Ali – to the Umayyad Caliphate, which began with Muawiya. From the contentious moment of the Karbala battle, oppression and persecution of the Shias started haunting the Muslim community with intra-Islamic rivalry throughout the Islamicate world. As a literary trope, the battle of Karbala embodies and acts as an explication of various political, devotional and ritualistic situations across the Islamicate world where Islam has taken multiple shapes and forms. The “Karbala complex,” as a universal template of martyrdom, can be deployed to shift the concerns of the scholars of religion, history, anthropology and literature from the old Islamic world, to the “abundant actualities” of Islam in different parts of the world. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.