Weeping and Laughing
Up until this point, I have been painting a rather pious and tragic picture of the observances during Muharram. There is, however, another dimension that needs to be acknowledged. Much of the literature on the event has focused precisely on the tragic, the melancholy, and the somber, but in this focus we run the risk of essentialism. Iranians—and for that matter, all Shi‘ah—are not a morose lot, perpetually living in a darkened world within which an ethos of constant sorrow prevails. In fact, there is a festive and celebratory air engulfing the phenomenon of Muharram performances that demands our attention. Although the idea is controversial and is the subject of constant debate, we must recognize that there is room for joy and merriment within the Karbala paradigm. Browne, for example, mentions a genre of satirical poetry to be recited during the most serious occasion for weeping, the majlis assemblies created for this very purpose. He has translated a poem called “The Book of the Table, Censuring Hypocrisy,” which is a work “in which the ostentation of the host and the greed of the guests are satirized with some pungency.”58 A few couplets from the poem will suffice for my purposes here:
Of those who make mourning for Ḥusayn and sit in assemblies in Frenzied excitement.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A host of gluttonous men, all beside themselves and intoxicated with the cup of greed,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To sit in such an assembly is not meet, for without sugar and tea It has no charm.
God is not pleased with that servant in whose entertainment is neither sherbet nor sugar.59
The image is one of a poet sitting in an assembly sarcastically commenting on the assembly itself. It is as if the poet is mocking the excesses of the aristocracy through biting social commentary, perhaps alluding to the feasting that occurred in Yazid’s palace when Husayn’s head was brought to him on a stick. The poetic license of the rauz̤eh khvān allows him to address serious and self-reflexive issues in a comic way. Thus humor too has its function during the annual period of mourning.
To use another example, Beeman has surveyed the intertwined relationship between ta‘zi̅yeh and rū-ḥauzi̅, a form of traditional Iranian commedia dell’Arte that draws on indigenous folklore and even classical literature. Beeman sees the two, which at first seem almost diametrically opposed, as complementary because “they cannot be treated separately within the context of Iranian society.”60 He suggests that both theater forms project the same presentation of Iranian morals and ideologies but do so from opposite ends of the performative spectrum: “Laughter and tears, though seemingly opposite emotional expressions, may indicate alternate, but equivalent ways of dealing with similar emotional and social situations.”61 The complementary emotions embodied in the acts of laughing and crying resonate with the English expression “I laughed so hard I almost cried,” which reminds us that laughing and crying can produce similar physiological effects and emotional states.
Another example comes from the sacred drama itself. Mehdi Abedi reminisces about his childhood in an Iranian village, where he was recruited at a very young age to play the “barely nubile bride” of Qasim for the wedding scene in a local ta‘zi̅yeh production. When he was in the second grade, he finally refused to play the role of the bride. He recounts the following: “What triggered the refusal I no longer exactly remember, but I remember bursting into angry tears at either being pinched, winked at, or obscenely teased as if I were a real girl.”62 He goes on to say that “Such teasing and humor had a regular place: the man who played Zeinab (sister of Husain, who led the women and children after the massacre …) always had a big mustache, and when someone would make a rude comment to him, he would show his mustache from under his chador. Typically, he had an obscene tongue as well, and would respond to propositioning with such retorts as, ‘Yes, I’ll sleep with you; bring your mother too.’”63 Abedi remarks that there was even “ribald mockery” of the ta‘zi̅yeh itself: “Shemr and Zeinab would replay their repartee from the passion play in obscene variations, e.g., Shemr: … If you are Zeinab, then what’s that penis? Zeinab: … God knows it is an extra piece of meat.”64 He finally notes that weeping was not always real but was sometimes pretend, but it nevertheless brought merit. Such reversals of the somber mood associated with the sacred month must also be accounted for in any discussion of Muharram rituals.65
Lastly, let me simply point out the testimony of Iranian friends who have mentioned to me repeatedly that as young men and women they always looked forward excitedly to the advent of Muharram. They fondly remember it as a time of festivity, food, family reunions, and occasions for social intercourse. One male friend of mine, who had been a teenager in prerevolution Iran, said many of the young men wanted to join dastehs not necessarily out of compassion for Husayn but because they wanted to attract the admiring gazes of young women and prospective marriage partners. Moreover, referring to the flagellation processions in Nabatiyya, located in southern Lebanon, Richard Norton and Ali Safa add that after the processions were over, “young men casually walked the street showing off their blood-spattered clothes as testimony to their fidelity to Shiism. Teenage girls enjoyed themselves, sometimes ogling their male contemporaries, sometimes giggling.”66 The flagellation therefore provided an opportunity for playful competition through a macho display of bloodletting. Muharram, in other words, offers the possibility of merging the sacred and the profane; it is profane social activity within a sacred frame of temporal reference.
The profane dimension is certainly found among the South Asian Shi‘ah as well, and even more so among their Sunni brethren. In his brilliantly conceived 1966 Hindi novel titled Ādhā Gā̃v (Half a Village), which unfolds in ten chapters corresponding to the days leading up to ‘āshūrā’, Rahi Masoom Reza paints a picture of Muharram in a rural area of northern India as a time of excitement and celebration. For Reza, an avowed Marxist and secular Shi‘ah, Muharram is filled with competition and sporting fun between neighborhoods. Concerning competitive breast-beating, for example, he recalls how “this matam used to be so powerful that the round and lotus-shaped candleshades and the crystal pieces of the chandeliers would tremble to its beat. And the silver-thread flowers embroidered on the hangings upon the platform where the taziahs stood would melt into teardrops.”67 In his world the rituals are accompanied by swordplay as well as competitive attempts to faint during mourning assemblies to receive special attention and achieve elevated social status. Reza’s muḥarram is an occasion for loud and colorful processions that attract merchants and vendors who set up stalls along the procession routes, giving the whole atmosphere a carnival-like feel.
The merger of the sacred and the secular, the happy and the sad, is a contested issue to which I should like to return in the following chapters. As we will see, the issue of praying or playing is a recurrent one. Although I do not want to ignore the pious and somber dimensions of Muharram, I also do not want to privilege them. My reason for doing so should become apparent as we proceed. I speculated earlier that as we move farther from the Shi‘i core, the Muharram observances become increasingly localized, drawing on the indigenous customs and traditions of each geographic location where they take root to create something new. At the same time, I want to argue that the tradition remains to a large extent faithful to the underlying paradigmatic nature of the Shi‘i master narrative.
In this chapter, we have seen that the material and visual dimensions of the public rituals combine with their verbal and dramatic dimensions to create a distinct ritualistic complex. Taken together, these multi-sensory events—stationary and processional, private and public, sacred and secular—comprise the observances for Husayn in Iran, telling a story that is relived each year by the faithful. Step by tedious step, the final ten days of Husayn’s life are incorporated into each person’s being through acts of bodily neglect and emotive upheaval. As a performance configuration, these events annually recreate a mood that keeps the historical master narrative of Husayn’s passion alive in the hearts and minds of those who believe in the martyr’s