Abstract

This chapter begins with reading an excerpt from an elegiac text written in 1883 about the historical death of the third Shiʿa Imam, Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli in Karbala. The author of this work, Mollā Āqā Darbandi, claims in this excerpt that the day of ʿĀshurā, the day on which the military events at Karbala unfolded, lasted for seventy two hours. This chapter departs from this absurdist moment and delves into the performance art of taʿziye as performed and reformed in the nineteenth century. Taʿziye performances in the nineteenth century were the successor of the ʿĀshurā mourning rituals, in which Shiʿa Muslims commemorated the death of Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAlī from as early as the eighth century. In the nineteenth century, these rituals evolved into intricate drama plays with specific sensorial arrangements on and off stage. It was by means of this sensoriality that taʿziya mediates, or makes meaningful, the mourning rituals of ʿĀshurā for its audience. Taking first-hand observations of these drama plays during the nineteenth century as my analytic objects, I show how the acoustic experience that taʿziye performances created evolved in tandem with the military reforms that initiated in the Dār al-Fonun – particularly the sonic disciplines in which the soldiers were trained.

Keywords: taʿziye, military sounds, disciplinary acoustics, military manuals