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Article: Every land is Karbala: in Shiite posters, a fever dream for Iraq.(ANNOTATION)
- Article from:
- Harper's Magazine
- Article date:
- May 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Harper's Magazine Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Banned under Saddam Hussein, public displays of Shiite Islam are now resplendent in central and southern Iraq. Images of the sect's defining religious event, the seventh-century Battle of Karbala, and its holiest imams appear on everything from key chains to T-shirts to posters like the ones shown here, which are plastered over walls, storefronts, and roadside signs. Fantastical and brilliantly hued, the posters offer a glimpse inside the psyche of the country's ascendant Shiite majority. In these lurid and chivalric iconographies can be seen a vision of Iraq suffused in a sainted mythology of suffering and carnage--a vision, perhaps, of Iraq's future.
Shiism's ...
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