FACTBOX-What is behind Ashura violence in Pakistan?

Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:14pm GMT
 
Email | Print | | Single Page
[-] Text [+]

(Reuters) - At least 11 people died in a suicide bomb blast in a Shi'ite Muslim prayer hall in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on Thursday.

The blast comes one day before the Ashura weekend, the Shi'ite calendar's biggest event, which has become a flashpoint for deadly attacks by Sunni militants over recent years.

Here are some key facts about Ashura and frayed relations between Pakistan's Sunni and Shi'ite groups:

WHAT IS ASHURA?:

-- Ashura falls on the tenth day of a 40-day mourning period during the Islamic calendar's first month, Moharram, which commemorates the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, who was killed in battle in A.D. 680 in the Iraqi city of Kerbala.

-- The schism between Sunnis and Shi'ites is rooted in a dispute over the successors of the Prophet following his death in A.D. 632.

-- Sunnis regard Abu Bakr, one of Mohammad's companions, as his successor. Shi'ites revere Ali, the prophet's son-in-law and cousin. Ali was also the father of Hussein, whose death Ashura commemorates.

-- Marching down streets, worshippers flog themselves with steel-tipped flails or slash their bodies with knives to express solidarity with Hussein.

WHY IS THE FESTIVAL A FLASHPOINT FOR VIOLENCE?:  Continued...

 
Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling speaks at a Thomson Reuters newsmaker event in London October 21, 2009. REUTERS/Andrew Winning
Darling says stimulus stays

G20 policymakers are agreed that it is too early to pull the plug on economic life-support packages, Chancellor Alistair Darling tells Reuters.  Full Article 

Most Popular General News on Reuters UK

  • Articles
  • Videos
 A demonstrator pounds away the Berlin Wall as East Berlin border guards look on from above the Brandenburg Gate in this November 11, 1989 file photo. REUTERS/David Brauchli/File Photo
Berlin Wall anniversary

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall's fall, Reuters provides an in-depth, multimedia look at one of the 20th Century's defining moments.   Full Coverage