ABSTRACT
THE PASSION OF the people and the support of the government paved the way for the development of the Ta′ziyeh, which grew at such a pace that within two hundred years it had become a full-scale drama that spread quickly throughout Iran. The passionate interest in the Ta′ziyeh reached such a level during the Qajar period that no other national event could compete with it. However, the interest shown by these two groups derived from different sources and satisfied different aims. The people looked on the Ta′ziyeh as a means to fulfil their religious duties as well as seeing it as a form of entertainment. The government and aristocracy, on the other hand, saw it more as a tool with which to protect their power and as a means of controlling the people. The ruling class achieved this by representing themselves as respectful guardians of the religion who supported this religious drama. Since they claimed that they had God on their side, no one dared to stand against them. The state misused the Ta′ziyeh to such a degree that in one Ta′ziyeh, Imam Hussein, the heroic martyr and symbol of innocence and purity and justice, was replaced by Nasseredin Shah, the brutal and corrupt king. When the Qajar dynasty was overthrown in 1925, the Ta′ziyeh suffered considerably because it was seen as being associated with the despised Royal Court of the Qajar kings. The intellectuals, nationalists and bourgeoisie helped to bring about the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which overthrew the Qajars and established the first National Parliament in Iran. In 1925, they established a new regime, the Pahlavi, who had a pro-Western nationalistic attitude. These three groups for the most part shared a desire to weaken the religious traditions in Iran, considering them to be reactionary and too old-fashioned for a modern society. The Ta′ziyeh, unfortunately, was one of the traditions they considered unsuitable as an art form in their new society. With the overthrow of the Qajar dynasty, the Ta′ziyeh not only lost one of its great supporters, but also had to face a hostile regime that issued orders to the police to stop Ta′ziyeh performances and arrest those who continued to stage them. As a result the performers had no choice other than to seek support from the ordinary people, the lower classes who still had great faith in the religion and its traditions. The Ta′ziyeh groups moved first to the outskirts of the capital, and then moved further away to the small cities and villages, where they could not be seen by the police. The police themselves came from lower classes of society and had strong connections with the religion and its traditions, and many of them were unwilling to enforce the law. The support of the people and laxity of the police were two elements that enabled the Ta′ziyeh groups to survive during those years. The Ta′ziyeh’s survival was further threatened, however, in the 1960s, when a new powerful force, which was opposed to the traditional elements of the society, rapidly westernized Iran. Petro-dollars poured into the country and the Western style of living soon had an impact on every aspect of the society. Television, cinema and music, along with the Western way of thinking, replaced most
traditional ideas and radically altered traditional art forms. Increasingly the plays of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Bertolt Brecht were performed in Iranian theatres, and Iranian directors became more concerned with theories of absurd or epic theatre than with indigenous or traditional forms of theatre. Among Iranian theatre specialists, only a minority of people, such as Ali Nasirian and Bahram Bayzaie, paid attention to the traditional and folk forms. The efforts of such defenders of traditional drama were ineffective in such a pro-Western atmosphere, and the Ta′ziyeh’s survival was threatened again.
