Order in the chaos

Some of the planning behind the protest movement in Iran is obvious to the world, especially through electronic media and social communications. But there’s a deeper level of order embedded in that culture, and it’s getting very little attention.

GetReligion gets it. This Time article helps.

Although it is not yet clear who shot “Neda” (a soldier? pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. For the cycles of mourning in Shiite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat — a way to generate or revive momentum. Shiite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran’s rich history. During the revolution, the pattern of confrontations between the shah’s security forces and the revolutionaries often played out in 40-day cycles.

Who outside the Muslim world knows this, or incorporates it into the larger attempt to understand what is unfolding at this moment in Iran?

Last week, TMatt [GetReligion’s Terry Mattingly] wrote “it’s about time for people in our big newsrooms to start writing about the religious tensions that surround President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that are helping to fuel those marches in Tehran (and, maybe, elsewhere in Iran).” This story provides some of that context. We learn that Neda is already being hailed as a martyr and that martyrdom is central to politics in the Shiite tradition:

“The first Shiite martyr was Hussein, the prophet Mohammed’s grandson. He believed it was better to die fighting injustice than to live with injustice under what he believed was illegitimate rule.

In the seventh century, Hussein and a band of fewer than 100 people, including women and children, took on the mighty Umayyad dynasty in Karbala, an ancient city in Mesopotamia now in modern-day Iraq. They knew they would be massacred… .

Because of Hussein, revolt against tyranny became part of Shiite tradition. Indeed, protest and martyrdom are widely considered duties to God. And nowhere is the practice more honored than in Iran, the world’s largest Shiite country.”

Citizens in the West can’t afford to not know this anymore. The global village is becoming much more than a cliche all of a sudden.