Taʿziyeh Close-Up: A Conversation with Moslem Nadalizadeh

Abstract

Described by Peter J. Chelkowski as “the sole form of serious drama to have developed in the world of Islam,” taʿziyeh is a performance form comprising elegiac, devotional performances in commemoration of the martyrdom of Husain ibn ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (626–680 CE), the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third Imam of Shiʿi Muslims.1 The revered Imam confronted the much larger army of Caliph Yazid ibn Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan on the desert plain of Karbala—south of modern Baghdad—where Husain and his followers bravely fought and became martyrs in 680 CE. According to tradition, the lamentation rituals for the Karbala martyrs were immediately performed by the Imam’s surviving family and supporters. Though performed differently in various localities today, the mourning rituals, known as Muharram, have developed into major communal events in Iran and other regions with large Shiʿi populations, where members of a village, a local neighborhood, or a guild will participate in the ceremonies. Also known as shabih-khwani (simulation recitation), taʿziyeh is a distinct dramatic tradition, including a range of episodes that recount the battle of Karbala, and generally performed within the rituals and ceremonies of the lunar months known as Muharram and Safar. As part of a body of devotional Muharram rituals, taʿziyeh is at its most elaborate during the first ten days of Muharram, but can be staged throughout the year to replay the various stories related to Karbala. This general description of taʿziyeh, however, does not reflect the lived experience of those who participate in the ceremonies, which are capable of producing shifts in consciousness that are conducive to devotional expression. Such a shift involves ways in which the audience immerses in the immediacy of the Karbala tragedy, affectively and perceptually, and this immersion makes declaring one’s allegiance and devotion to the martyred saint possible. To invoke the late Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, taʿziyeh is a “living ritual”—a public event that has both experiential and semantic significance at the communal level.Taʿziyeh varies in performance across regions. In Iran it mostly appears in dramatic episodes that reenact the tragedy of Karbala. In Lebanon and the western Persian Gulf, the performances are known as shabih (simulation) and mostly comprise battle reenactments rather than poetic narratives. In South Asia and the Caribbean, taʿziya (note the difference in spelling) refers to model recreations of Husain’s mausoleum and other relevant structures.The following interview discusses Iranian taʿziyeh from the perspective of Dr. Moslem Nadalizadeh, a taʿziyeh performer and a leading scholar of the tradition.2 Nadalizadeh is an associate professor and the director of the Department of Persian Language at Ahlul Bayt International University in Tehran, Iran. I’ve always found the expression “the theater became a truth” as paradigmatic of the experience of the taʿziyeh audience. The “audience” does not see “theater” performed on a distant stage but feels an affinity with the performers who, through oral and other forms of performance narratives, not only depict but also mourn the inner message of Karbala. The “audience” therefore enacts the truth through his or her their experience of mourning. In your latest publication, you seem to echo this perspective. You write, “We should bear in mind that taʿziyeh is performance, but not theater.”10 Certain forms of theater and taʿziyeh, I would however argue, share similar emotive modes of action toward a yet-to-be-realized social reality. The theatrical traditions that advance ways of performing and seeing performances as lived experiences aim at producing changes in consciousness conducive to transformative actions. This is mostly evident, for example, in the Theater of Cruelty, in which the focus is less on staging performance and more on the audience whose sensibility should undergo an experience of shock for the purpose of awaking a subconscious depth in everyday life. In his Theater and Its Double [1938], Antonin Artaud famously argued for an intimacy between actor and audience in a “magic exorcism” that brings together gestures, sounds, language, movements, and expressions to rethink reason into a new visceral force of life, a new vitality in an attempt toward human emancipation. Both Jerzy Grotwoski and Peter Brook admired taʿziyeh for this very reason: the capacity to refashion the world by fusing the audience with the performer, and in the process to create a visceral theater of lived expression. Taʿziyeh embodies a ritualization practice that is less about the kind of transgression that Artaud wanted and more about social solidarity. Do you agree? Also, in the specific case of the audience, do you see a fundamental difference between taʿziyeh and theater?