I now leave so I can become bright as that sun that eternally shines.” A war fought for eight long years between two Muslim nations provided an opportunity for men like this Iranian soldier to express his religious and national pride-in a poetic idiom symbolizing the act of martyrdom as immortality.Īs this testimony demonstrates, soldiers are not merely those who die on the battlefield they become figures who attain an immortal reality through self-sacrifice. Nearly seventy years later, amidst the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), an Iranian soldier’s last will and testament: “Martyrs are no longer present, but they have given us life, and the flickering of the light that emerged from the depth of darkness has now turned into a bright and magnificent sun. The moment of consolation in the letter emerges when the soldier is praised for giving up his life for “friends,” and for the nation he served. What this letter reveals is the sacrosanct way in which the soldier’s self-sacrifice becomes an expression of ideals of nationalism, a point that the chaplain in this instance clearly expresses with the use of the terms “country’s service,” and selfless response of the soldier to the “call of duty”. In a war that introduced the first instance of mass armies, volunteers and conscripts-letters and testimonies not only expressed the intimate realities, but also the ideological roots of warfare. You will console yourself with our Lord’s words-words repeated over your husband’s grave-“Greater love hath no man than this-that a man lay down his life for his friends!” “We prayed”, wrote a British chaplain in a letter of condolence to the widow of a fallen soldier in 1916, “We gave thanks that your husband had heard and answered the call of duty and that God had seen him fit to lay down his life in his country’s service. This first systematic study of Persian and European sources analyzes how the Muharram rites changed from being a devotional practice to an ambiguous ritualization that created distinct spaces of communication-widening the gap between state and society. Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran (Iran Studies)įor information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here. His research focuses on the theoretic relationship between religion, ritual and politics and the relationship between culture and public sphere. Babak Rahimi is Assistant Professor of Iranian and Islamic Studies at the University of California at San Diego.
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