Grief, Trauma, and Ritual
Part Two (2)
Collective and Intergenerational Trauma

We are a people who throughout history have repeatedly experienced massacres, genocide, book burnings, repression, and despotism, yet each time something has prevented the destruction of our cultural foundations. This has been an endogenous and resilient force: a force that has repeatedly reconstructed our historical memory and collective continuity and made survival possible.

The time we are experiencing today bears many similarities to the sixth century AH, a subject I have previously discussed in a seminar under that title. The sixth century was one in which jurists and theologians rose to prominence and what remained of philosophy had become an emaciated, scourged body. During the same period, the legacy of dynamic Iranian mysticism was gradually appropriated by Sufism.

Anvari, describing that time, is presented here as saying that it was an age in which buffoons and the ignoble rose to fame and fools and the base came to power—an age in which robes could be seen upon the shoulders of the lowly and halters around the necks of the free. This was the same period at the end of which the Mongols devastated Iran. Yet it was in the heart of this darkness that Suhrawardi was born.

Suhrawardi speaks of a sky that will never be empty of the Simurgh, because whenever one Simurgh rises from this soil into the sky, another will return from the celestial paradise toward this land. We are the survivors and descendants of those who lived through these catastrophes and carried history forward.

Our mothers and fathers engaged in a remarkable resistance in the world of language and narrative: in poetry, in storytelling, in teaching their children their mother tongue, and in preserving rituals such as Mehregan, Nowruz, and Tirgan. We are the children of such magnificent resistance—a resistance that throughout history preserved the possibility of our survival, meaning, and cultural continuity.