It seems likely that throughout the Ummayyad period (661–750 C.E.) the observance of Husayn’s martyrdom was a private affair conducted in the homes of influential members of Husayn’s clan, during which poets led lamentation sessions by reciting mournful verse.13 As Shi‘ism spread, however, so too did the mourning assemblies. By the tenth century, during the rule of the Persian Buyid dynasty (945–1055 C.E.) in Baghdad, impressive Muharram processions became well established. According to historians, the Buyid ruler Muizz al-Dawlah ordered the bazaars in Baghdad to be closed down and draped in black cloth on ‘āshūrā’ of 352 A.H./963 C.E.14 Yitzhak Nakash cites the historian ibn al-Athir, who writes that the ruler “forced the people to close the bazaars, suspend their business, to mourn, and to place cupolas covered with wool [in the markets]. Wailing women, their clothes torn, walked in the streets, slapping their faces and lamenting Husayn.”15 Chelkowski adds that ibn al-Athir “tells of great numbers of participants, with blackened faces and disheveled hair,” repeatedly circumambulating the city while beating their chests and mournfully reciting dirges.16 At that time the event was public and took shape as a procession, but during periods of non-Shi‘i rule, the observance must have gone underground, continuing within the homes of the devout as a private observance, much as it did during the Ummayyad period. Evidence such as this suggests that the earliest mourning observances moved from predominantly Arab areas into Persian domains after 1500 C.E., when Shah Ismail I, the first king of the Safavid dynasty, declared Shi‘i Islam the state religion of Persia and staged public performance gradually took shape.17
Persia’s cultural influence in the region prior to the Safavids was substantial, but it again became a political power when Shi‘i Islam was established as the state religion and was used to unify the country in opposition to the military campaigns of Sunni adherents such as the Ottomans and Uzbeks. It was at this time that the Karbala narrative was used to bolster a strong sense of national identity. Lincoln, for example, makes the following observation: “Invocation of the Husayn myth ever since has served, inter alia, to separate Shi‘i from Sunni and Iranian from Arab.”18 It was at this time also that the Muharram observances received royal encouragement; commemoration of Husayn’s martyrdom increasingly became a vehicle for patriotic sentiment even as it retained its soteriological function as a ritualistic act.
European eyewitness accounts of the processions are abundant, and they describe marching characters clothed in colorful regalia accompanied by mounted soldiers enacting the battle of Karbala. Chelkowski describes these early public displays as follows: “Living tableaux of butchered martyrs stained with blood, their bodies showing simulated amputations, were moved along on wheeled platforms. Mock battles were mimed by hundreds of uniformed mourners armed with bows, swords, and other weapons. The entire pageant was accompanied by funeral music and spectators, lined up along its path, beat their breasts, shouting ‘Hussein, O Hussein, the King of Martyrs’ as it passed by.”19 Such staged performance grew out of the processional observances held during the first ten days of Muharram.
As the Muharram ceremonies began to flourish and further develop under the Safavids, a second significant form of observance emerged as a genre of verbal and written poetry concerning the lives and actions of Shi‘i martyrs. Belonging to the maqtal genre, these narratives in verse form were taken predominantly from a book written by Vaiz Kashifi titled Rawḍat al-Shuhadā’ (Garden of Martyrs), and they were read to assemblies for the purpose of eliciting lamentation (nawḥ) from audience members.20 The work, given an Arabic title but written in Persian, was widely circulated in Shi‘i communities from the sixteenth century onward and had broad-based popular appeal. The text was later translated into Urdu in India to continue the narrative tradition there.21 Originally, it was customary to recite or chant a chapter from the Garden of Martyrs in public each day during the first ten days of Muharram. Repeated in gatherings hosted by private patrons, the recitations came to be known as rauz̤eh khvāni̅s (garden recitations). During these events a series of extended threnodies interspersed with exegetical digressions (guri̅z) would occur to add secular color and allow the raconteur to display his skills at verbal art.22 Other martyrology books were eventually written based on the model of Kashifi’s classic text for use in such mourning assemblies (majālis), and today they comprise a huge body of literature.
Traditionally, a muraṣṣa’ khvān, someone with good recitation skills, would read elegies (mars̲i̅yahs) embedded in the larger rauz̤eh corpus or recite pithy ones from memory. The poet would recite while standing at a pulpit (mimbar) or sitting on a raised platform. From his elevated position, he would recite loudly in an oscillating timbre to insure that his tragic verses would be heard by all in the mourning assembly. Here is a powerful example of the genre from the opening lines of an elegy by the Persian poet Qaani (d. 1853 C.E.):
What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
How? Day and Night.
Why? From grief.
Grief for whom? Grief for the King of Karbalā’.23
J. M. Unvala, who witnessed a number of Iranian rauz̤eh khvāni̅s in the second decade of the previous century, described the poet and his effect on the audience as follows:
[He] sits and recites for about an hour an anecdote of the martyrdom in a sing-song manner, … He has such fluency of speech and such volubility, that he recites sometimes for hours together without stopping even to think. In order to dispel fatigue after every sentence or couplet he draws in his breath with a noise produced at the back of the throat.… His serious and grave features, his lachrymose voice, his gestures of helplessness and deep mourning, combined with the crescendo tempo, in which he reaches the climax of the tragic stuff of his recital, is sufficient to make even hard-hearted men cry dispairingly like babies and women beat their thighs hysterically, shed bitter tears and shriek incessantly Husein, Husein.24
It is important to emphasize again that such gatherings for lamentation were arranged to elicit emotional responses from audience members and to remind the pious of Husayn’s suffering. Participation in these events offered the audience members the possibility of experiencing the martyr’s pain vicariously through what I have been calling subjective apprehension. By subjective apprehension I mean a personal experience of Husayn’s passion on the phenomenological level, a level on which individuals have direct access to the imām’s mediating powers within a larger social collective. This physical and psychological dimension of the ritual complex is the most central aspect of muḥarram praxis. But rather than generalizing about a phenomenon so richly variegated and complex, let us follow the historical progression of the narrative tradition’s development to see how it dovetails with processional rituals to create a distinct ritual idiom.
Gradually, special elegies were developed for each of the days leading up to the tenth. By hearing these elegies recited on the proper days, participants made the past present, thereby actualizing their sacred history, even if in panegyric form. Through choice of episodes and voice modulation, the innovative narrator was able to excite and manipulate the emotions of his audience to produce an intense emotive unity, what Turner would call communitas. Because the occasions for reciting verses from the Garden of Martyrs were opportunities for the professional raconteur to display his own particular ability to innovate, the text became secondary to the bard’s own creative