After the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential elections, under the cloak of darkness, residents of Iran’s major cities climbed to the rooftops of their residential buildings to chant “Allah-o-Akbar” in numbers – a brief reprieve from the violent suppression of their street protests by Basiji militiamen. “The cry of “Allah-o-Akbar” was the defining sound of the 1978 protests against the Shah of Iran, during a revolution that toppled the Pahlavi monarchy and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.”1 During this earlier period the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini called upon his followers to invoke Allah against the tyranny of the Pahlavi monarchy.2 Not only has this chant been employed by dissenting Iranians over the last thirty years in opposition to various national and foreign forces, it has been hyper-mediated and has circulated widely through various media formats.3 The subsequent Islamic Republic of Iran, born as a result of such demonstrations, adopted a proprietary relationship to what is otherwise one of the most ubiquitous Islamic utterances, translated as “God is Great”. Despite its pious provenance the Islamic Republic that was inaugurated by these earlier revolutionary calls has interpreted the post-2009 chanting of “Allah-o-Akbar” as blasphemous and an affront to their authority. My paper focuses on video representations of the rooftop chants that began to circulate online after the announcement of Ahmadinejad’s incumbent win. This genre of videos stage the politicization of a sonic performative, which I argue has its roots in performance practices employed during the ’79 revolution as well as in the elegiac tradition of ta’ziyeh more broadly. I inquire into the emotional force these recordings have had on a transnational scale through internet distribution paying particular attention to what I call the “aural imaginary” through which the rooftop chants of “Allah-o-Akbar” are heard. I also examine these chants as sonic performatives, cries that, through the deployment and resignification of an Islamic Revolutionary ethos, have the capacity to enact a counter-politics. 1 Mightierthan, “Poem for the Rooftops of Iran: “Where is this Place”—June 19, 20019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKUZuv6_bus&list=PLQwQL-vuib8qV3EnDdGC6IxMAOSTi4E5p&index=18&feature=plpp_video, accessed January 29, 2014. 2 Setrag Manoukian, “Where is this Place,” Public Culture, no. 22: 2(2010), 241. 3 See Setrag Manoukian, “Where is this Place?”: Crowds, Audio-Vision and Poetry in Post-Election Iran,” Public Culture 22: 2(2010). And also Babak Rahimi, “Affinities of Dissent: Cyberspace, Performative Networks and the Iranian Green Movement,” CyberOrient: Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East 5: 2 (2011).