Between Karbala and Calvary: renunciation, <i>Taʿziyeh</i> , and the Orientalist imagination in Matthew Arnold's “A Persian Passion Play”

Abstract Matthew Arnold's 1871 lecture in Birmingham, later published in Cornhill Magazine, engages the Shiʿi Muslim ritual drama of taʿziyeh in relation to the Oberammergau Passion Plays, capturing a particular moment in the Victorian period when concepts of religion were being reshaped through the emerging sciences of comparative religion and race. Based on secondary sources, the lecture presents Shiʿi devotion as a form of renunciation, framed as the surrender of individual will to a universal moral ideal uniting reason and feeling. Yet Arnold's theological interpretation is deeply informed by imperial knowledge systems, particularly the racialized classification of Persians as Indo-European and thus kindred to Europeans in moral disposition. The lecture ultimately promotes an ethic of abnegation by projecting Christian and Shiʿi performances as shared embodiments of self-sacrifice, a value Arnold regarded as configured across imagined racial lines. In doing so, the lecture offers a comparative model rooted not in cultural or doctrinal parallels but in a vision of moral affinity cast in racial terms. Drawing on the accounts of Gobineau and Gibbon, Arnold aligns taʿziyeh with a Christian aesthetic of suffering while eliding its historical specificity, offering instead a theological and racialized reading of devotion that casts Persians as moral mirrors of English Protestant virtue.