The Procession

The mourning sessions held in homes or imambarahs, although public, largely reflected kin and friendship ties in their composition. The truly civic rites, the processions, brought persons together in the streets from all over each major city, as well as many visitors from nearby villages.

The climax of the mourning period came on the tenth day, the anniversary of the Imam Husayn's own martyrdom. Participants rose in the early hours of the morning and began preparing for the procession, women sometimes lit candles at the cenotaph before dawn and made requests. At dawn the mourners set out for a symbolic burial ground on the outskirts of the city, called a Karbala. In Safavid Iran, the labouring classes participated in street processions; the wealthy favoured the mourning sessions inside. In Awadh, however, many notables joined the street processions with great fervour. The wealthy put together a military funeral parade, with elephants, bands, a bearer of the sword staff, banners, and a caparisoned and bloodstained Duldul with a royal umbrella above his head. Friends and family of the owner, elegy chanters, incense bearers, and the owner of the cenotaph display himself walked behind, often barefoot and with heads exposed to the sun. Next came the cenotaph of Husayn surrounded by banners and covered by a canopy supported by silver poles, in the style of a Muslim funeral, then the cenotaph of Qasim and the wedding paraphernalia.

In Iran very late in the eighteenth century a new practice associated with mourning the Imam grew up, the passion play (tacziyah ). From representational acts in the tenth-of-Muharram processions, wherein mourners portrayed Husayn and his enemies, a tradition emerged of folk theatre centred in a fixed playhouse. Ulama in Awadh gave rulings against the use of tableaux or religious paintings as backdrops during mourning sessions.