BEIRUT: Shias across the Muslim world yesterday marked Ashura, a day of mourning during which many believers flagellate themselves. Michael Jansen witnessed scenes in Beirut
Streets leading to the heart of the Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, are blocked, and black-clad Hizbullah security men with mobile phones oversee the barricades.
They examine my press pass and wave us into the inner sanctum of Ashura, the Shia festival commemorating the slaying in 680AD by Sunnis of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at Kerbala in central Iraq.
This event and its commemorations have divided the Muslim world into orthodox Sunnis and heterodox Shias ever since.
Disagreement over who should succeed Muhammad - the Shias' blood heir or the Sunnis' righteous man - blossomed into a full-blown religious dispute which will never be resolved.
My companion, Hamzah, and I join the stream of men, women and children, walking to the Mujamma Sayyed al-Shuhada, the Centre of the Honourable Martyrs, a vast prefab hall bombed flat by Israel during its summer offensive and promptly rebuilt. The sky is grey and begins to weep cold tears. It is a perfect day for mourning. Umbrellas mushroom over the gathering throng.
Red, black and green flags hang limply from lamp-posts. A loudspeaker mounted on a tracked vehicle exhorts the faithful to embrace mourning.
Hamzah and I plunge into the throng alongside the Mujamma. We pass men sitting on the kerb weeping, their faces cupped in their hands.
A sobbing voice inside the building broadcasts the story of Hussein's martyrdom. We thread our way into the core of the crowd and halt opposite the arched gateway of the building near the barrier separating men from women. At the end of a lilting hymn, the disembodied voice cries, "Yah, Hussein, Yah Hussein!"
The men around me extend their hands, palms up in prayer. The service closes with cries of "Labbayk, Hussein! I am here, Hussein, at your command."
We crunch our way over the rubble of devastated buildings, walk to the car and swoop along empty roads into the mountains, rain spattering on the windscreen, to Nabatieh, a Shia town which commemorates Ashura in the traditional manner. The curtain of cloud clears as we make for the Husseiniya, the Shia meeting house with hundreds of the faithful.
Walking against the tide are boys with pads of gauze taped to their heads and blood-spattered shirts. Hamza remarks: "The boys go first, then men, and last old men."
Here security is provided by ranks of smartly dressed Lebanese soldiers and police bearing plastic riot shields. Ambulances from the Lebanese Red Cross and Red Crescent are parked on the roadside. In a first-aid tent, doctors and nurses bandage the walking wounded.
Clusters of bloodied youths jog along the street in front of the Husseiniya. They carry knives, curved and straight swords or ceremonial weapons, and strike their foreheads with these implements to make blood flow.
A man carries a small boy, no more than three, his head streaming blood. As we climb the blood-spattered steps of the Husseiniya, I pull my scarf over my head and enter an area of grieving men. Women and girls cluster in a railed-off area at the back.
Wounds are not random cuts from knives and swords, but deliberately inflicted by a man with a cut-throat razor, which he wipes on his sleeve after each incision, risking infection with Aids and hepatitis.
Once a cut is made, the devotee strikes his brow with his palm or the flat side of his weapon to make the blood spurt. Some beat a slow tattoo, others batter themselves in a frenzy of religious fervour.
Friends band together and bounce down the steps, spattering blood right and left. A single drop falls on my shawl, a tiny Ashura badge.
We pause at the top for an attendant to sweep a wave of blood thinned with rain into a drain before making our way out ahead of a rank of bloody men chanting, "Haydar, Haydar," another name for Ali, the murdered father of Hussein and founder of Shiism. "We are Shias and our blood is boiling."
Families take seats on the grassy slopes around the football field across from the Husseiniya. Here the Battle of Kerbala is re-enacted by horsemen representing the army of the Sunni caliph and the gallant band of Hussein. Boys sporting bandages are served Turkish delight.
On the way back to the Dahiyeh we listen to Sayyed Nasrullah speaking to tens of thousands of the faithful. "We want one Lebanon, a Lebanon for all." He and Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, Hizbullah's spiritual mentor, banned flagellation in Beirut, as had Saddam Hussein in Iraq.