Fidel Castro's ashes were interred in a private ceremony on Sunday morning, ending nine days of mourning for the man who ruled Cuba for nearly half a century.
For years under Saddam Hussein, Shiites were prohibited from celebrating the Arbaeen, the end of the mourning period for Imam Hussein, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.
Tomorrow, if it passes without serious mishap, will represent the end of official mourning and the discordant hurdy-gurdy of the fairground can be turned up again to full volume and the old merry tunes on the cash register.
Figures are made to house the spirits of deceased family members and are placed in family shrines, and masks are used to drive away the spirits of the deceased at the end of the mourning period.
The observance is Arbaniya, which commemorates the end of the mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was killed by an overwhelming force of rival Sunni Muslims near Karbala in A.D. 680.
The United Nations special representative in Iraq, Staffan de Mistura, linked the car bombing to the annual Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala to commemorate the end of the mourning period for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.
The deadliest attack on Thursday took place in Karbala, the holy Shiite city south of Baghdad, where tens of thousands of pilgrims have been massing to commemorate Arbaeen, which marks the end of the mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.
The remark seemed to confirm what the Congolese political class has been saying: the son had received his father's approval to marry a woman who has already given birth to their child, but now had to wait for the end of the mourning period.
Some Xhosa families wear black for the entire period and these clothes are symbolically burnt at the end of the mourning period.
This likely marked the end of the mourning process the deceased's social significance among the community of loved ones now severed by this final transformation into cleaned bones.
