Shi’i mourning rites and rituals have played an essential role in the legitimation of the Iranian state since the sixteenth century. Over the past one hundred years, these rites and rituals have also emerged as popular religious-cultural sites for political contestation and resistance. In this study, I explore an independent, newly developed mode of practicing mourning rituals in the city of Yazd at the heart of Iran. The movement began almost a decade ago, and it has departed from the rituals’ traditional genre in both content and form to serve as the public’s political tool. I argue and show that Yazd rituals moved away from the dominant tropes of Shi’idiscourse and representation and turned into a protest movement. It does so by three key measures: by focalizing the message of Karbala around the modern concept of freedom instead of martyrdom and sacrifice; using she'r-e now (new poetry) instead of classical-traditional poetry, the former is less rigid, has uneven poetic lines and irregularity in rhyme, and relates to social context and address social and political issues; and finally, taking up a participatory approach in practice making nonhierarchical. Yazd mourning songs have three political implications: they voice sharp radical criticism of political structures and economic conditions, condemn corrupt clerics, and encourage people to stand up against tyranny and oppression. In this study, I engage in a cultural analysis of the most popular Yazd mourning songs over the last decade to examine the conceptual and practical shifts in their meanings and performances. In so doing, I explore the new identities that manifest themselves in these changes.

Scholars of modern Shiism have heavily investigated the politicization of Shiite rituals of Muharram in Lebanon. Likewise, the place of public ritual in Lebanon’s Islamic movement headed by Hezbollah has also been examined. Given the substantial scholarly interest in the emergence of public ritual and forms of piety as an emblem of the contemporary Shiite Islamic movement, it is surprising that no scholarly work has examined funerals as a site where these transformations transpire. This study is therefore concerned with two overlooked ritualization sites of the Lebanese Shiite community: the common and the military funeral. It asks, how have the death rituals (funerary, commemoration) changed from 1969 to 2019? How does the death ritual function in a particular sociopolitical environment? To answer these questions, the first section of the paper utilizes oral history and participant observation records to examine the change in common death rituals, funerary and commemoration, over the last five decades in a Shiite village in South Lebanon. It focuses on the reform, or following Lara Deeb, the authentication of the young pious Shiites of their parents’ ‘customs and traditions’. Here, an understanding of the ritual itself, reflecting a greater religious knowledge, the policing of gendered public expression of mourning, and the prescription of disciplined and regimented practices as an alternative to no longer accepted rites, is what differentiate the authenticated ritual from its predecessor. Ultimately, the Karbala paradigm becomes entrenched in the practice of death rituals, with the double emphasis on the lament ceremony or majles and the moral sermon. The second section draws on ethnographic records of Hezbollah's martyr funerals and the Party’s discourse production since 2013. Using Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented tradition,” it is argued that Lebanese Shiite funerals have become the site for the rapid invention of sacralizing tradition, one which builds on the form of common funeral and actively appropriates ‘timeless’ Ashura symbols and rituals. Through this invented tradition, which classifies the community’s dead bodies in a well-defined hierarchy through sacralization, the making of Hezbollah martyrs is realized.

The Shi'i discourse on martyrdom changed considerably after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and particularly through the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. As the revolution unfolded, the traditional understanding of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom (680 CE) was read through a revolutionary perspective, and the concept of martyrdom was then transformed into an empowering tool for the Iranian Shi'a. The Islamic Republic’s leaders understood the importance of cultivating a culture of martyrdom among the youth. Therefore, martyrs of the revolution, along with those of the war, were praised as national heroes who sacrificed everything for the sake of the Islamic revolution. However, more-recent waves of sectarian conflict in Iraq and Syria have triggered yet another interesting turning point in the way that martyrdom is understood among the Shi'a. The Iran-led Shi'a coalition’s decisive and successful involvement in the regional sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Syria (leading to the de-facto defeat of ISIS and their fellow Salafi jihadists) symbolized this turning point. The new martyrs, known as martyred Shrine Defenders (mudafi'an-i haram), go beyond national heroes. While the Iranian Shi'a fighters and martyrs of the eight-year war with Iraq exemplified those who fought and martyred alongside Husayn in Karbala, the Shrine defenders saw themselves more like the soldiers of al-Mahdi. They acted from a position of power and assumed the same kind of responsibility that al-Mahdi is supposed to have with his promised return, i.e., avenging the blood of Husayn, restoring the legacy of the Prophet and the Imams, and making the wrongs right. With regard to Iran’s post-war period, and particularly the ongoing sectarian tensions in the region, my argument in this paper is that fighting and dying for the protection of Shi'i Shrines in Syria and Iraq heralded a new era, a kind of transition from the practice of intizar (passively awaiting the return of al-Mahdi) to pragmatic messianism. In other words, martyrdom in the form of the Iranian brand of Twelver Shi'ism is now fully understandable in terms of sacrifice for the sake of the already ongoing de-facto cosmic battle between the party of God (Hizbullah) and the forces of Satan.

Drawing on an analysis of Shi‘i ritual lamentation in Lebanon, I examines how religious actors and pious publics employ literary, recitational, theatrical and socio-technological methods to cultivate imaginal engagements with the otherworldly. I analyse these methods, demonstrating how they locate pious Shi‘is in religious metanarratives which transcend the linearity of time, taking place in the Elsewhere and the here-and-now, simultaneously. I argue that this produces transposable and lasting dispositions which constitute the Shi‘i self, immerses subjects in this-worldly-oriented modes of religiosity and bestows upon Shi‘i politics and the imagined community a profound emotional legitimacy. I posit that cultivated engagements with the Elsewhere are constitutive experiences in modes of religiosity which emphasise a symbiosis between human action and metaphysical intervention, thus complicating the question of agency and intentional action.