Sacrifice and authorship: a compendium of the wills of Iranian war martyrs

Abstract

Shohada ba khun-e khod safehat-e tarikh ra qalam mizanand “The Martyrs write the pages of history with their blood.”From 1980 to 1988 Iran fought a bloody war with neighboring Iraq. Those who died in the war are eulogized as the “martyrs of the war of truth against falsehood” and have been accorded an almost sacrosanct status in the Islamic Republic. A tragedy of unprecedented proportions in modern Iranian history, the war was also the catalyst for important social and political transformations within the country. Iranian warriors went to war not so much to kill as to sacrifice their lives for a larger community that was itself being transform through the exigencies of warfare. As succinctly explained by one Iranian fighter, “We are fighting not for revenge, but for Islam, country and honour.”