Paimana

Ninth of Muharram, 1448 AH

In the previous essay I read the slogan that every day is ʿAshura and every land is Karbalāʾ for its political sense, as a summons to rise, and I set its other sense aside for separate treatment. This is that treatment, and the sense I postponed is, if anything, the stranger of the two. Taken at its word the slogan makes a claim about time that ought to be impossible. It says that an event of the year 61 of the Hijra is not past. Not that it is worth remembering, not that it remains relevant, but that it is, in a way the one who says it often means quite seriously, present, and present not once a year but every day. And the remarkable thing is that the central devotions of the tradition behave exactly as though this were literally so.

Consider the Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ, the salutation to al-Ḥusayn that the tradition recommends for daily recitation, and that many recite every day of their lives.[^1] It does not speak of al-Ḥusayn in the past tense, as one speaks of the dead. It addresses him, in the second person and the present, as one addresses the living: peace be upon you, O Abā ʿAbdillāh. It tells him that the peace of the reciter will be upon him for as long as the reciter remains and as long as there are night and day, and it asks God not to make this the last of the reciter’s covenant with him, as though a relationship were being kept up across the centuries rather than a memory rehearsed. It pronounces curses on the killers as on present enemies and grief at the killing as at a present loss. And at its heart it says the thing that states the temporal claim most nakedly: yā laytanī kuntu maʿakum fa-afūza fawzan ʿaẓīman, would that I had been with you, that I might have won the great victory with you.[^2] The reciter wishes to have been present at Karbalāʾ. And the tradition answers the wish by telling him that in reciting the salutation he is reckoned among those who were martyred there, that he shares their standing, as though the wish to have been present were itself a kind of presence. The rite is recited every day, from every land, with the instruction that one who cannot stand at the grave should recite as though standing there. Every day, and every land: the slogan is not a comment on the devotion but a description of it.

So the practice enacts, with great precision, the denial of the past tense. The question I want to ask is whether the denial answers to anything real, or whether it is a piece of pious self-deception that we tolerate because it is moving. I am going to argue that it answers to something real, and that saying exactly what takes a little work in the metaphysics of time, work that turns out to deliver a result more surprising than I expected when I began.

It is worth dwelling first on what kind of grief this is, because its phenomenology is part of the evidence. Commemoration, in the ordinary sense, holds its object at arm’s length and acknowledges that it is over; one commemorates a battle, lays a wreath, and goes home, the past sealed as past. Nostalgia goes a step further into feeling, but it too concedes the loss; the ache of nostalgia is precisely the ache for something known to be gone and not recoverable. The grief of the majlis is neither of these. It does not seal the event as over, and it does not ache for an acknowledged-lost past. It weeps as one weeps at a death in the house this morning, with the rawness that belongs to a present wound and not to a remembered one. A mourner can be moved to fresh tears, year after year, by a loss thirteen centuries old, in a way no merely commemorative attitude could sustain. Whatever the metaphysics turns out to be, the felt structure of the grief is the structure of presence and not of recollection, and that is a datum a theory of the practice has to accommodate rather than explain away.

Begin with the plainest possible objection, the one a philosopher would raise first. The event is past. It happened in 61 of the Hijra, which is earlier than the moment of any reciter who has ever lived, and that is simply a fact, fixed and unalterable. To address al-Ḥusayn as present and to wish oneself at a battle thirteen centuries gone is, on this view, to indulge a sentiment at the expense of a truth. Now, to see what is wrong with this objection, or rather what is incomplete in it, one has to notice that it quietly assumes a particular theory of time, and that the theory is not the only one available and may not be the right one. Philosophers since McTaggart have distinguished two ways of ordering events in time.[^3] One arranges them as past, present, and future, with the “now” moving along the series, so that an event is first future, then present, then past; this is the tensed picture, what he called the A-series. The other arranges them only as earlier than and later than one another, a fixed ordering with no moving “now” and no privileged present, every event simply standing in its date; this is the tenseless picture, the B-series. The objection I just stated belongs to the tensed picture. It assumes that the present moment is uniquely real, that the “now” has moved on past 61, and that the event has thereby slipped into the non-existence that is pastness. On the tensed view, and in particular on its strict form, presentism, only what is present exists at all, and the past is precisely what has ceased to be.

Here is the surprise. The devotion feels like presentism. It feels as though it is claiming that the event is happening now, that the “now” is somehow at Karbalāʾ. But presentism is the theory on which the devotion’s claim is most straightforwardly false, because on presentism the past is gone, annihilated, and an event of 61 has as little reality as it is possible for anything to have. The theory that actually underwrites the devotion is the opposite one. On the tenseless view, and on the eternalism that develops it, all times are equally real. The difference between past, present, and future is not a difference in reality but a difference in relation to the speaker. It is exactly like the difference between here and there, which is not a difference in the reality of places but in their relation to where the speaker stands.[^4] On eternalism, Karbalāʾ has not stopped existing. It stands in its date, in the year 61, as real as the day on which I write, neither more nor less. Its pastness is not its fading but merely its standing earlier in the series than I do, the way a city I have left does not cease to exist when I am no longer in it. The mourner’s deep conviction that Karbalāʾ is not over, not lost, not dissolved into nothing by the passage of time, is not a sentimental denial of the metaphysics. It is, of the two metaphysical pictures on offer, the one that happens to be right, or at least the one a great many serious philosophers hold to be right.

The tradition I am writing about, as it happens, developed an apparatus of its own for exactly this question, and it is worth setting beside the Western one, because in one respect it does better. The philosophers of the school of Iṣfahān distinguished three registers of duration. There is zamān, ordinary time, defined as the relation of the changing to the changing, the time of the corporeal world in which things begin and end and recede. Above it is dahr, perpetuity or the aeon, the relation of the changeless to the changing, the register in which the stable realities subsist. Above that is sarmad, the relation of the changeless to the changeless, which belongs to God alone.[^5] Mīr Dāmād built on this a celebrated doctrine that the world is originated neither in time nor in eternity but in dahr, an atemporal origination, ḥudūth dahrī. I am not concerned here with his cosmogony, and the use I want to make of the distinction goes beyond anything he intended. But the register of dahr is precisely one in which priority and posteriority are ontological rather than successive, in which a reality does not recede as it recedes in zamān. And it has an advantage over the bare block of the eternalist. Eternalism confers equal reality on every event without distinction, so that it cannot say why Karbalāʾ should be present in a way that an idle Tuesday is not. Dahr is the register of the abiding realities. An event bound up with what the tradition takes to be the standing truths, the changeless meanings of which it is the enactment, has a footing in that register that an ordinary event lacks. Its date in zamān is fixed at 61. Its reality is not confined to zamān, and what the rite reaches for is the footing it has in the register above.

I should not lean too hard on any of this, because the metaphysics is contested, and a careful reader will want to know how much of the case depends on winning a disputed question. Eternalism is not established. Presentism has able defenders, and the reality of tense and passage is among the live controversies of the subject. So let me say plainly that the central claim requires neither eternalism nor dahr, and survives even if the strict presentist is right that only the present exists. For the presentist must still grant a point of Augustine’s that is independent of the dispute, which I come to in a moment: that the past, whether or not it exists in itself, is given to us only in a present act, and is present in no other way. On that concession the work of the rite stands either way. If eternalism or dahr is right, the event is permanently real and the rite makes its standing reality present. If presentism is right, the event is gone in itself and accessible only as a present re-presentation, which the rite supplies and intensifies. The metaphysics changes what the rite does with the event. It does not turn the rite into make-believe.

But I have to be careful, because eternalism gives me less than the whole of what the devotion wants, and the gap between what it gives and what the devotion wants is where the real work lies. Eternalism vindicates the permanence of the event. It says that Karbalāʾ is still real, still there in its date, not annihilated. What it does not say is that the event is present, in the sense the mourner means when he weeps as though the loss were now. For on eternalism every event is equally real, equally standing in its date, and my breakfast on an ordinary morning two years ago is exactly as real, and exactly as past, as Karbalāʾ. Eternalism confers permanence on everything and presence on nothing. It tells me the event is not gone; it does not tell me that the event is with me. And the devotion plainly claims more than permanence. It claims a presence, a being-here of the event for the one who mourns, which the bare metaphysics of the block of time does not supply. So permanence comes from the metaphysics, and presence must come from somewhere else. It comes, I think, from the rite itself. To say how, I need two things: a clear view of what kind of claim the rite is making, and a concept, developed more carefully in the Christian tradition than the Islamic, for the act that claim performs.

Take the prior question first, because answering it disarms the objection’s strongest form. Read “every day is ʿAshura” as a flat assertion in the tensed mode, an assertion that the event is now. On the standard analysis of tensed language, a sentence of the form “E is present,” uttered at a time t, is true just in case E occurs at t.[^6] Said in any year but 61, then, the assertion is simply false, and no devotion can make it true, for the killing does not occur on the day I say the words. If that were all the slogan could be, the objector would have won at the first move. But assertion is not the only thing an utterance can do. Austin taught us to separate sentences that state a fact, and are true or false, from sentences that perform an act, and are neither.[^7] “I promise” does not report a promise; it makes one. “Peace be upon you, O Abā ʿAbdillāh” does not report a greeting sent across thirteen centuries; it performs one. The salutation and the slogan belong to this second class. They do not assert that the event is simultaneous with the speaking, which would be false and trivial. They enact a relation to the event, and the relation they enact is the very making-present this essay is trying to describe. Read as an assertion the slogan says something false. Read as what it is, a performative, it does exactly the work the objection declared impossible.

The concept is anamnesis. In its weak sense the Greek word means recollection, the mere calling-to-mind of something absent. But in the sense that the liturgical tradition gave it, and that Dom Gregory Dix recovered in his study of the shape of the Eucharist, it means something stronger, which the English “remembrance” badly undertranslates. It means a re-presentation, a re-calling of a past event in such a way that the event is not treated as absent but is made present and operative by its effects.[^8] The Eucharist, on this understanding, does not merely remind the worshipper of a sacrifice that is over and done. It re-presents the one sacrifice, makes it present, so that those who stand in later time may enter into it. And the crucial qualification, the one that keeps the idea from collapsing into magic or absurdity, is that the event is re-presented and not repeated. The sacrifice is not performed again; the one sacrifice is made present again. This is exactly the structure of the majlis and the ziyāra. Al-Ḥusayn is not killed again each Muḥarram; the tradition is not claiming a grotesque annual recurrence of the event in clock time. The one event of Karbalāʾ is made present again, re-presented, so that the mourner who stands thirteen centuries later may enter into it, weep within it, be reckoned among those who were there. The presence that eternalism could not supply is supplied by the rite, which takes the permanently real event that the metaphysics guarantees and makes it present to the one who performs the rite.

It might still seem that this presence is a kind of pretending, a willed illusion laid over the fact of the event’s pastness. Here a point of Augustine’s removes the last of the difficulty, and it is a point about where the past is. In the eleventh book of the Confessions, Augustine presses on a puzzle: the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present has no duration. His resolution is that what we call the past exists, when it exists at all, only in the present, as a present memory, and the future only as a present expectation. So there are not really three times but three modes of a present, the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things to come.[^9] The past, in other words, is never encountered as past. It is encountered only in a present act of memory, which is the sole mode in which anything past is present at all. If that is so, then the re-presentation of Karbalāʾ in the rite is not a fiction laid over the event’s real pastness, as though there were some other, truer way the past could be present and the rite were faking it. There is no other way. The present mode is the only mode the past ever has. The mourner who makes the event present in his grief is not falsifying its pastness; he is doing the one thing that can be done with a past of this weight, which is to hold it in the present that is the only place a past can be held.

Bergson gives this a different inflection, and one that fits the grieving in particular. He distinguished the time we live from the time we measure. Measured time is spatialized, laid out as a line of instants external to one another, the time of the clock and the calendar, and in that time Karbalāʾ is a point at a fixed distance behind us. Lived duration, durée, is not like that. In it the past is not left behind but survives integrally and presses into the present, interpenetrating it, so that the past, in his image, gnaws into the present and swells as it goes.[^10] Grief is the plainest case of lived duration there is. The grief does not treat the loss as a receding point on a line; it carries the loss forward whole, lets it continue to act. When the tradition refuses to spatialize Karbalāʾ into a distant point and insists instead that it is carried forward and still acting, it is keeping faith with the time we actually live in rather than the time we draw on paper.

Husserl had shown, a little earlier, why the present is hospitable to this at all. The present of experience is not a knife-edge instant but a field with breadth. When I hear a melody I do not hear one isolated tone and then another and another; I hear a melody, because each tone just sounded is retained in the living present as it sinks away, and the tone about to sound is anticipated, so that the now is always thick with a just-past and a just-to-come.[^11] Husserl named these retention and protention, and his claim was that there is no bare instantaneous present without them: presence as we actually have it always reaches a little behind and a little ahead of the instant. Ritual re-presentation extends, in the shared and public register, a reaching-back that consciousness performs in the private register at every waking moment. The mourner who holds Karbalāʾ in the present is doing, across centuries and in company, a larger version of what hearing a melody does across seconds and alone.

It helps to see that this is not a peculiarity of Shīʿī devotion but an instance of something religion does everywhere, and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade described the general structure as well as anyone. Eliade distinguished profane time, the homogeneous flow of ordinary duration in which events recede and are lost, from sacred time, the time of the festival, which does not recede but is recoverable, reversible, periodically made present again.[^12] The festival, on his account, does not commemorate the founding event from a distance; it reactualizes it, abolishes the interval, and sets the celebrant down in the time of origins. Every tradition that has a founding event has some rite that does this, that collapses the distance to the origin and makes the celebrant a contemporary of it. The majlis is the Shīʿī instance of this universal form, and the slogan that every day is ʿAshura is simply the most explicit statement any tradition has made of what all of them are reaching for, the recovery of the sacred event out of the profane flow that would otherwise carry it away.

I have been speaking, for convenience, of the mourner in the singular, as though the presence of the event were a feat each devotee performs in private. That is the wrong picture, and correcting it is not a refinement but a change in what wants explaining. The presence of Karbalāʾ is not produced one heart at a time. It is produced and sustained by a community, across generations, through institutions built for the purpose, and the individual mourner enters a presence the community already holds rather than conjuring one of his own. Halbwachs made the general point a century ago: that memory is not a private act but a social one, framed and supported by the groups we belong to, so that even what feels most inward is held within frameworks the group supplies.[^13] The mourner weeps at Karbalāʾ within frameworks he did not make, the narrative he was taught, the liturgy he recites, the calendar that brings the tenth of Muḥarram round again, the assembly that gathers to grieve. Take the frameworks away and the presence does not shrink to something private and pure. It vanishes. The presence belonged to the community before it belonged to him, and his access to it runs through the forms the community keeps up.

Assmann sharpened Halbwachs in a way that fits this case with uncommon exactness. He distinguished communicative memory, the living memory of a community carried in everyday talk, which reaches back only three or four generations, some eighty years, before it fades, from cultural memory, the institutionalized memory of the foundational past, carried in rites and texts and festivals, which can hold an event present across millennia.[^14] Karbalāʾ passed out of communicative memory more than twelve centuries ago. No one alive has spoken with anyone who was there, or with anyone who spoke with anyone who was. Its presence is therefore not the lingering of a living memory but the achievement, wholly, of cultural memory, of an institution built to keep a foundational event present long after the last witness is gone. And the medium of cultural memory, on Assmann’s account, is precisely the sort of thing the majlis is. The festival does not recall the founding event from a distance; it relives it, makes it present, and in so doing breaks up the flat one-dimensional time of ordinary life, setting against the present a founding past felt to weigh more than the present does. This is the social and institutional form of the very thing I described earlier under the theological name of anamnesis. The rite makes the event present; the community is what the rite is for.

Two further things follow, and the scholarship on the rite itself has seen them. The presence is carried in the body and not only in the mind. Connerton argued that societies remember above all through commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices, through performances repeated until the past is sedimented in the posture and the gesture of those who perform them.[^15] The mourning of Muḥarram is bodily memory of just this kind: the gathering, the recitation, the weeping, the beating of the chest, a past held not as a proposition entertained but as a thing done with the body in company. Durkheim would have added that the assembly is not incidental to the feeling but its source, that it is in the gathered and effervescent congregation that the sacred is generated and the group renewed, so that the presence of the event is at the same time the community’s renewal of itself.[^16] And the foundational study of the devotion drew the conclusion all of this points toward. Ayoub argued that the believer, through participation in the suffering of the Holy Family, comes to share in it and to become one with the sufferers, so that the rite is participation and not spectatorship.[^17] This gives the metaphysics I began with its last turn. The community does not merely contemplate a permanently real and re-presented event from the outside. It stands inside the event as its living continuation, because the community is itself the chief effect the event left in the world. To say, with Dix, that the event is operative by its effects is to say, here, that it is operative in them, in the very assembly that gathers to mourn. The mourners are not only looking back at Karbalāʾ. They are the part of Karbalāʾ that is still going on.

There is one more feature of the case that the other religions’ rites do not all share, and it sharpens the claim that the event is not past. Karbalāʾ is, in the tradition’s understanding, unfinished. The Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ does not only salute al-Ḥusayn and curse his killers; it enrolls the reciter among those who seek the avenging of his blood, the ṭālibīna bi-thārihi, alongside the awaited one whose rising will at last exact it.[^18] The reckoning of the event is held open, its demand for justice unmet, its account not yet closed, and an event whose account is not closed is not safely in the past. This is the temporal shape that the Christian anamnesis also has, the memorial offered, in Paul’s phrase, until he comes, so that the re-presentation of the founding event looks backward and forward at once, holding the event present between the moment it occurred and the moment its meaning will be completed. Karbalāʾ is present, on this reading, not only because it is re-presented in the rite and not only because it is permanently real in its date, but because it is morally open, a wound still demanding the redress that the tradition defers to the end of time. An unanswered demand is a present demand. The event cannot become wholly past while what it calls for has not yet come.

Let me now state the objection to all of this in its strongest form, because it has a real point and the reply has to earn its keep. The objection is that I have built an elaborate apparatus to dignify a sentiment, and that the apparatus, for all its sophistication, cannot change the brute fact that al-Ḥusayn was killed thirteen centuries ago and is not being killed now. To weep as though the loss were present, the objector says, is to refuse a plain truth, and calling the refusal anamnesis or eternalism is a way of dressing the refusal in robes. I concede the brute fact entirely, and the reply is that nothing I have said denies it. The killing occurred in 61 and occurs at no other date; the rite does not claim the contrary, and I have been at pains to insist that re-presentation is not repetition and that the event is not recurring in clock time. What I have claimed is narrower and survives the objection intact. It is that the event is not annihilated by being past, which is eternalism and not sentiment; that the only mode in which any past event is ever present is the present mode of memory and re-presentation, which is Augustine and not sentiment; that the rite makes the permanently real event present in that mode, which is anamnesis and not sentiment; and that the event’s moral account is still open, which is the tradition’s eschatology and not sentiment. The grief is not the product of a confusion between then and now. It is the present and proper mode in which an event that is permanently real, and not yet morally finished, is held present by those who will not let it recede. The mourner is not mistaking the date. He is enacting the one truth about an event of this kind that the bare chronology leaves out, which is that its pastness is the least important thing about it.

A second objection comes from the opposite direction, and the communal apparatus I have just introduced seems to invite it. If the presence of the event is sustained by frameworks and institutions and the needs of a community, then is it not exposed as a construction merely, a thing the community makes rather than finds, with the event itself reduced to whatever the present requires it to have been? This would dissolve the presence into projection, and the worry is a real one, but it rests on a confusion that Halbwachs himself was at pains to avoid. To say that memory is socially framed is a claim about the conditions of access, about the frameworks through which a community reaches its past. It is not the claim that the past is manufactured by the reaching. The two come cleanly apart. The frameworks of Shīʿī memory settle how Karbalāʾ is held present, and by whom, and with what intensity; they do not settle that the killing occurred, which is fixed independently of every framework, secured by the chronology that an earlier essay in this series leaned on. The community constitutes the presence of the event. It does not constitute the event. Cultural memory is a means of transmission, and a means of transmission is answerable to what it transmits. So the mourning can be communally sustained and answerable to a real and terrible fact at once, and there is no tension between the two; the social character of the holding-present is not a solvent that turns the thing held into a fiction.

I have argued across these essays that the practice is the bearer of the tradition, that the witness’s presence is converted into the community’s by re-presentation, that what is transmitted mother to daughter and assembly to assembly is held by a form of life and not by a chain of names. The metaphysics of this last essay is the metaphysics that practice presupposes. When the community gathers each year, and each day in the salutation, it is not performing the memory of something it concedes to be over. It is exercising the only power that finite creatures have over the past worth keeping, which is to make it present, again and again, in the grief that refuses it the status of the merely bygone. What every day is ʿAshura finally claims is that Karbalāʾ is not behind us. Not because the clock has stopped, and not because the event recurs, but because some events are of a kind that does not recede safely into the past. Their reality does not fade, for nothing real is annihilated by growing distant. Their presence is renewed each time they are re-presented, for the present is the only place a past can live. And their demand is not yet answered, for the justice they call for has not yet come. Of an event like that, the mourner who weeps as though she had been there speaks more exactly than the chronicler who reminds her that she was not. Her tears are not a mistake about the date. They are the form that fidelity takes toward a past that has not finished being present.

---

[^1]: The slogan kullu yawmin ʿĀshūrāʾ wa kullu arḍin Karbalāʾ (“every day is ʿAshura and every land is Karbalāʾ”), sometimes traced to Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and given an activist sense by ʿAlī Sharīʿatī and Khomeini, was treated in its political register in the previous essay of this series, “The Founding Refusal.” Here I take its temporal claim at face value. On the recommendation of Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ for daily recitation, see the tradition from ʿAlqama b. Muḥammad al-Ḥaḍramī and Imam al-Bāqir preserved in Ibn Qūlawayh (d. 368/978), Kāmil al-Ziyārāt: “if you can recite this every day of your life, do so.”

[^2]: The text of Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ is given in Ibn Qūlawayh, Kāmil al-Ziyārāt, and al-Ṭūsī, Miṣbāḥ al-mutahajjid. The features I draw on are the direct second-person address (al-salāmu ʿalayka yā Abā ʿAbdillāh), the declaration of a perpetual bond (ʿalayka minnī salāmu Llāhi abadan mā baqītu wa-baqiya al-laylu wa-l-nahār; wa-lā jaʿalahu Llāhu ākhira al-ʿahdi minnī li-ziyāratikum), the wish to have been present (yā laytanī kuntu maʿakum fa-afūza fawzan ʿaẓīman), and the standing instruction that one distant from the grave recite as though present at it, being thereby reckoned among the companions of al-Ḥusayn.

[^3]: J. M. E. McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17 (1908), distinguishing the A-series (positions ordered as past, present, and future, with a moving present) from the B-series (positions ordered only as earlier and later). McTaggart used the distinction to argue that time is unreal; I am borrowing only the distinction, not the conclusion. Its modern descendants are the tensed or A-theory and the tenseless or B-theory of time.

[^4]: On eternalism, the view that all times are equally real and that “past,” “present,” and “future” mark only relations to the time of utterance, as against presentism, the view that only what is present exists, see the standard treatments in the metaphysics of time (e.g. the contrast developed by D. H. Mellor, Real Time, and the broader literature on the “block universe”). The analogy between temporal and spatial indexicals, between “past/present/future” and “there/here,” is the heart of the tenseless view and the heart of my point: that the pastness of Karbalāʾ is its position relative to us, not a diminution of its reality.

[^5]: The triad sarmad, dahr, zamān is developed by Mīr Dāmād (Muḥammad Bāqir Astarābādī, d. 1040/1631) in Kitāb al-Qabasāt, building on Avicenna: sarmad is the relation of the changeless to the changeless (the level of God alone), dahr the relation of the changeless to the changing (the perpetuity in which the stable realities subsist), and zamān the relation of the changing to the changing (measured, corporeal time). His doctrine of ḥudūth dahrī, the world’s origination in dahr rather than in zamān or sarmad, was framed against both the philosophers’ eternal world and the theologians’ creation in time; his student Mullā Ṣadrā recast the same problem through substantial motion (al-ḥaraka al-jawhariyya). My application of dahr to the liturgical presence of a historical event is an extension of the apparatus, not a doctrine Mīr Dāmād taught.

[^6]: The truth-conditions of tensed sentences fixed by the time of utterance are the core of the so-called new tenseless or B-theory of time; see D. H. Mellor, Real Time (1981) and Real Time II (1998), and the earlier token-reflexive account of J. J. C. Smart. On this analysis “E is past,” “E is present,” or “E is future,” said at a time t, is made true by tenseless facts about E’s date relative to t, not by any irreducible property of pastness, presentness, or futurity. I use the analysis only to fix what the assertoric reading of the slogan would commit one to, and so what the performative reading avoids.

[^7]: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962), on the distinction between constative utterances, which state something and are true or false, and performative utterances, which do something in the saying and are instead felicitous or infelicitous. The salutation and the slogan are, on my reading, performatives of re-presentation. Austin’s own eventual erosion of a sharp constative/performative line does not affect the contrast used here.

[^8]: Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), esp. p. 245, on anamnesis as a “re-calling” or “re-presenting” of a thing “in such a way that it is not so much regarded as being ‘absent’ as itself presently operative by its effects,” a sense the Latin memoria fails to carry. Cf. the Catechism of the Catholic Church §1363, that the liturgical memorial “is not merely the recollection of past events but the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God,” so that the events “are made present and real”; and J. Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, on the Godward and eschatological direction of the memorial (“until he comes”). The decisive qualification, which I rely on throughout, is that the one event is re-presented and not repeated. The transfer of the concept to the majlis and the ziyāra of Karbalāʾ is my own.

[^9]: Augustine, Confessiones XI, esp. xx (26), on the impossibility of locating past or future in anything but the present, and the resolution that there are “three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future,” the first being memory (memoria), the third expectation (expectatio); and xxvi–xxviii on time as a distentio animi, a distension of the soul. The point I take is that the past is only ever given in a present act, so that re-presentation is not a counterfeit of some more genuine access to the past but the only access there is.

[^10]: Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889) and Creative Evolution (1907), on the distinction between durée, the lived qualitative duration in which states interpenetrate, and the spatialized, homogeneous time of measurement; and on the survival of the past into the present, the past “gnawing into the future and swelling as it advances.” Bergson’s subject is the philosophy of consciousness and life rather than ritual; the bearing on the temporality of grief is my own.

[^11]: Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (lectures of 1905, ed. 1928), on the structure of the living present as retention of the just-elapsed and protention of the just-to-come, with the hearing of a melody as the standard illustration. The extension of this micro-structure of the instant to the historical interval, and to ritual, is my own.

[^12]: Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) and The Sacred and the Profane (1957), on the distinction between profane duration and sacred time, the latter “reversible” and “recoverable,” and on the festival as the reactualization of the founding event in illo tempore rather than its commemoration from a distance. I am claiming that the Shīʿī devotion is a particularly self-aware instance of this general religious structure, not that it is unique in kind.

[^13]: Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and La mémoire collective (1950), on memory as socially framed, the individual recalling as a member of groups and within the social frameworks those groups supply. I read Halbwachs’s thesis as concerning the frameworks of memory rather than the fabrication of its objects, the distinction on which the reply to the constructionist objection turns.

[^14]: Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992; Eng. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization) and “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” distinguishing communicative memory (everyday, oral, reaching back three or four generations, roughly eighty to a hundred years) from cultural memory (institutionalized in rite, text, and festival, reaching to the foundational past and enduring for millennia). Assmann describes the festival as a “reliving” (Vergegenwärtigung) of the foundational event and as setting a “contrapresent” founding past against ordinary one-dimensional time; among his own examples is the ritual reliving of the crucifixion, which is also the structural parallel I have drawn to anamnesis.

[^15]: Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (1989), on commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices as the principal media of social memory, and on the performative re-enactment by which a community’s past is sedimented in habit, posture, and gesture.

[^16]: Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), on “collective effervescence,” the heightened condition of the assembled group in which, on his account, the sacred is generated and the collectivity periodically regenerates itself. One need not accept Durkheim’s reduction of the sacred to the social to grant that the gathered assembly is a condition of the devotion’s force.

[^17]: Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of ʿĀshūrāʾ in Twelver Shīʿism (1978), the foundational scholarly study of the devotion, on the believer’s participation in the suffering of the Holy Family and his becoming, through that participation, one with the sufferers; and on the “House of Sorrows” whose grief continues until the day of final vindication, which is the eschatological openness discussed above.

[^18]: The enrollment of the reciter among the ṭālibīna bi-thārihi, the seekers of the avenging of al-Ḥusayn’s blood, together with the Mahdī, is part of the standard text of Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ; the title thār Allāh (“the blood whose claim belongs to God”) is applied to al-Ḥusayn in the same liturgy. The deferral of the redress to the rising of the Qāʾim connects this essay to the eschatological reservation discussed in “The Founding Refusal.” The structural parallel with the Christian “until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26) is, again, my own.