THE ISLAMIC DRAMA of Iran is known as Ta ʹziyeh1 or Shabih.2 It is a drama enacting the suffering and death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet of Islam. In 680 AD he was massacred along with his family in the plain of Karbala near Baghdad by the soldiers of Yazid, the Caliph.3 This drama was described by the distinguished theatre director Peter Brook as ‘a very powerful form of theatre’4 when he first saw a Taʹziyeh performance in 1970 in a village in the north of Iran. Many theatre critics, such as David Williams, claim that it was the Taʹziyeh that ‘had fired his [Brook’s] imagination’5 for future experimental productions such as Orghast and Conference of Birds.
The evolution of the Taʹziyeh involved the incorporation of countless elements drawn from religion, mythology, folklore and traditional forms of Iranian entertainment. This development took place over a long period of time. However, the Taʹziyeh, in its fully evolved theatrical form, came into existence in the mid-eighteenth century. It reached its highest point during the rule of Nasseredin Shah (1848–96), who built the Takiyeh Dowlat. This magnificent playhouse for the Taʹziyeh provided seating for a large number of spectators. The Taʹziyeh suffered significantly in the twentieth century, when it was attacked by a number of pro-Western and nationalistic movements that objected to such religious dramas because of their belief that the performances encouraged social stagnation. The Taʹziyeh suffered even further when it was banned in the 1930s by the Pahlavi regime, and Taʹziyeh groups were forced to take refuge in rural areas far from the reach of the authorities.6 However, the support of faithful spectators (most of whom are from low socio-economic backgrounds) as well as the theatrical appeal of this form of drama with its simple, powerful and flexible style of performance, have kept the Taʹziyeh alive. Today it is possible to see many Taʹziyeh performances throughout Iran.
Despite its importance, the Taʹziyeh has been almost totally ignored by Western theatre historians and critics.7 While Christian passion plays of the Middle Ages are dealt with extensively in almost every book that has been written about the history of world theatre, and numerous specialized books have been written about them, almost no mention of Islamic religious drama (the Taʹziyeh) has been made. Why such a gap has been left needs to be looked at.
Islam is the world’s second largest religion, with a following of one billion people. Consequently, it would appear that the lack of recognition of the Islamic drama of Iran results from ignorance on the part of Western theatre historians, who seem to be interested only in Christian religious dramas. From a more pessimistic viewpoint one could assume that the lack of recognition of the Taʹziyeh is due to the anti-Islamic sentiments that the Western world has harboured for so long. One might argue that, because of political motives, the West has created an environment in which even the cultural achievements of the followers of Islam are completely ignored. Furthermore, this form of cultural discrimination, and the lack of understanding it produces, not only affects the Taʹziyeh but is also part of a bigger problem experienced in Asian theatre.
The Taʹziyeh and other Asian theatrical forms have been interpreted and introduced to the West for the most part by diplomats and travellers. These were people who were not familiar with the theatrical techniques employed in the Taʹziyeh and other forms of Asian theatre and saw performances from an alien cultural-political perspective. Even if among them were those who did not wish to culturally exploit these performances, their views remained those of antique collectors rather than theatre scholars. It is for this reason that most Asian performances, including the Taʹziyeh, were introduced to the Western world as if they were merely antiques, rather than the live and passionate performances that they actually are. The Taʹziyeh was labelled ‘a crude form of theatre’8 that failed to observe the unities of place and time. These diplomats and travellers did not understand that ignoring the neoclassical unities of time and place in fact created one of the theatrical strengths of the Taʹziyeh, as this allowed audience and performers to move from one place or time to another. Even those few Western theatre specialists, such as Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht, who came across these performances, had such little knowledge of Asian theatre that their observations were based on emotional and dreamlike impressions rather than on scholarly evidence. Artaud (1896–1948), after seeing only one performance by a Balinese dance troupe in 1931, for instance, was drawn towards ‘Oriental theatre’ and based many of the controversial aspects of his own Theatre of Cruelty on what he understood from this performance.9 But the problem with Artaud’s theory in relation to Asian theatre is that it not only failed to make the understanding of Asian theatre for the West clear, it may even have made it appear to be more difficult to understand than it really is.
Similarly, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was also influenced by Asian theatre, and the development of the technique of Verfremdung—‘estrangement’ or ‘alienation’—was partly based on his understanding of the acting techniques employed in a Chinese performance (by Mei Lan Fang) that he saw in 1935 in Moscow.10
Apart from Artaud and Brecht, who at least alerted the Western world to the importance of Oriental theatre, the few who have written on the subject have mainly concentrated on discussing Japanese and Chinese theatre. As a result most other forms of Asian theatre, including the Taʹziyeh, have been ignored.
Of those Westerners who did show an interest in the Taʹziyeh, two are important. The first Westerner to pay serious attention to the Iranian religious dramas was the Comte de Gobineau, who, in his book Les Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (Paris, 1865), dedicated a section to the Taʹziyeh and introduced it to French scholars. The second was Matthew Arnold, who, in one of his lectures, Essays in Criticism (London, 1871), compared the Taʹziyeh to the passion plays of the Middle Ages. However, these and other writings on the Taʹziyeh were not written from a theatrical viewpoint and as a result they did not attract the attention of most Western theatre specialists. It was not until 1970 that the Taʹziyeh became known to Western theatre scholars. Peter Brook, after seeing a Taʹziyeh performance in that year, expressed his enthusiasm for its theatrical qualities. He has arguably made the greatest contribution to introducing the Taʹziyeh as a form of theatre to Western theatre scholars and, more importantly, to theatre performers.11 But somehow, despite Brook’s contribution, the West remained largely ignorant of the Taʹziyeh.12
In this research, taking a theatrical viewpoint, I have attempted to trace and discuss the origins and development of the Taʹziyeh. In addition I have tried to provide a guide for those who wish to carry out further research on the Taʹziyeh. With this in mind, I have included an extensive bibliography of sources, in both Persian and English.
The Taʹziyeh, it has been argued, is the only form of religious drama derived from Islam. According to the drama critics of the Arab world, no Islamic country, with the exception of Iran, is known to have any form of Islamic religious drama. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World states: The Shiʹi passion play called Ta’ziyah is the only serious drama ever developed in the Islamic world, except for contemporary western theatre.’13 This claim is supported by the critic M.M.Badawi, who has published widely on Arabic theatre and drama. Badawi writes that the Taʹziyeh ‘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’.14
In order fully to appreciate the nature of the Taʹziyeh, an understanding of Islam and history of Iran is essential. Consequently, I have devoted two chapters of this book to the religion and history of Iran and have attempted to link these directly to the development of the Taʹziyeh. And in order to focus on the main objective of this research, which is ‘to trace the origins and development of the Taʹziyeh’, I have resisted the temptation to compare it with other forms of theatre such as Greek drama and the European passion plays of the Middle Ages. Comparisons between the Taʹziyeh and these forms of theatre can no doubt be made, but I believe that this potentially fascinating area requires a separate study.
My own collection of the Taʹziyeh plays has been the main source for my study. I collected 150 manuscripts during the years between 1972 and 1992. Many of these were obtained directly from performers from various parts of Iran. I have been able to compare these scripts with productions of them, and this has provided me with invaluable information relating to their style of performances. My study of the Taʹziyeh would have not been possible without access to these manuscripts. Apart from the manuscripts, my publications on the Taʹziyeh in Persian were of a great use for this study.15
Finally, I must explain that the Taʹziyeh reflects the Shiʹi versions of what happened in the early years of Islam and that these versions are partly in contrast with what Sunni scholars recorded. This debate has nothing to do with my research, as I have studied the Taʹziyeh as a form of art dealing more with imagination and fiction than with the facts or the history.
1 . Mourning.
2 . Resemblance.
3 . Caliph, the Islamic ruler, successor of the Prophet.
4 . Brook, Peter, There Are No Secrets, London, Methuen, 1994, p. 38.
5 . Williams, David, Peter Brook, A Theatrical Casebook, London, Methuen, 1988, p. xiii.
6 . ‘In 1928 the Government had taken the first steps to prevent public flagellation in the month of Muharram, the Month of Mourning, and the practice of inviting the envoys of Muslim countries to the plays acted during Muharram, to depict the sufferings of the martyred Husain and his family, was discontinued. The plays themselves, the Taziyahs, were discouraged and thus in the big cities a usual feature of the calendar began rapidly to disappear.’ Avery, Peter, Modern Iran, London, Ernest Benn, 1965, pp. 290–1.
7 . Here I excluded those studies made by the Middle Eastern and/or religion scholars.
8 . Colliver Rice, C, Persian Women and their Ways, translated into Persian by A.Azad, Tehran, 1988, p. 186.
9 . Roose-Evans, James, Experimental Theatre…, London, Routlege, 1989, p. 74.
10 . Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre, translated by John Willett, New York, 1964, p. 244.
11 . Brook, Peter, There Are No Secrets, London, Methuen, 1994.
12 . The only serious attempt to introduce the Taʹziyeh to the West in recent years was made by Peter Chelkowski, an Iranologist, who published a collection of essays (mostly translated from Persian) in 1979. See: Taʹ ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, New York, New York University, 1979.
13 . The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol. 4, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 200.
14 . Early Arab Drama, London, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 10.
15 . Malekpour, Jamshid, Adabiyat-e Namayeshi dar Iran (Drama in Iran), 2 vols, Tehran, Toos Publishers, 1983. Malekpour, Jamshid, Shabi-Khani (Persian Passion Plays), Tehran, University Press, 1986.