Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

238 t CHAPTER NINE
The Passion and the Death of Husayn
Pious devotions in Sunni Islam were nourished by neither popular
literature nor popular art. Drama was not among the arts that
found a distinct place in traditional Islamic culture, though in
more recent times all the popular forms of drama, from grand opera
to soap opera, are performed in Muslim societies. Traditional
Islam had its dramatic narratives, to be sure, the encomia of the
Prophet on his birthday, for example, and the laments recited or
chanted on the tenth of Muharram in memory of the martyrdom
of Husayn at Karbala in 680. These latter “garden recitals”—they
derived mainly from a Shiite work titled “The Garden of the Martyrs”—were
stationary and delivered by a professional reciter, but
they were processional liturgies as well. There is evidence for public
processionals in honor of Husayn in Baghdad from as far back
as the tenth century, when mourners with tattered clothes, streaming
hair, and blackened faces circled the city walls on the tenth of
Muharram, beating their breasts and chanting their dirges. This
took place when there was an Alid-leaning dynasty ruling in the
capital, but when an out-and-out Shiite regime was established in
Iran in the sixteenth century, the processions became full-scale
pageants—with many of the participants dressed as characters in
the Husayn-related events being portrayed.
In the mid–eighteenth century the Husayn pageants and the garden
recitals fused and produced in Iran, and in Persian, a genuinely
dramatic performance in a fixed place before a stationary audience,
the taziyeh, or “consolation.” At first these dramas were performed
at street intersections or open areas in the town, but eventually,
in the nineteenth century, special arenas were constructed,
either permanently or temporarily, for their performance.
Though the liturgical event may have begun merely to commemorate
Husayn’s slaughter, soon other themes and other figures
from Shiite history were introduced. In the end, the taziyeh proved
to be a more open-ended performance than its Christian passion
play counterpart. The latter remained closely tied to the Gospel
texts and to faithful presentation of events that were not only historical
but sacramental. Taziyeh, in contrast, knew no such textual