Ta'zieh means comfort, condolence, or expression of grief. It comes from the roots aza which mean mourning. It commonly refers to passion plays about the Battle of Karbala and its prior and subsequent events. Sir Lewis Pelly began the preface of his book about Ta'ziyeh maintaining that "If the success of a drama is to be measured by the effects which it produces upon the people for whom it is composed, or upon the audiences before whom it is represented, no play has ever surpassed the tragedy known in the Mussulman world as that of Hasan and Husain." Years later Peter Chelkowski, professor of Iranian and Islamic studies at NYU, chose the same words for the beginning of his book Ta`ziyeh, Ritual and Drama in Iran.

The Battle of Karbala was fought on 10 October 680 between the army of the second Umayyad caliph Yazid I and a small army led by Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, at Karbala, Sawad.