Iran's Youth and the Holy Defense

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) produced an industry to commemorate martyrdom by utilizing every form of media – both visual and textual – to propagandize. The state now hopes these reminders will impress upon young people the Islamic and political values of the last generation, and yet there has been little research on how today’s youth engage the Iran-Iraq war and its cultural legacy. The state’s continued investment in the culture of martyrdom gives rise to a number of questions. In particular, how has the narrative of the war changed to reach the post-war generation, unmoved by tired state rhetoric? This paper argues that the retrospective glance of the generation who fought the war, characterized by an interest in Shi’ism and its powerful iconography, has changed dramatically as the IRI repackages and revisualizes the War to suit the values of contemporary youth.
In this paper, I examine visual and material culture including city murals, posters, and films, as well as memoirs published by the Department of the Literature and Arts of the Resistance, in order to capture these transformations in the generational discourse. For example, in its effort to beautify the visual landscape of Tehran, the state admits to the loss of emotive currency of caricatured martyrs. By examining the murals replacing these martyrs, I analyze the war's recent refashioning. Similarly, early films like the critically acclaimed Bashu (1990) emphasize the human cost of warfare but do not offer the controversial perspectives of later films like Party (2001), which prove highly critical of the state’s monopolization of the war narrative. By challenging the prevailing image of fanatical warriors and subverting gender hierarchies in the hyper masculine space of war, the state oversees (and participates in) the attempt to portray the reality of warfare rather than a religious romance modeled on the Battle of Karbala. The state thus allows this generation to create new terms for the discourse on war and martyrdom in order to give the distant trauma relevance to young people with radically different values.