MOHURRUM CELEBRATIONS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 22, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 42.

MOHURRUM CELEBRATIONS.

THE Indian Witness, published at Calcutta, June 20, says: "The din of the Mohurrum fills the air. Lamentations for the fate of two men who were slain in battle twelve hundred and sixteen years ago, and elaborate celebration of commemorative funeral rites, have taken complete possession of the Sheah Mohammedans. Sunni Mohammedans are supposed to have nothing to do with the Mohurrum celebrations. Yet such is the influence of numbers, and the contagion of feeling that many orthodox Mohammedans and a large number of Hindus are drawn into the current, and join in the wail of Hussain, Hussain, weep at the recital of the Mercia, and follow the tomb of Hussain to the grave. The tenth of the month Mohurrum is the date of Hussain's death, and from the first of the month until the tenth the commemoration of the said event completely absorbs the attention of the Sheah Mohammedans. It is an unanswerable and a perplexing proof of the vitality of Islam. Recent events in Asiatic Turkey have given painful proof of the strength of Mohammedan feeling. The one hundred Armenian young men deliberately sacrificed at Urpah, while the sheik recited verses from the Koran to inspire and direct the slaughter, shows us not only that Mohammedanism is terribly alive, but still retains characteristics which we would gladly suppose had no place in the Mohammedanism of the nineteenth century. These yearly commemorations are not only proofs of the vitality of Mohammedanism, but they help to keep it alive."