“Ashoura Is No Longer a Story We Relive Each Year”

After three years of continuous war — a war that crept into the homes overlooking the Galilee, breached the depths of our fears, forced us from our homes time and again, claimed those we hold dearest, and destroyed houses, neighborhoods, and villages whole — our relationship with place has been transformed. 

Villages that we used to pass through without a second thought became battlefields, or rather stages for an epic heroism we had never witnessed before. News from these southern towns has become our daily bread. We wait to hear the names of villages like we wait to hear the names of those we love, and we imagine what unfolded in Taybeh, in Bint Jbeil, in Khiam, and in Ali al-Taher… 

But what this war has changed within me is not just my relationship to place, but also my relationship to what I know of history: the stories I grew up hearing and was raised on since childhood. 

During the first 10 days of the new hijri year, every Muharram, my mother or grandmother would take us to the nearest Ashoura majlis: either to the Sayyed al-Shuhada complex in Beirut’s southern suburbs — which, like our villages, has become a witness to Israel’s criminality — or to the village husseiniya. I no longer recall the first majlis I ever attended. 

A majlis speaks to you of your loved ones’ thirst, yet it is the very place that most quenches your own.

I remember as a child trying to imagine the events of Ashoura unfolding within my small circle, within my own family — so that I would be moved, and more importantly, so that I would weep with the crowds. I used to look for a thread of semblance to bring the story closer to me, daydreaming hypothetically: that my father was left alone with no one to back him up, that my brother was killed in early childhood, that our house was burning down… I strained to weave a connection between what happened centuries ago and my own life.

Little did I know that the years would do all of it to us all. That what I had looked for in my imagination, I would one day find on the way to the South.

It never escaped me that those rituals, for all of their anguish and sorrow, were a balm. Even as grief ran deep, the act of returning to the village, this time around — even if only to commemorate the mourning — felt like reclaiming life itself. We found solace in holding the majalis in our own homes, rather than in the places of our displacement.

On the tenth day, the sacrifice began where the road began.

I make my way to the city of Nabatieh. Up ahead is Ali al-Taher —  stubborn as a fortress; as a barricade; as a reassuring, stately father. From there, the road stretches toward a scorched Khiam. Before we arrived, a sound preceded us: a nearby airstrike. War refuses to disappear, even on this day of lamentation.

I stand beside a family and ask them when the procession will begin. 

The man smiles and says: “I’m from Nabatieh el-Fawqa. I went up there for the commemoration, but they bombed a little while ago, so we came to Nabatieh. You’ll have to ask someone else.”

I smile and tell him that our mourning stretches across all the villages. He replies: “I am the father of a martyr. Every day is a funeral.”

"Yes, indeed, this year, every day is Ashoura,” a woman beside us offers.

Then she turns to us, and the photograph of a smiling young man pinned to her chest flashes before us. I look at the image and wonder: what would he have contributed to this conversation, and what battle would he have recounted?

I walk past the monument outside the husseiniya. It’s only a few years old, but it summons a moment further in time: the tenth of Muharram 1983 — when mourners in Nabatieh’s processions faced Israeli tanks with nothing but their swords. 

I think to myself that this city does not separate its memory from its present. All it takes is one martyrdom retold, and others awaken; one battle recalled, and it echoes into another still being fought. 

I step inside the husseiniya. The mourning commences, and the reciter gives himself over to narrating the battle. I look at the women around me and realize how much we needed this collective lament — not just to cry but to mourn together, since grief becomes lighter when it is shared.

I realized that what I tried to imagine as a child no longer needs imagining. Ashoura is no longer a story we relive each year, nor a history to find our reflection in. It has become a present we live and endure, one that tests us every day. For “no” means more than a word — it is a cost. And to be on the path of truth has become a daily practice.

We no longer need to bridge that history — the gap has closed, and we have become a part of it.