Karbala: From History to the Imaginary – The Making of a Religious Symbol

Abstract

This article is based on awareness of the relationship between history and imagination in the making of religious symbols, a dialectical relationship in which the imagination interacts with historical events and things, reformulating and shaping them according to a set of mechanisms and media, including language, religion, myth, rituals, rites, production, imitation, amplification, idealization, the metaphysical flash, and the anticipatory flash, often making something what it is not. In this context, we worked on how the city of Karbala transformed from history to imagination, and its transition from the temporal and mundane to the spiritual and sacred.