Culture Of Martyrdom: Iran’s Basij Militia

On a summer’s night in a northeast neighborhood of Tehran, I joined hundreds of men and women at a small mosque inside a narrow alley as they welcomed home the recently discovered remains of an ‘unknown soldier’ from the Iran-Iraq war.

Local members of a controversial and mostly volunteer militia - called the Basij - decorated the mosque entrance with battlefield icons like barbed wire, sand bags and dog tags. Inside, the men watched the commemoration ceremony from the main hall while the women listened quietly from under their black chadors in the covered terrace above.

Many of the families I met in this working-class neighborhood called Shemran Noh sent their husbands and sons to fight in the eight-year long war from 1980 to 1988. Twenty years on, scores of these devout Iranians from mostly low income areas are entrenched in a ‘culture of martyrdom’. They celebrate the sacrifice of the martyr and pay homage to the war-dead at every opportunity - as if the war were still on going.

Directed and Narrated by: Mana Rabiee mrabiee@wamu.org

Edited by: Josephine Boxwell jo_boxwell@msn.com