“the Shifting Face of Martyrdom: Heroism in Contested Narratives in Contemporary Iran”

In contemporary Iranian political culture, the martyr is the central figure in the process of Heroization. The martyr embodies all the values that the ideology aims to promote and disseminate through education, media, art, and literature. Not only the School textbooks are filled with biographies and memories of martyrs, the calendar and urban spaces such as schools, cultural-artistic centers, are named or pilled up with the name of martyrs.

Over the past four decades, the figure of the heroic martyr in official discourse have evolved. The image has shifted from that of a young religious man who goes to war to defend his land against a foreign aggressor, to state officials, and later to nuclear scientists who are assassinated, and during the COVID-19 crisis, to nurses and doctors who die while serving patients. Although the image of the martyr has varied, it remains a rather masculine one.

On the other hand, amidst the formation of social and political movements in the past decade, despite fundamental ideological and value-based differences, counter- discourses have used many of the concepts and rhetoric invented and advocated by the official discourse, in an attempt to reclaim these words. One such concept is that of the martyr, which has been repeatedly employed in the social movements of 2009 and 2022, referring to the demonstrators killed during the street protests.

What is the portray of martyr in these counter-discourses? what transformations has the figure of the martyr as a hero undergone between the social movements of 2009 and 2022? Has the current generation rebuilt its notion of martyrdom upon that of the previous decade? And, aside from the similarity in the term, does the concept of martyr in the counter-discourse share any meanings and connotations with the official discourse?