The Influence of Condolence Theatre on Ali Barkattai’s Portrayal of Al Hussein’s Character in his Play “Karbala

            Karbala represents one of the most important turning points in Islamic history. It can be said that sequence of events in Islamic history after Karbala has become completely different from the way it was before it. That is, after Karbala Muslim World was divided into two major camps: Sunni and Shii, and an ideological conflicted started since then and continued to exist until now.
Karbala had its implications on literature, especially playwriting because the dramatic conflict on the theatre with the actual presence of the actors can present on the stage a reality that is similar to reality in Karbala. Accordingly, the historical importance of Karbala, its significance, and its symbols motivated many play writers to address the incident and re-present different versions of it after being loaded with visions and contents that vary depending on the writers, historical stage, and context.
            Ali Barkattai’s Karbala is the first theatrical work in the contemporary Turkish theatre that addresses this incident in an independent way, which motivated me to study this work. In this study, I tried to show the impact of Condolence Theatre on the writer’s portraying of the character of “Al-Hussein” and aspects of similarity between the traditional Condolence Theatre and Ali Barkattai’s Karbala.
     To achieve the main goals of the study, I divided the study into a prologue, introduction, two chapters, and epilogue. The prologue is about “the Shii-Alawi existence in Anatolia: A brief historical overlook”, whereas the introduction is about “Karbala in the Turkish literature”. On the other hand, the first chapter addressed “Condolence Theatre: its history and basic features”, and the second chapter addressed “aspects ofthe influence of Condolence Theatre on Ali Barkattai’s portraying of Al-Hussein character in his play Karabala”.
            The study concluded that Ali Barkattai was successful in presenting his “Karbala” in an elegant theatrical language using the characters in their historical and mythical dimensions and benefiting from the huge legacy of poetry and Condolence Theatre to reflect the conflict between the Good camp, as represented by Al-Hussein and his companions, versus the Evil camp represented by Yazid bin Mawia and his fellows. In his play, Barkattai reemphasized the continuity of the meanings and values of Karbala and Al Hussein’s martyr-hood in it, and was able to reproduce one of Condolence Theatre models in a contemporary theatrical format. However, this does not mean that Barkattai’s play was a repeated copy of previous works that addressed the same topic. Actually, his creative style and personality were clear in each and every single page of this creative work.
            Finally, I pray to Allah for this study to be able to present some new contribution to previous studies, which addressed the Turkish literature, in general, and the theatrical one, in particular. And I hope it was successful in presenting a contemporary Turkish theatrical work that was not presented before to the Egyptian and Arab readers.