Revolution as Taziyeh

During the first half of 1978, mourning processions were held in Iran for activists felled in prior demonstrations. The device occasioned subsequent political protests, fostering a series of horizontally organized demonstrations that lasted six months. Accounts of what transpired, published in pamphlets at the time, are replete with exhortations for others to join. The documents extend discursive patterns found in courtroom appeals and defenses made by leftist activists over the course of the twentieth century. In this language, we find visions of a collective revolutionary subject configured as an individual worthy of empathy and observation, recalling overlaps between human rights advocacy and guerrilla warfare. The discursive pattern challenges divides between materialism and culture in the study of modern Iran. Analyses of the revolutionary process in Iran make recourse to pragmatism, and yet they elide the importance of language and culture displayed here. This chapter argues that a pragmatic sensibility corresponds with adaptations of the Karbala paradigm in Taziyeh processions. To the extent that the former reflects individual investments in self-preservation, the latter cultivates investment in communal self-preservation through memorialization.