Why Does Iranian Grief Make Non-Iranians So Uncomfortable?

There's almost fourteen centuries of logic underneath the footage. Here's how to read it.

The footage coming out of Iran right now includes women cutting their hair. Wailing in the streets. And then there are people dancing at graves.

I worry that to non-Iranians this looks like chaos or a breakdown.

It’s neither.

I study hidden religious logic for a living. What I mean by that is that most of us move through secular spaces without noticing that those spaces are saturated with assumptions that came from somewhere. American wellness culture, for instance, runs on Protestant logic. That is what is underneath, for example, manifesting and detoxing. And you could argue the way we mourn is also very Protestant. The self is a project. Suffering is a problem. Grief is something you process, move through, and ideally transcend, efficiently, quietly, and within good boundaries. That’s not neutral. That’s theology that’s forgotten it’s theology.

Iran has different hidden logic. Shi’a Islam runs underneath Iranian public life the way Protestantism runs underneath ours, and one of the places it surfaces most clearly once you know what to look for is in how Iranians grieve. What looks like breakdown to non-Iranian is actually a 1,400-year-old technology for surviving what should not be survivable.

Let me show you what I mean.

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I want to start with someone else, because her words are better than mine on this.

Screenshot of Misha Murphy’s excellence Feb. 3rd reel on IG, hyperlinked to original reel.

Misha Murphy runs Hafez Death Care, a death and grief support practice specifically for the Iranian diaspora. This week I saw her reel of IG titled “Iranian Grief is Radical” that I’ve watched probably a dozen times. On it she says:

Iranian grief is radical. In the West, when a state kills someone, we tend to respond in one of two ways: either a quiet vigil with candles, silence, respect or rage, protest, sometimes riots. But in Iran, grief has never lived in either of those boxes. Traditionally, Iranians grieve together, loudly, emphatically. They wail, they scream, they beat their chests and cut their hair. It’s expressive in a way that would make most of us in the West uncomfortable. But it’s not just angry. It’s sad, deeply, loudly sad. That disruption is itself a kind of protest. Grief doesn’t have to be quiet to be respectful, and it doesn’t have to be angry to be disruptive.

And then she describes the weeks following the recent massacre of thousands of young Iranians in recent protests:

The people are dancing. Singing at graves, not to celebrate death, but to insist on life. “My child was killed too soon,” they say. “My child was not a victim. We reclaim their life. We continue their fight. You will not take away our hope.” They dance, they sing, they wail, they scream, they beat their chests, and they move as one body — to remember their own aliveness, feel their sorrow and their love, to remember joy, and to be so disruptive with their grief the state cannot look away. That is protest.

Wailing and dancing. Scraping flesh and singing at graves. Not incoherence. Tradition.

To understand where this comes from, you need a short detour through Islamic history, specifically through the question that every religious community has to answer when its founding prophet dies, and what happens when they can’t agree on the answer.

A quick cheat sheet on Shi’a Islam

When Muhammad died in 632 CE, the Muslim community faced an immediate crisis: who speaks now? The group that would become Sunnis believed leadership should pass to a companion of the Prophet chosen by the community’s elders. They selected Abu Bakr, and the line of leaders they established were called Caliphs. The group that would become Shi’a Muslims believed authority wasn’t something a committee could assign. It moved through blood. Through family. For them the rightful heir was Ali, Muhammad’s cousin, his son-in-law, and husband of his daughter Fatimah. Ali was the first Imam, in Shi’a understanding, not just a political successor but the successor to the Prophet’s religious authority.

In other words, Sunnis argued caliphs were the rightful leaders of the Muslim community, but for Shi’a it was the imams. The Sunnis, numerically, won. Ali was the one cross-over: the first Imam who eventually also become the fourth caliph, but he was assassinated. And then came Karbala.

Photo by أخٌ‌في‌الله on Unsplash

In 680 CE, Ali’s son Hussein (the Prophet’s grandson, the third Shi’a Imam) refused to pledge allegiance to the Umayyad caliph Yazid I, whom he considered corrupt. He traveled toward Kufa with a small group of family and companions, where supporters had promised to meet him. They didn’t show. On the plains of Karbala, on the 10th day of Muharram, Hussein and his people were surrounded, cut off from water for days, and killed. He died alongside most of his male relatives. The women and children were taken captive.

This is the founding wound of Shi’ism. Hussein chose martyrdom over an oath of allegiance, and Shi’a theology reads that choice as the eternal struggle of justice against power. He is called the Prince of Martyrs.

And Shi’a Imams kept getting killed. Generation after generation, Imams were surveilled, imprisoned, and martyred by whoever held political power. The grief accumulated. And so Shi’a Islam developed something Sunni Islam did not in the same way: a full theology of mourning. Not grief as private emotion, not grief as something to move through and transcend. Grief as communal practice, spiritual discipline, and political act. To mourn is to protest. To remember is to resist.

That’s the logic underneath the Iranian footage Misha highlights in her reel.

Ashura: grief as annual event

Every year, on the 10th of Muharram (Ashura) Shi’a Muslims commemorate the death of Hussein at Karbala. Sunni Muslims observe the same date as a day of fasting and thanksgiving, marking the parting of the Red Sea. Same day on the calendar, completely different emotional register. One tradition fasts in gratitude; the other takes to the streets in sorrow. This isn’t a minor liturgical difference, it reflects genuinely divergent understandings of what suffering means, what the body is for, and whether grief belongs in public.

For Shi’a Muslims, Ashura is the most sacred day of the year. Processions fill city streets, elegies are chanted, preachers recount the events of Karbala in precise and devastating detail—the betrayal, the thirst, each death—so that the audience weeps as if it just happened, because in some sense it did. In Iran, passion plays called ta’ziya reenact the battle publicly. The audiences participate as well, shouting at the heroes, cursing the villains, participating in the drama bodily. Mourners beat their chests in synchronized rhythm. Some communities practice more extreme bodily mortification, though this is contested within the tradition (many Shi’a clerics have actively pushed back on self-flagellation and encouraged blood donation instead.) The specific form of grief varies, but the commitment underneath it doesn’t: grief must be physical, communal, and visible enough that it cannot be ignored.

Compare this to American grief culture. We are given bereavement leave measured in days. We are expected to process loss quietly, efficiently, without making anyone too uncomfortable. Grief that exceeds socially acceptable limits, grief that is too loud, too long, too bodily, too political, gets read as dysfunction. We have a whole therapeutic vocabulary for this: unresolved grief, complicated bereavement, failure to move through the stages.

In contrast, Shi’a mourning traditions would read that vocabulary as the dysfunction.

The thing Mrs. Habibi taught me

I have more skin in this than most people who follow me here probably know.

Iran was been central to my scholarly work for the two decades of my career. I studied the history and anthropology of Islam in graduate school including Persian, Arabic, the theological and political traditions that shape Shi’a life. Three of my books engage Iranian politics and religion directly. This isn’t a topic I came to this week because it’s in the news.

But the credential that matters most to me isn’t the books. It’s the summer of 2004, when I spent three months in Tehran doing fieldwork, sitting in the Imam Khomeini Archives, taking Persian lessons, interviewing leaders of women’s organizations who were doing serious work on gender justice from inside the Islamic Republic. Not long after Bush’s Axis of Evil speech, I was expelled and haven’t been permitted back since. So I watch what’s happening in Iran this week, the strikes, the fires over a city I walked through, with something that isn’t quite grief and isn’t quite dread but lives somewhere in between.

What I learned in Tehran, sometimes only by first embarrassing myself, is that I’d arrived with frameworks I thought were neutral. They weren’t. They had hidden logic of their own.

I share the moment that broke this open in the preface to Creative Conformity. I was interviewing a prominent women’s organization leader—Mrs. Habibi—and I referred to her, in a question, as an “Islamic feminist.”

She slammed her hands on the table.

She was not an Islamic feminist. She was not interested in the categories I’d carried over from Chicago. She was doing her own work, inside her own tradition, on her own terms, and my framework, however well-intentioned, was sitting between me and understanding what was in front of me.

I think about that moment constantly when I watch Western coverage of Iran. The reflex to sort what we’re seeing into legible boxes (grief or celebration, victims or resisters, rational or irrational) is the same reflex I walked into Mrs. Habibi’s office with. It’s the reflex of someone who hasn’t yet recognized that a different logic is operating. One that doesn’t need our categories to be coherent.

What does this ask of us?

Misha isn’t just describing Iranian grief. She’s also holding a mirror up to ours.

The hidden logic underneath American grief culture is Protestant in its bones. Suffering is individual, recovery is personal responsibility, and grief that refuses to resolve itself is a problem to be managed. That logic tells us the goal of grieving is to stop. To integrate, stabilize, return to function. Grief that stays loud, stays embodied, stays political, that insists on being witnessed past the point of social comfort, reads as failure to cope.

What Shi’a mourning traditions suggest is that grief is political. That its privatization is itself a political act, one that serves power by keeping loss individual, manageable, quiet. That the body beating its chest, or dancing at a grave, or wailing in the street is not malfunctioning. It’s insisting that what happened cannot be swallowed silently. It’s making loss visible.

You don’t have to be Shi’a for that to land. You don’t have to believe in the intercession of martyrs to ask, honestly: is the way I grieve actually serving me? Personally, spiritually, politically? Or have I inherited a set of assumptions about grief as efficient, private, resolved that are working against me?

When I watch the footage from Iran, the wailing and the dancing, the chests struck and the songs sung at graves, I don’t see chaos. I see a tradition doing exactly what it was built to do: turning private devastation into public testimony, refusing to let loss become quiet, insisting that the dead were not victims but people whose lives and fights continue in the bodies of those who loved them.

As Misha puts it so beautifully, Iranians are “so disruptive with their grief the state cannot look away.”

یاد باد —May it be remembered

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My book Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us is out from Tarcher/Penguin Random House this April. If you would like to support me or my work please consider pre-ordering—pre-orders matter more than most people realize!