By Adnan El-Ghoul
and Robert Bain
Daily Star staff

 Ashoura is one of the most important religious events in the Shiite Muslim calendar. It falls on the first 10 days of the Muslim month of Muharram, and commemorates the death of Hussain, the third Shiite Imam, at the hands of the Caliph Yazid in battle at Kerbala in 680 AD.
Since that time, Shiite Muslims have commemorated the anniversary of Hussain’s death with expressions of public grief ranging from parades to
self-flagellation. Sunni Islam has some reservations about these practices.
This is why Al-Manar, the television station of Hizbullah, a Shiite party, broadcasts two different versions of the Ashoura commemorations in Lebanon ­ one on its terrestrial channel for the domestic audience, and the other on its satellite channel, for a wider Arab and international audience.
“The manner in which the Shiites act … is controversial to the Arab and Muslim audience. Locally we broadcast the whole program, whereas we have to replace it with a different version regionally without compromising the religious doctrine or the actual teachings of the rituals,” Hassan Fadlullah, news director of Al-Manar television, said.
He added that the only events that were broadcast both domestically and regionally were Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches.
He said the split programming was intended to strengthen the unity of all Muslims and help achieve Muslim objectives in the struggle against Israel and the forces of hegemony.
This politicization of Ashoura is relatively recent. Sunni cleric Abdel-Naser al-Jabri, head of the Islamic college in Beirut, said that the Ashoura commemorations first acquired a wider political significance during the Iranian revolution.
“Ayatollah Khomeini started a revolution in Shiite tradition and doctrine,” he said. “He committed the Shiite sect to believe in an Islamic state and stressed its non-sectarian dimension.”
However, he said, he believed that the Shiites made a mistake in trying to convert other Muslims. “It is far more fruitful to preach that Shiite doctrine is one of many valid Islamic doctrines,” he added.
Fadlullah, on the other hand, said that Hizbullah and Iran’s media coverage would help Islamic unity but was not intended to convert other Muslims.
“We have many just causes in common and if we only defeat attempts to stir up a sectarian conflict in Iraq, Lebanon or anywhere in the Muslim world, it would be a triumph,” he said. “Winning the media battle is essential to guaranteeing the unity of all Muslims and achieving our objectives in the struggle against Israel and the forces of hegemony.”
The withdrawal of Israel from South Lebanon in 2000 and the recent prisoner exchange have made Hizbullah the champion of the Arab cause. While some may see a Shiite organization this popular as a threat, Jabri said that it doesn’t need to be.
“We should all turn these successes into Muslim successes,” he said. “If the Ashoura commemoration is one way of achieving unity and mobilizing the masses, we ought to work toward making it a Muslim occasion rather than one sect’s rituals.”