Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) – Activists circulated on social media, videos and photos from the neighborhoods of Shiite citizens of “Ashura” in the Qatif region of Saudi Arabia.
On Monday, the tenth of Muharram 1444 in the Hijri calendar, Muslims revived the Ashura day, amid a great difference in its rituals and rituals between the Sunni sect, who see Ashura as a day of joy, and the Shiite sect, who sees it as a day of sadness.
According to the Sunnis, the day of Ashura is the day on which God saved the Prophet Moses and those with him from the “Bani Israel” of the people of Pharaoh, as the Prophet split the sea with his stick and managed to escape while Pharaoh and his soldiers drowned, and the Sunnis fast this day as a revival of the Prophetic Sunnah.
As for the Shiites, Ashura is the anniversary of the killing of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad by his daughter Fatima, who died in the year 680 AD, in a struggle for power, and they commemorate this day with symbolic manifestations of “self-reproach”, and to show grief over his death during his revolution against the Umayyad ruler at the time. Yazid bin Muawiyah, and in those scenes, thousands of Shiites sing religious eulogies, beat their chests or what is known as “slapping”, injuring themselves with daggers or swords, and then lashing themselves with whips in coordinated movements.
Activists circulated a video clip published by the state-run Saudi Al-Ekhbariya channel from the events held in Qatif.
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