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  • Ta'ziyeh as Theatre of Protest
  • Hamid Dabashi (bio)

Some two decades before the 20th century came to an end, a massive revolution shook an ancient land to its foundations. What was later to be called the "Islamic Revolution" in Iran took much of the world by surprise. The surprise lay not so much in the event but in the manifestly religious signs of its mobilization. The Revolution was led by a high-ranking cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, and organized by the clerical class, which demanded the establishment of an Islamic Republic. Some two centuries into "Enlightenment Modernity," a project that had extended its colonial shadow to the four corners of the globe, a religious revolution of sudden and inexplicable ferocity brought a corrupt monarchy and its military to their knees. Why and whence a religious revolution? Why now, at this particular juncture in history, when God was long since proclaimed dead at the European site of Enlightenment Modernity? In a series of articles published in the Italian daily Corriered'ella Sera (1978), Michel Foucault sought to explain the Islamic Revolution to himself and to the rest of the world.1 The leading critic of modernity had come to see how, in his estimation, it was being challenged at one particular periphery of its European origin.

Shi'ism As a Religion of Protest

By the early 1980s an Islamic Republic was established in Iran and an all-out war was under way with neighboring Iraq. As the ravages of the war wreaked havoc on both nations, the institutions of an Islamic Republic were consolidated in Iran. Some 200 years into the Iranian colonial encounter with modernity, and almost 100 years after a constitutional revolution that had established a secular monarchy, the organs of a repressive theocracy were now solidly put in place. The defining moment of the Islamic Revolution in Iran was the political rehabilitation of Shi'ism by a succession of revolutionary ideologues. As a religion of protest, and as an ethos of speaking truth to power, Shi'ism was put to full revolutionary use to overthrow a corrupt government and then to mobilize the masses against the invading Iraqi army. Finally, it was used to consolidate a theocracy. That today the Islamic Republic of Iran is a discredited state apparatus, held together by a combination of militant repression, an entrenched clerical clique, and the contradictory consequences of nonsensical rhetoric such as "The Axis of Evil," is nothing less than a historical testimony to the doctrinal paradox at the heart of Shi'ism. Shi'ism is a religion of protest. It can only speak truth to power and destabilize it. It can never be "in power." As soon as it is "in power" it contradicts itself. Shi'ism can never politically succeed; its political success is its moral failure. And that paradox is at the very soul of its historical endurance.

At the end of the 20th century, Shi'ism was thus put to immediate and enduring [End Page 91] use in order to topple a monarchy, consolidate an Islamic Republic, and institutionalize an outdated theocracy. True to its doctrinal paradox, Shi'ism has been instrumental in the first and the second task, and entirely useless in the last. In both its suggestive symbols and enduring institutions, Shi'ism has been the paramount ideological force in revolutionary and military mobilization, before being categorically abandoned by a clerical establishment bent on continuing their illegitimate reign, at the cost of their professed religion.


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With the victory of the Revolution in Iran in 1979, there was a national referendum resulting in a landslide victory for the Islamic Republic. The ballots were in two colors: green for the Islamic Republic and red against the Republic. The authorities cleverly borrowed the color symbolism of the ta'ziyeh. This stamp was issued from 1980 to 1988. (Courtesy of Peter J. Chelkowski)

Nowhere is the central paradox of Shi'ism, in both its mobilizing and demobilizing contradictory forces, more vividly evident than in its most spectacular visual manifestations, namely in the thematics of ta'ziyeh and all their visual and performing variations. By ta'ziyeh I do not only...

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