by Marina Schneider
You received your BA in Political Science, what led you to study aesthetics and mystical traditions in South Asia?[1]
I started off in engineering and political science. Towards the end of my undergraduate in the 1990s, when I was feeling lost and wasn’t happy with the things I was doing, I encountered Professor Anna Marie Schimmel, who is very well-known in Islamic studies, especially among those who study Arabic, Persian, and Urdu poetry. After learning more about her work and the ways she engages with literary culture, I felt like it was something I really wanted to do. Her interests and methods were especially appealing to me because I come from a family where poetry plays a prominent role in our everyday life.
My grandmother raised me for the first fourteen years of my life. She was an avid reader of Urdu poetry; she would read to me and I learned literacy from her. She would start reading a page from one of the great poets and fall asleep. I would want to know what happens next so I would continue reading. She made poetry out to be so exciting, so multidimensional, so safe that I just felt comfortable in that world. My maternal uncle and father were also very much a part of this world of literature and that played a big role and I feel my earliest training was there. Then with the work of Anna Marie Schimmel and others, I received validation that early training could also give me a better life, not just intellectually, but materially. Being tied to a university and teaching classes is a great experience.
Anna Marie Schimmel drew me into a world that gave me a lot of hope and that the questions I had about the world around me were not unique to me. That I came from a culture where these questions had been asked. So, she basically gave me a community.
Your first book was Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory. Can you describe the methodological path that led from your early graduate work to the completion of this book?
So, you know, my education and my sort of formal studies involved reading literature closely, listening to music, appreciating the works of visual arts including the cinema. One thing that was coming through, when I was encountering all of these different forms of art and writing, was that these cultures that I was studying took a certain kind of pride in pluralism, multivocality. The 1990s was also a time when Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations came out. Huntington and his sort of brethren, I should say, argued that Islam and the world of Islam could not exist in harmony with cultures around them. Of course, the rejoinder to all this reductive discourse had already come from the great Edward Said, who had written Orientalism in the 1970s. He had talked about how for particular political, colonial, and imperial reasons Muslim societies have been reduced to certain sound bites that make the work of colonial and imperial powers easier and how many of our academies had been at the service of these imperial projects. When I was in graduate school in the 90s, Said was one of the great heroes and the honor of hosting him, that was big.
I feel that most people who were working with me in our doctoral program and many of our professors were very much invested in bringing out the plurality of these traditions. I was drawn to Karbala because it was a symbol that was frequently invoked in my own family and the culture that I had grown up, but that I felt that even within that culture it had been approached in an exclusivist way. That is, I come from a Shia family and the Shia seem to talk about it as it mattered to them, and their theology; to their devotion. So, I wanted to look at it in a more expansive way. The idea of martyrdom, the idea of Karbala evoked a certain kind of sorrow when the event was commemorated, especially during the first two months of the Islamic year. I wanted to see what are the other ways in which this symbol has been approached. I explored the Marxist traditions, writers who very clearly distance themselves from religion, yet talked about Karbala as a revolutionary symbol that reflects minoritarian struggles, that is providing language to this discourse of speaking truth to power. Then there were contexts in which the commemoration of Karbala was not sad, but happy, the musical assemblies especially around Sufi shrines where Hussein’s martyrdom was seen as a way in which he safeguarded the religion of his grandfather, hence something that needed to be celebrated. So, I look at these different approaches to that one symbol.
Did you find that you agreed with these Marxist readings of Karbala?
Yes! Yeah, I mean I felt like these were sincere readings. They were also reminders that in many parts of the world this divide we have between that which is religion and that which is not religion, secularism as people seem to draw lines, this is really problematic, futile, because the entire Marxist discourse that I was studying was very much infused with these symbols and so these divides that we have simply did not work. So, while I was creating these different contexts, I was also very much aware of how blurry the boundaries are.
Can you talk a little bit about how you define symbols or how you are thinking about symbols in relation to your work?
Sure. You know I think its very simple in my mind. It is the way in which one event, one person, one place signifies much more than what the dictionary can or what a few phrases tells us it signifies. So, Karbala is the name of a place, and it is the name of a battle fought between Hussein and Yazid’s forces. Then it becomes a symbol for reflecting the proximity that God’s creation has with God. It stands as a way in which people speak of minorities overcoming majoritarian forces. It reflects certain challenges to exoteric victories, outward successes and victories that might seem to ourselves as victories in our particular moment, but ultimately, they constitute defeat. I speak of it as a symbol in a sense, that it stands for something that is much more, greater than what its geographical location or its historic nature would lead us to believe.
[1] Answers edited for clarity.
About the Interviewer:
Marina Schneider is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin. She is currently working on Islamic Iberia between 12-16th century and explores the connection between Iberia and Colonial Latin America.