Ta'ziyeh

Ta'ziyeh means consolation, and everything in the form serves the work of grief. The plays enact the events of Karbala: Husayn and his small company surrounded on the plain, the denial of water, the deaths one by one, the martyrdom of the Imam himself and the captivity of the survivors. The conventions are fixed and openly symbolic.

The protagonists, the family of the Prophet, sing their parts in classical Persian modes and dress in green and white; the antagonists declaim without melody and wear red; a change of headgear turns one performer into another, a basin of water stands for the Euphrates, and circling the stage signifies a journey. The staging is in the round, traditionally in the takiyeh, a courtyard or purpose-built arena, with the audience wrapped around the action and fully complicit in it: they know every line to come, they weep, beat their breasts and cry out, and their weeping is the point, since tears shed for Husayn are held to intercede for the one who sheds them.

The actor playing the villain Shemr may pause to protest that he too loves the Imam whose killer he must portray, a convention that keeps the moral frame unbroken. Performance is concentrated in Muharram, above all on Ashura, the tenth day, and a full cycle can run through the month with a different episode daily, the whole community underwriting the production as an act of collective devotion.

The road to ta'ziyeh runs through three centuries of Iranian mourning practice. Under the Safavid dynasty, which made Twelver Shiism the state religion in the sixteenth century, the Muharram commemorations flourished as processions with standards, mock coffins and tableaux, alongside the rawza-khani, the sung recitation of martyrdom narratives named for a famous elegiac text. In the eighteenth century, most historians of the form agree, procession and recitation fused: the tableaux began to speak, the narrators became characters, and by the Qajar era the result was a full dramatic repertoire of hundreds of episode scripts, copied and traded by troupes.

Qajar patronage raised the form to spectacle: Naser al-Din Shah's Takiyeh Dowlat, completed in the 1870s in Tehran, seated thousands beneath a great canopy and stunned European visitors, who compared the performances to the passion plays of Christendom. The twentieth century nearly killed it: the Pahlavi state, embarrassed by public mourning and wary of clerical mobilisation, restricted Muharram performance, and ta'ziyeh withdrew to the villages. It returned with the 1979 revolution's revaluation of Karbala symbolism, and has since been studied, festivalised and staged internationally, with directors such as Peter Brook drawing on its conventions. UNESCO's 2010 inscription recognised the form as living heritage; within Iran it remains what it was, seasonal mourning enacted by and for the community that grieves.