The Islamic Drama

by Jamshid Malekpour

  33 . Negah be Gharb, p. 135.

  34 . For a thorough examination of this discussion see Hussienian, R., Ghena va Mosighi dar Fegheh Islam, Tehran, Soroush, 1995.

  35 . Namayesh, No. 4, 1989, p. 9.

  36 . Negah be Gharb, p. 135.

  37 . In terms of structure and social function, there is a similarity between these caravanserais and the inn-yards used in late medieval theatre in Europe.

  38 . Persia and the Persians, pp. 382–5.

  39 . Rooznameh Iran, Tehran, 1972, p. 645.

  40 . Sharaf, Tehran, 1887, p. 4.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Taʹ ziyeh in the Islamic World

  IT WAS IN IRAN that Shiʹa, the second most important branch of Islam, flourished, and it became the official religion of the country. Today, nearly seventy million Iranians practise the religion and for the last five hundred years the country has been the centre of the Shiʹa religion. However, the Shiʹa religion soon found followers all over the Islamic world, from the Middle East to Africa, and even spread to the Caribbean.

  In Iraq, nearly two-thirds of the population are Shiʹa. In Lebanon, the Shiʹa minority has been very influential in the political and social life of the country in recent years. In the sub-continent of India (Pakistan, Bangladesh and India), there are millions of Shiʹa followers who not only practise the religion, but also mix its rituals with the rituals of other religions, making them richer and more colourful. The Muslim Indians were the people who took the Shiʹa religion with them when some of them migrated to the islands of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.

  We now need to examine whether or not Shiʹa was able to help in the development or transformation of the Taʹziyeh into these non-Iranian countries.

  ʹ Despite the fact that two-thirds of the Iraqi population are Shiʹa, this Arab country, unlike Iran, has been always ruled by a minority of Sunnis, and despite the fact that the tragic events that constitute the spiritual and dramatic core of the Taʹziyeh took place in the Karbala plain near Baghdad, and even though all of the characters involved in these events were Arabs, the Taʹziyeh did not develop in Iraq.

  These circumstances suggest that the Taʹziyeh would not have been able to be performed in Iraq as the Shiʹa followers in that country were not allowed to present publicly in the takiyehs the faces of the killers of Imam Hussein as they had been able to do in Iran. It was for this reason that the mourning rituals of Muharram in Iraq were limited to the rowza-khani, the telling of the stories of the Karbala tragedies, and the presentation of mourning processions. The Shiʹa followers of Iraq could not show the killers of Imam Hussein as villains in such theatrical presentations as this was offensive to the powerful and hostile Sunnis who respected those who were responsible for the death of Imam Hussein and his followers.

  There are a few Arabic Taʹziyeh, but these were written in Iran by Iranians who knew Arabic. In the Vatican collection there are four such Taʹziyeh in Arabic,1 which all are from central and northern parts of Iran and have nothing to do with Iraq or any other Arab country. We do not know of any Arabic Taʹziyeh that has been performed in Iran, even in the south, where there is an Arab minority.

  One piece of evidence presented by Ibn-e-Kathir, a Sunni Arab historian, suggests that there was a long-standing anti-Shiʹa feeling on the part of the Sunni Arab population of Baghdad that led to opposition to the practice of Muharram rituals right from the beginning. Such antipathy towards Shiʹa beliefs was a major obstacle to the development of such religious rituals into a dramatic form.2

  Ibn-e-Kathir also reported how, one year later (965), the Shiʹa’s had to fight the hostile Sunni population for the right to hold such processions again. They fought violently, and properties were looted. Iraq and other Arab countries with a Shiʹa population had strong Sunni communities that were always backed by Arab nationalist regimes. This was a strong obstacle to the development of the Muharram rituals and processions into full-scale drama, as had happened in Iran. This view is supported by M.M.Badawi, who makes the further claim that the Taʹziyeh is the only form of Islamic drama to have developed in the Islamic world. He writes:

  Yet in the study of the Arabic theatre the Taʹziya remains of very limited relevance…because of its Shi’ite origin, sentiment and manner of presenting Islamic history, the Taʹziyeh has not spread to the Sunni parts of the Islamic world… However, a word had to be said about it here for the following reasons: first, because it explodes the commonly held fallacy that Islam as such and not ‘puritan’ Islam, is incompatible with dramatic representation. Secondly, it is virtually the sole dramatic spectacle of a tragic nature which we encounter in the Islamic world prior to its cultural contact with the West.3

  Two other scholars of Arabic drama, Jacob M.Landau4 and Muhammad Aziza5 support Badawi’s argument and endorse the uniqueness of the Taʹziyeh as the religious drama of Islam that developed in Iran.

  A similar opposition to Shiʹa rituals also took place in Lebanon. As in Iraq, the minority Shiʹa population in Lebanon have been silenced by a majority of Christians (Maronites) and Sunnis for many years. The Shiʹas were not allowed to practise the rituals of Muharram without harassment. In recent years, the situation has changed as a result of the civil war that erupted in 1975 and gave the Shiʹas greater political and social power. Michel M.Mazzaoui, who has written on the subject of Shiʹism in South Lebanon, doubts that the Taʹziyeh ever developed in Lebanon or was performed there. He writes:

  This rather harsh position of the Sunni-Arab Muslim attitude toward the Hussein tradition made life very difficult for the Shiʹa communities of Jabal Amil in south Lebanon… As regards Taʹziyeh proper, the practice in south Lebanon with its center in the hilly town of Nabatiyeh is said to have been a recent nineteenth-twentieth century import from Iran. It is difficult to document this… If one is permitted to make a final judgment in this context, one would like to say that in Iran Taʹziyeh will safely develop (as indeed it has during the past several years) within the relative safety of art forms.6

  Although Michel Mazzaoui indicates the difficulty of documenting the presence of the Taʹziyeh in South Lebanon, there is some evidence that the Taʹziyeh was performed in South Lebanon and that the Shiʹa population were aware of its existence. This piece of evidence is provided by Emery Peters, who was in a Lebanese village in 1956 carrying out fieldwork and witnessed a performance of a Taʹziyeh there. He writes:

  They cast the parts in such a way as to symbolize and reinforce the distinctions between classes and groups in the village. The parts of Husayn and his followers, the good guys, are taken by the shaykhs (elders) and sayyids (descendants of the Prophet) while ‘the bad guys’ are portrayed by peasants and petty trades.7

  Apart from this isolated eyewitness account, there is no evidence of the presence of the Taʹziyeh in Lebanon. The actual range and scope of Taʹziyeh performance in this country needs further research.

  Turkey has a special yet controversial place in the Islamic world. Although it is a Sunni-Islamic nation with a Shiʹa minority, it has been governed by a secular nationalist regime for the past eighty years. This regime has had a strong anti-religious attitude and passed a law in 1928 banning all sorts of religious mourning and processions. However, as Ivar Lassy8 has indicated, the mourning rituals of Muharram have been practised since then in private in most Shiʹa villages in Turkey. Whether those rituals developed into full-scale dramatic form is unknown. There is some evidence that a type of Taʹziyeh, probably in its early stage of development, was performed by Shiʹa Iranians living in Turkey during the late period of the Ottoman Empire (1798–1910). Metin And, an acknowledged specialist in Turkish theatre, describes our present state of uncertainty about the presence of the Taʹziyeh in Turkey. He writes:

  Yet some European writers erroneously associate the Taʹziyeh traditions with Anatolian Turkey. For instance, an article, entitled ‘Turkish Theatre’, giving short definitions of various dramatic forms, devotes most of its space to explaining Taʹziyeh, identifyi
ng it with Turkey. On the other hand, an Englishman who spent many years in rural Anatolia, in his article on Shiʹa Turks, briefly describing Muharram observations in an Alevi (Shiʹa) village, clearly states that there is no Taʹziyeh tradition among them.9

  Although there are 35 Turkish manuscripts in the Vatican Collection, a quick examination reveals that most of the scripts are from the state of Azerbaijan in Iran, whose population is mainly Shiʹa. These manuscripts are not truly Turkish. Metin And’s argument about the absence of any Turkish Taʹziyeh may well be accurate.

  ʹ During the eleventh century Islam gradually spread into India. Today, the Muslim population of India numbers more than 100 million, and about 10 million of these are Shiʹ a followers. But because of the diversity of religions in India, the minority Shiʹa population was able to practise the rituals of Muharram without being harassed by Sunnis. This gave the Shiʹa followers the opportunity to demonstrate their faith and feelings in colourful and noisy processions.

  In India, the term taʹ ziyeh is used to describe a different type of presentation from that performed in Iran. In India, during the month of Muharram, the mourners make models of the shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Hassan and call them taʹ ziyeh or zariyeh. These models are made of metal or wood and are housed in ashurkhaneh (takiyeh) and then carried in processions on the tenth of the month. The main colours used in the taʹ ziyeh s or models are red and green, symbolizing blood and poison. A red taʹ ziyeh represents Imam Hussein, who was killed by the sword, and a green taʹ ziyeh represents Imam Hassan who was killed by poison.

  In the cities of Hyderabad and Lucknow, at sunset on the tenth day of Muharram, these taʹ ziyehs are either buried or, where there is access to a river, placed in the water. In this dramatic presentation not only Shiʹas but also Hindus participate. David Pinault, who spent the Muharram of 1991 in the city of Hyderabad, has provided a graphic description of this ritual:

  To what extent can Hyderabad’s Muharram liturgies be considered dramatic, that is performances involving the mimetic enactment or symbolic representation of the events of Karbala? True Muharram drama can be found, of course, in Iran, in the Taʹziyeh or ‘passion play’, where individuals don costumes and assume the roles of Husain, Abbas and so forth and play out to some extent the battlefield speeches and death of Karbala. Hyderabad offers nothing as fully representational in its Muharram rituals. Nevertheless I witnessed several Muharram liturgies staged by the matami gurahan10 which incorporated elements of what can be termed dramatic representation. The most remarkable is a procession on the seventh of Muharram in honor of Nawshaye Karbala, the ‘bridegroom of karbala’… Wedding procession, death, shrouding, entombment: the ritual actions of the seventh of Muharram comprise mimetic representations which can be characterized as a form of liturgical drama. In the light of such findings it seems advisable to widen the definition of Shiite drama beyond Taʹ ziyeh and to look beyond the geographic confines of Iran in future studies of Shiite drama.11

  There is no doubt that what David Pinault has described here was a performance of the Taʹziyeh of Qasim, a Ta’iyeh play that is very famous in Iran. The wedding procession, death, shrouding and entombment that he witnessed are all parts of this play. We can be sure that the Taʹziyeh in some form has been performed in India as a part of the Muharram rituals and, as Pinault suggests, there need to be further studies on this subject. As a result of migration, the dramatic tradition of carrying the models of the shrines of Imam Hussein and Hassan and either burying them or placing them in a river spread from India to the two tiny islands of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. According to The Cultural Atlas of Islam12 (1986), 12 per cent of the population of Trinidad and Tobago are Muslims. Even though the majority of this 12 per cent are Sunnis, the difference between Sunnism and Shi’ism in these two islands is slight. In fact, the mixture of Islamic, Indian, African, Caribbean and Christian cultures has resulted in the creation of a unique way of practising religion and performing rituals.

  Islam was carried to these two islands mostly by Indians who were taken there by the British to work in the sugarcane fields. A tiny population of Muslims was formed, and with the participation of other religious groups the rituals of Muharram were performed. These rituals, however, differed markedly from those performed in India. The most important change was that the ritual was not performed as a tragic or mourning ceremony for the death of Imam Hussein and his followers. Instead, it became secularized and is now performed as part of a carnival celebration that involves lots of drumming, dancing and drinking beer!

  The celebration, which is called ‘Hoseh’—probably a corruption of ‘Hussein’—starts at the beginning of Muharram. As in India, models of the shrines of Imam Hussein and Hassan are made in different sizes and called tajeh, which is probably a corruption of ‘Taʹ ziyeh’. These tajehs are kept in the ashurkhaneh for a few days. On the ninth day, the great tajeh (the biggest one) is carried through the streets to the accompaniment of drums. Sweets and foods are distributed to the onlookers. In the evening, some people start drinking beer and rum and the whole procession turns into a real carnival. At sunset, the tajeh is taken to the sea and placed in the waves. When this is done, some of the participants shed tears. After floating for a while, the tajeh finally sinks into the sea and disappears. Although this ceremony, as Frank J. Korom and Peter Chelkowski state, exemplifies ‘the process of cultural creolization, grafting indigenous ethnic elements onto an important substratum of ritual performance’,13 it has been functioning more as carnival than as a religious form of drama. It is clear that the ceremony has little to do with what we know of a Taʹziyeh performance proper, but it is nevertheless important in the study of those dramatic elements that were used in the development of the Taʹziyeh. These include processions and symbolic presentations of the characters (in this case in the form of the tajeh).

  As we have seen, there is some evidence of performance of the Taʹziyeh in south Lebanon and India. However, the evidence relating to the Taʹziyeh and the related mourning rituals in countries outside Iran is so slight that a great deal of research needs to be carried out before we can estimate the importance of the Taʹziyeh in the wider Islamic world.

  NOTES

  1 . Nos. 146, 360, 368 and 701.

  2 . Kamel Al Tavarikh, Tehran, Naser-Khosro, 1939, p. 231.

  3 . Early Arab Drama, pp. 9–10.

  4 . Landau, Jacob M, Studies in the Arab Theatre and Cinema, Philadelphia, 1958.

  5 . Aziza, Muhammad, Al-Islam wa-l-marah, Cairo, 1971.

  6 . Taʹ ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, pp. 234–5.

  7 . ‘A Muslim Passion Play’, The Atlantic Monthly, CXVIII, 4, 1956, p. 177.

  8 . Lassy, Ivar, The Muharram Mysteries: Among the Azerbeijan Turks of Caucasia, Helsinfors, 1916.

  9 . Taʹ ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, p. 239.

  10 . Matami Gurahan is a group of Shiʹa followers who get together to organise the Muharram rituals.

  11 . The Shiite, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992, pp. 132–4.

  12 . Faruqi, L. and I.Faruqi, The Cultural Atlas of Islam, Macmillan, New York, 1986, p. 269.

  13 . ‘Community Process and the Performance of Muharram Observances in Trinidad’, The Drama Review, 38, 2 (T142), 1994, p. 170.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Taʹ ziyeh Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

  THE PASSION OF the people and the support of the government paved the way for the development of the Taʹziyeh, which grew at such a pace that within two hundred years it had become a full-scale drama that spread quickly throughout Iran. The passionate interest in the Taʹziyeh reached such a level during the Qajar period that no other national event could compete with it. However, the interest shown by these two groups derived from different sources and satisfied different aims. The people looked on the Taʹziyeh as a means to fulfil their religious duties as well as seeing it as a form of entertainment. The government and aristocracy, on the other hand, saw it more as a tool with which to protect
their power and as a means of controlling the people. The ruling class achieved this by representing themselves as respectful guardians of the religion who supported this religious drama. Since they claimed that they had God on their side, no one dared to stand against them. The state misused the Taʹziyeh to such a degree that in one Taʹziyeh, Imam Hussein, the heroic martyr and symbol of innocence and purity and justice, was replaced by Nasseredin Shah, the brutal and corrupt king. When the Qajar dynasty was overthrown in 1925, the Taʹziyeh suffered considerably because it was seen as being associated with the despised Royal Court of the Qajar kings. The intellectuals, nationalists and bourgeoisie helped to bring about the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which overthrew the Qajars and established the first National Parliament in Iran. In 1925, they established a new regime, the Pahlavi, who had a pro-Western nationalistic attitude. These three groups for the most part shared a desire to weaken the religious traditions in Iran, considering them to be reactionary and too old-fashioned for a modern society. The Taʹziyeh, unfortunately, was one of the traditions they considered unsuitable as an art form in their new society. With the overthrow of the Qajar dynasty, the Taʹziyeh not only lost one of its great supporters, but also had to face a hostile regime that issued orders to the police to stop Taʹziyeh performances and arrest those who continued to stage them. As a result the performers had no choice other than to seek support from the ordinary people, the lower classes who still had great faith in the religion and its traditions. The Taʹziyeh groups moved first to the outskirts of the capital, and then moved further away to the small cities and villages, where they could not be seen by the police. The police themselves came from lower classes of society and had strong connections with the religion and its traditions, and many of them were unwilling to enforce the law. The support of the people and laxity of the police were two elements that enabled the Taʹziyeh groups to survive during those years. The Taʹziyeh’s survival was further threatened, however, in the 1960s, when a new powerful force, which was opposed to the traditional elements of the society, rapidly westernized Iran. Petro-dollars poured into the country and the Western style of living soon had an impact on every aspect of the society. Television, cinema and music, along with the Western way of thinking, replaced most traditional ideas and radically altered traditional art forms. Increasingly the plays of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Bertolt Brecht were performed in Iranian theatres, and Iranian directors became more concerned with theories of absurd or epic theatre than with indigenous or traditional forms of theatre. Among Iranian theatre specialists, only a minority of people, such as Ali Nasirian and Bahram Bayzaie, paid attention to the traditional and folk forms. The efforts of such defenders of traditional drama were ineffective in such a pro-Western atmosphere, and the Taʹziyeh’s survival was threatened again.