TAʽZIYAH, more fully known as taʿziyah-khvānī or shabīh-khvānī, is the Shīʿī passion play, performed mainly in Iran. The word itself is derived from the Arabic ʿazā˒, "mourning," and the taʿziyah performance marks the death of Ḥusayn, the grandson of the prophet Muḥammad and the third imam of the Shīʿah, who was brutally murdered, along with the male members of his family and a group of followers, while he was contesting his hereditary right to the caliphate. The horrors of this hot and bloody scene, which took place on the plain of Karbala near the Euphrates on ʿĀshūrā˒, the tenth day of the Muslim month of Muḥarram, in AH 61/680 CE, became the prototype of Shīʿī martyrdom.

Beginning in the middle of the tenth century, annual parades held in Baghdad during the month of...