Regenerating the Islamic Republic: Commemorating Martyrs in Provincial Iran1

Abstract

This article explores how provincial Iranian laymen and officials who support the regime (here, Basijis) mobilize the bodies and blood of martyrs to sacralize the national landscape in Post-Revolutionary Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a powerful cohort of religious scholars and everyday citizens has emphasized the need to (re)generate the authentically Islamic interior of the nation while resisting an immoral, "Westernstruck" exterior. A significant part of this sacred defense against Western cultural invasion has been the exhumation of bodies of Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) martyrs from the battlefront for reburial and commemoration at sites across the national landscape. This article, based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the Fars Province of Iran, investigates these ongoing practices of reburying and memorializing martyrs. I argue that the exhumations and reburials of martyrs are strategic religious practices that organize the bodies of Iranian subjects around key reference points, specifically the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala, the 1979 Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War. In addition, I show how acts of commemorating martyrs emphasize the sacrificial blood of male citizens, a bodily substance that draws further symbolic efficacy from its associations with the life-giving blood of kinship. This is the first ethnographic account of how martyrs are interred and commemorated in provincial Iran.

Sacralizing kinship, naturalizing the nation: Blood and food in postrevolutionary Iran

“…The visceral displays of the blood of martyred citizens in Iran's museums, however, doubly evoke the God‐given natural laws ( āin‐e fitrat ) of kinship according to Islamic exegesis and the sacred history of martyrdom and prophetic genealogy. Indeed, the resonances of blood as “natural” and “sacred” substance pile onto each other, increasing its power to shape citizens, thus adding both a naturalizing and sacralizing dimension to blood in the political project of regenerating the Islamic Republic (Wellman ).…”

“…The brightly colored red signs that surrounded the graves portrayed the blood and bodies of martyred Iranian soldiers who had died in the war to defend the values of the revolution. One read, “The martyrs of the Islamic revolution protected the face of Islam and of the Qur'an with the price of their blood” (Wellman ).…”

“…Indeed, the Friday Imam in Fars‐Abad and my Basiji hosts argued that, like the bodies of the Twelve Imams and their descendants, the blood of martyrs does not rot or putrefy. It remains whole, intact, and sweet smelling in the grave (Wellman ).…”

Pastors of a dispersed flock: Diyanet officers and Turkey's art of governing its diaspora

“…Martyrdom as a way of reconciling religious ideology with mundane politics recurs in Islamist movements and parties. The literature has mainly focused on Hezbollah in Lebanon (Hamzeh, 2004;el-Husseini, 2008) and in Iran by addressing how the memorialization of martyrs re-animates and sacralizes the national landscape (Wellman, 2015). In the case of Turkey, the Diyanet associates the figure of the martyr with the soldier, thereby sealing the sanctity of the military nation (Altınay, 2004;Arjomand, 2017) 2009: 114).…”