With this piece I sought to symbolically represent the martyrdom of Husain as the extinguishing of a fire.\u00a0 The fire on the left represents not only Husain as grandson of Mohammed, and so with it being extinguished the extinguishing of one of the members of the family of the prophet, but also the strong piety of Husain.\u00a0 He was an upstanding man of integrity who went to his death knowingly because of what he believed in.\u00a0 Because of this he shines as an example throughout history.\u00a0 The dark figures extinguishing the fire are figuratively the army of Yazid.\u00a0 The figures are shrouded in darkness and the scene is depicted at night, although Husain actually died during the day, to represent the moral darkness of the act, the terribleness of Husain\u2019s murder, and also to emphasize how Husain shines out as a the example of an excellent and pious man against their darkness.\u00a0 The continuity of Husain as a figure of strong religious significance is represented by the coals on the right of the painting, which are left even after the fire is put out.\u00a0 Although Yazid\u2019s army was able to kill Husain, they unwittingly cemented his place in history.\u00a0 Now, in many situations of injustice and oppression, Husain is invoked on the side of those who are oppressed and Yazid on the side of the oppressor.\u00a0 Yazid\u2019s victory can thus be seen as very temporary.\u00a0 The coals, stretching off over the horizon in the distance, represent this permanence of Husain.\u00a0 Despite the extinguishing of the blaze that was Husain the righteous man, his example continues to inspire.\u00a0 The coals also represent the Imamate which follows from Husain and which is of such significance to Shia Muslims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With this piece I sought to symbolically represent the martyrdom of Husain as the extinguishing of a fire.\u00a0 The fire on the left represents not only Husain as grandson of Mohammed, and so with it being extinguished the extinguishing of one of the members of the family of the prophet, but also the strong piety […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4563,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4563"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/27"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/chriswoodcb12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}