Most of even the earliest forms of the Greek elegiac couplet...

Most of even the earliest forms of the Greek elegiac couplet (from which the Latin and then Western languages take the genre and the name) do not display exclusively themes of death or loss. If I bring up this point - which may seem somewhat distant from the question of elegy on Husayn in Arabic and Persian - it is to emphasize that the literature of marathi has but weak parallels in Western tradition.

More particularly, it is not paralleled in Western Christian tradition, despite an extensive martyrology. Some of the social and attendant historical factors in this contrasting development may be surmised: for one thing, the influence of poetic tradition has been comparatively much stronger among the Arab-speaking peoples and among the once much wider circle of Persian speakers than in the West.

What is of relevance here is that it has clearly been the event of Karbala' which allowed this pre-Islamic Arabic tradition to continue into Islamic times and take its central place in the languages of the Islamic tradition. Any elegy (in the restricted sense in which we are speaking here) may strike a universal note; in fact that is one of the requirements of an elegy, but very few examples tend to survive as poetry or as something which would continue to evoke deep emotion.

Practically our whole tradition of funeral elegy in English, for example, seems to be quite dead, in the poetical sense. In contrast to this, we have the tradition of Husayn and those martyred with him: the sacrifice of Husayn has provided a vital and meaningful subject for authors (both Shia and Sunni) for all of fourteen centuries (and into the future, God willing).

Thus we see that even in Arabic, although the strong tradition of secular elegy continued into this century, that too has declined with other forms and themes considered 'artificial' by modern movements, while marthiya on Husayn and the other martyrs of Karbala' continues in both formal and popular language. Alongside this, the event of Karbala' has provided a continuing ritual context for elegiac poetry.

The marthiya in pre-Islamic times has a ritual function as a lamentation (nawh), often recited by women (and the best of its earliest practitioners known to us were women). Not only would the listener be invited to dwell in the virtues of the deceased, but the pathos of the situation was also revealed, and it may be assumed that those present were then moved to weep.