Paimana

Masculinity, Mourning, and the Emotional Inheritance of South Asian Men

Fifth of Muharram.

Some inherit wealth. Others inherit silence.

Salam

Across the emotional landscape of the South Asian subcontinent, silence is less an absence than a method. It is taught, rehearsed, and inherited. In its most intimate form, it arrives in the pauses between conversations, in the glances exchanged at funerals, in the way sorrow is folded into a cup of tea and stirred, unspoken. This silence is not benign. It is a language unto itself. And it is how many men here learn to feel.

The men I speak of do not lack feeling. They lack permission. Raised under the weight of ancestral expectations, they were taught that vulnerability is dangerous and grief is a luxury someone else can afford.

Their fathers did not speak of humiliation. Their grandfathers did not explain the griefs they swallowed in a changing world. Their uncles never accounted for the anger in their hands. Instead, they passed down a masculinity trained in the art of emotional repression, shaped by economic precarity, social dignity, and the myth of quiet strength.

And so, a boy watches his father work two jobs without complaint, and he learns: do not say you are tired. A teenager cries at his grandmother’s funeral, and he is told: be strong. A husband hesitates to share his anxiety, and he hears: what will people say? Emotions become like contraband, possessed but never revealed. What survives are code-gestures: a ride offered without a question, a charger placed beside a friend’s bed, a phone call that lasts only three minutes but means everything. They love.

They ache. But they do so in disguise.

Yet something else stirs beneath this carefully composed quiet.

Once a year, during the days of Muharram, I have watched these same men collapse into public, unrestrained weeping. They gather in the majlis, some sitting close to the minbar (pulpit), others at the periphery, and cry in a way they never do elsewhere. Men who have never said “I’m hurting” sob openly at the name of Husayn. They slap their chests, weep at the memory of Ali Akbar’s final moments, tremble when Abbas is remembered. In these ten days, something ruptures. And it is not merely historical grief. It is personal, inherited, unprocessed sorrow finding its one sanctioned outlet.

What happens here is not simply religious ritual. It is unsanctioned therapy cloaked in theology. The grief is coded as devotion, but it bleeds with lived emotion. In the cry for Husayn’s thirst, there is often also a cry for the mother who died too soon, for the son who no longer speaks, for the marriage breaking silently, for the depression without a name. And the majlis becomes a space of rehumanization. Where elsewhere they are strong, here they are allowed to be broken.

I know this space intimately. Though I have never truly lived here, I have returned often enough to recognize its emotional architecture. I know what it means to belong yet remain slightly outside. I understand the symbols, but interpret them differently. I do not kiss the tabarrukät. I do not walk in the juloos. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who do, but my mind works differently. I approach ritual as a seeker of meaning rather than replication. But I still sit on the farsh-e-aza.

The farsh-e-aza, literally “the floor of mourning,” is the simple carpet or ground where the mourners of Karbala gather. But it is far more than that. It is an open sanctuary.

A threshold between the historical and the emotional. To sit on the farsh-e-aza is to lower oneself not just in posture, but in ego, and to enter into a shared vulnerability where status, gender, and class blur into grief.

Not because I need every historical claim to align with reason, but because I believe that where there is real grief, there is a door to God.

The Qur’an repeatedly points to the heart as the center of understanding:

أَفَلَمْ يَسِيرُوا فِي الأَرْضِ فَتَكُونَ لَهُمْ قُلُوبٌ يَعْقِلُونَ بِهَا أَوْ آذَانٌ يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَا فَإِنَّهَا لاَ تَعْمَى الأَبْصَارُ وَلَكِن تَعْمَى الْقَلُوبُ الَّتِي فِي الصُّدُورِ

Afalam yasir fi al-ardi fatakuna lahum qulubun ya giluna bihã aw adhanun yasma una biha fa-innahã lã tamã al-absaru walkin ta mã al-qulubu allati fi as-sudur.

“Do they not travel through the land, so that their hearts may thus learn to understand, and their ears may learn to hear? For indeed it is not the eyes that grow blind, but it is the hearts within the chests that go blind.”

(Surah Al-Hajj, 22:46)

The heart, in the Qur’anic worldview, is not simply an emotional center. It is an epistemic organ, a vessel for gnosis. And perhaps when the tongue is silent and the rational faculties collapse under the weight of unprocessed sorrow, it is the heart that still listens. And still learns.

Husayn’s legacy is not only theological. It is pedagogical.

He teaches not just through what he stood for, but through how he allowed his companions to weep, to express, to become human in the face of annihilation. His tragedy gives language to a grief that would otherwise rot into resentment. In a world where men are trained to swallow sadness, Karbala becomes the only place that asks them to spit it out, to cry without shame, to mourn with dignity.

But here lies the wound within the miracle.

After the tears dry, the silence returns. No one asks what was truly mourned. The pain reverts to code. The softness is re-armored. And the ritual becomes a ritual again, rather than a revolution.

Yet imagine if it did not. Imagine if we could carry the grammar of that grief into the rest of the year. Imagine telling a brother, a father, a friend: you do not have to wait for Muharram to cry. You do not need a noha to say what hurts. You are allowed, now, tomorrow, every day, to feel and be felt.

And perhaps that, too, is part of what it means to follow Husayn. Not just to remember how he died, but to emulate how he lived: with courage, with tenderness, with the refusal to remain silent in the face of what should be spoken.

So when the tears come, we must not interrupt. We must not translate them. We must sit beside them. Not to fix or advise, but to witness.

Because somewhere beneath every noha, there is a story that has waited generations to be told.

And sometimes, that story is their own.

Wassalam,

Raza