Introduction to this event

The green Ashura, the Iranian Moharram

Ashura is an epic performative ritual. Once a year the Iranians organize and take the streets to relive and remember the epic narrative of Hussein. Literally meaning ‘the tenth’ of the month ‘Moharram’, Ashura is a ten day ceremony commemorating the tragic death of Hussein, his 72 followers, and the final ten days of their heroic struggle for freedom. On Ashura the public sphere becomes a performative one. The rituals narrate the epic through street carnivals and street theater draped in green and black; and mourning rituals celebrating martyrdom as a form of tragic death in resistance to oppression. The doors of many houses are open in which, abundance of food is prepared in huge caldrons on big fires and offered freaely to familiar as well as stranger mourners. The rituals come in different forms and local traditions of remembering, but they all share a number of symbolic motifs and performative elements in common (more information).

Whether performer or observer, the public remind themselves of the importance of defending freedom at the cost of one’s own life, or loss of loved ones. The yearly reliving of Ashura through rituals carries a simple ideal: seeking freedom transcends religious belief. The heroic Hussein famously addressed the army of the oppressors: “Even if you have no faith, at least seek freedom”. This maxim shapes the Iranian image and significance of Ashura. For fourteen hundred years, the Ashura rituals have ensured that the simple ideal of seeking freedom is passed from generation to generation.

For Iranians, this year’s Ashura, the 27th of December, is perhaps the most significant of all. Since June 12th, the Iranians have lived their own epic of reclaiming freedom. * They risk and lose their lives, lose loved ones, are imprisoned and tortured, all shaping an ongoing contemporary epic: a non-violent epic of freedom-seeking on the streets of Iran.*

This Ashura, History and Life join forces as Iranians redefine Hussein’s epic in their own non-violent aspirations for freedom and civil rights. And indeed both epics are symbolized with the same colors: green in persisting hope of freedom, red for the innocent’s blood, and black in memory of the martyrs.