Throughout the diaspora in political rallies and on social media, women and men sing to the beat of the drum “I am fed up with your religion /curses upon your creed/ the calluses upon your foreheads / and your hearts of stone.” Surprisingly, the poetry and melody of this chant is a reappropriation of a sineh-zani from Yazd, Iran during the month of Muharram in 2013. To this day this and other sineh-zanis are widely reshared as forms of protest on Iranian online semi-publics. Through the analysis of recently televised performances of sineh-zani (2017-2022), and the reappropriations of them on social media, I expand on Hamid Dabashi’s notion of Shi’ism as a religion of protest to further examine the paradox of conformity and dissent inherent in sineh-zani performance within Iran today. I build on previous scholarship regarding the Karbala-paradigm (Fischer 2010) to examine how the subversive power within sineh-zani paradoxically fosters sentiments of dissent from theocracy within Iran and across the diaspora today. This work brings together ethnographic fieldwork in Iran (2019-2022) and digital ethnography (2017-2023) with music analysis to examine: (1) how these collective musical expressions harbor an elusive subversive power, and (2) how the reappropriated sentiments from protest-sineh-zanis foster cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2016) and solidarity across diverse sectors of society. My analysis of sineh-zani, first, establishes this ritual’s role in engendering a collective identity defined by its opposition to tyranny. Secondly, through the poetic analysis of viral online videos of sineh-zani, I show how each ritual’s enactment both accommodates and challenges the polity through its opposition to historic accounts of oppression. Lastly, I locate sineh-zani as a performative space that regenerates historical moments of injustice while simultaneously voicing indiscriminate objections to contemporary tyranny. In this transformative poetic space, orators skillfully manipulate poetic conventions of ritual to rhetorically critique abuses of power by the state. I further present how these sineh-zani’s critical sentiments are reworked into the secular Women, Life, Freedom protests through the reuse of their poetry and melodies in new forms of digital expression. This ethnographic research also provides insights into a process of the regime’s loss of legitimacy as a religious authority in community spaces, social settings, and economic classes that were traditionally strongholds of support.