Take Me to Karbala: Body, Piety, and the Imperial Thanatopolitics in the Shiʿa Community in the South Caucasus

• In Event: Bordering Practices and Border Crossings in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Caucasus

Abstract

Death is a constant but seldom mentioned companion of human experience; it seems an unlikely subject of a historic inquiry. Yet, at the border crossings of the Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Qajar Iran, death, or to put it plainly - dead bodies, had been the subject of political contestation, ritual performance, and eulogized sights of public memory in which states’ bureaucracy played a central role. This paper examines how the coalescence of death, ritual, and bureaucracy engendered scenarios of negotiations that sought to resolve the profane questions of burial as well as the profound questions of piety, afterlife, and communal legacy. Specifically, this paper grapples with the topic of Shi’a eschatology manifested in the burial ritual that persisted among some Shi’a Muslim communities in the South Caucasus under Russian imperial control. The ritual entailed deliberate storage of the dead bodies of the devout Shi’a Muslims for a period of time that ranged from several months to three years (or longer) in specially constructed crypts and basements, with the purpose of transporting the bodies of the deceased for the final burial in the sacred for the Shi’a Muslims shrine cities like Karbala, Qom, Mashhad, and others. This unconventional Islamic practice required the custodians of the bodies of the dead to not only find practical methods of protecting the bodies from the natural processes of decomposition but also negotiate with the Russian authorities for the right to keep and transport these bodies across Russian imperial borders into the Middle East.

Author

• Sergey Salushchev, UC Santa Barbara