tazia

…the name for this mourning, taʿziyyeh, also came to be applied to passion plays performed to reenact events surrounding al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom. Through the depths of their empathetic suffering, Shīʿites could help to overturn the injustice of al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom at the end of time, when all wrongs would be righted, all…

…the Persian classical tradition: the taʿziyyah, a word that originally meant “consolation” and was applied to various forms of religious mourning. Since the 19th century the word taʿziyyah has referred in particular to passion plays performed by lay actors enacting the sufferings of the 12 Shiʿi imams. The plays mainly…

…participate in passion plays called taʿziyahs. Such celebrations are, however, absent from Egypt and North Africa.

Quite different was the passion play, derived mainly from early Islamic lore and assembled as a sequence of tragedies representing Shiʿi martyrdom. Both the shadow play and the passion play were interlarded with musical prologues, accompaniment, and interludes, but these were not necessarily an…

…passion play known as the taʿziyah (“consolation”) is performed during the first 10 days of the month of Muharram. Recounting, in often highly emotional and graphic detail, the martyrdom of the descendants of ʿAli, the son-in-law of Muhammad, the pageant retains elements that date back to the 10th century. The…

…at the Muslim festival of taʿziyah. As in ancient Greece, these festivals extended over many days and involved the whole community. In the 20th and 21st centuries, as popes and other religious leaders traveled around the world to address the faithful, huge outdoor ceremonies became the norm, often with staging…