When everywhere is Karbala: Murals,martyrdom and propaganda in Iran

Introduction: why study the murals of Iran?

Although Iranian propaganda murals have become a subject of Western academic inquiry, for most Iranians these murals have become ‘invisible backgrounds’. It is no wonder that those who notice them are largely foreigners visiting Iran for the first time. (Karimi, 2008: 55)

Karimi’s insight is that the propaganda murals of Tehran go more or less unnoticed in the everyday life of citizens; they have become habitual and mundane, no more significant than the other street furniture of a bustling city. Her point is reminiscent of that made by Billig (1994) about ‘banal nationalism’, that often the symbols of nationalism are commonplace and quotidian rather than loud and spectacular: ‘The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building’ (Billig, 1994: 8). In a literal sense, the quantity and scale of the murals of Tehran is unmissable; they are an omnipresent aspect of the urban landscape. Karimi’s point is more subtle, however, focusing as it does on the reception of these murals by the citizens of the city.

The murals came to have an important attraction to one set of foreigners, namely, the Western media. During the last three and a half decades in the West, whatever has been the latest crisis in relation to Iran has led to numerous media reports illustrated with photographs of murals. But these were always a backdrop to the story, never the story in their own right. The result was that there was little insight into the purpose and themes of the murals.

In attempting to go beyond the media gloss to analyse the murals of Iran, I faced a number of obstacles. I am a foreigner who does not read or speak Farsi. The breakthrough I needed was contact with an Iranian postgraduate at the university where I worked. With her help and that of a number of her friends, I embarked on an extensive bout of ‘mural hunting’ in Tehran, Shiraz and Yazd. This is where the next obstacle arose. The murals of Tehran in particular are painted on high buildings alongside the many highways which run through the city. The difficulty is in taking good pictures of the murals; there is extensive traffic, often moving at speed. The split second opportunity one needs for the photograph can disappear as a passing car blocks the view. Leaving the highway does not necessarily solve the problem. One may find the mural’s location but high barriers block any access to the road from where the best view is available (see Figure 1). It took all the ingenuity of my Tehran guides to enable me to photograph as many murals as I eventually did.

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Figure 1.

On the right is Iraqi Shia leader Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein in 1999. He was the father of Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, founder of the Lebanese political group Movement of the Disinherited (whose armed wing was Amal). He disappeared in 1974 on a visit to Libya, possibly killed on Gadaffi’s orders. On the left is Muhammad Bagher Sadr, Imam Musa’s cousin. (© Bill Rolston)

In 1999, it was claimed that there were over 600 murals in Tehran (Marzolph, 2003: 90). By the time I visited in late 2013, there may have been more but no figures were available. I managed to photograph about 200 murals, a quantitatively significant amount. My method was in effect a form of ‘convenience sampling’. The advantage of this method is clear; it allows one to collect data in the absence of the necessary information on the full data set which would make more purposeful methods possible. The downside of the method is its inability to reach precise conclusions about the representativeness of the sample; there is, for example, no way to assess the distorting effect of possible ‘outliers’ (Farrokhi and Mahmoudi-Hamidabad, 2012).

The most significant feature of the murals is that almost every one depicts men who died in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 or the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–1988. Coming from the West, it is easy to dismiss these displays as heavy-handed propaganda. The murals are easily interpreted within a number of well-rehearsed Western tropes: fanatical ayatollahs, a cult of martyrdom, the imposition of religious fanaticism. But to judge them thus is to miss a number of important points. Undoubtedly, their sheer size and omnipresence indicate a massive propaganda intervention by the authoritarian state into the everyday lives of citizens. But, as will be made clear, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as a mere imposition. The themes of the murals speak to deep beliefs in Iranian society, both old religious beliefs – in particular the centrality of the notion of martyrdom in Shia Islam, going back to the quintessential martyr, Imam Hossein, killed at the Battle of Karbala – and more recent political beliefs – notably the martyrdom of hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the Islamic Revolution and the subsequent Iran–Iraq war. In fact, it is the merging of these two sets of belief that is at the core of the murals’ message. As such, the overwhelming focus on martyrdom cannot avoid striking chords in the wider society at the level of religious belief. Equally important is the fact that the murals portray real people who died within the living memory of many who view them. It is the interplay between religion and politics, memory and propaganda that will be the central focus of this article.

Consequently, the article will first consider the question of memory and power to examine the way in which formal memory is created in societies and in particular the role played by powerful elites in that creation. The consolidation of state power in Iran is the subject of the next section, followed by an account of how the use of martyrdom and the story of the death of Imam Hossein have been central to state power for the current political leaders in Iran. A detailed survey of the martyr murals of Tehran is then presented, followed by consideration of some silences on the walls of the city. The final section returns to Karimi’s initial insight to put forward some conclusions on how the murals are received by the public.

Martyrdom and mobilisation

The Battle of Karbala occurred on the day known as Ashura, the 10th day of the month of Muharram, in the year 61 of the Muslim calendar, 680 of the Christian calendar, in present-day Iraq. Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, and 72 of his followers were slaughtered in a battle with the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. Hossein, like his brother Hassan and father Ali before him, had tried to prevent bloodshed by not directly challenging the caliphate leadership. Despite that, Yazid considered Hossein a threat to his position as Caliph. Hossein and his infant son were among the dead. The female relatives of Hossein mourned the dead before being brought, along with the severed heads of the dead, to Yazid in Damascus (Chelkowski and Dabashi, 2000: 77; see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Reproduction of Mahmoud Farshchian’s painting ‘the Evening of Ashura’. (© Bill Rolston)

While all Muslims recognise the significance of Karbala, it is of particular importance to Shia believers. For them, Hossein is ‘the paradigmatic martyr’ (Yarbakhsh, 2014: 78). As Shariati (n.d.) points out, in European countries, the word martyr refers to the manner of a person’s death. ‘One of the basic principles in Islam and in particular in Shiite culture, however is “sacrifice and bear witness.” So instead of martyrdom, i.e. death, it essentially means “life,” “evidence,” “testify,” “certify”’. In taking a stand against Yazid, Hossein was upholding the ideals of his grandfather and father in the face of the distortion of those ideals by the Caliphate. He faced down authoritarianism and injustice through the sacrifice of his own life. His act of altruism was in order to save Islam.

Ashura is celebrated across the world of Shia Islam, to the point that the ‘the vast majority of distinctly Shiite rituals are derived from the events that took place in the Battle of Karbala’ (Aghaile, 2005: 8; for a fuller account, see Aghaile, 2004). There are, however, nuances to the reading of this myth in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran. There, the focus is on the martyr as agent rather than victim. The latter trope figures more centrally in representations of martyrdom in Lebanon (where the Karbala myth is arguably even more assertive than in Iran – see Norton, 2005) and Palestine (Buckner and Khatib, 2014). In the Iranian case, the martyr is in charge of his or her destiny.

The Karbala myth came to have contemporary political significance in Iran in the 1970s, with the Shah portrayed as the tyrant (Yazid) and the revolutionary opposition as the tyrannised (Hossein). Karbala became ‘primarily a political message, anchored deeply in religious sentiment that yelled and clamoured and shrieked for salvation from tyranny …’ (Gruber, 2008a: 30). This political reinvigoration of the Karbala myth was espoused not simply by Islamist clerics opposing the Shah but also inspired secularists because of its call to social justice and national sovereignty. To stand up to the Shah might mean having to choose the path of martyrdom in the name of justice, just as Imam Hossein did. Karbala was not in the past but in the present. ‘During the revolutionary upheaval of 1978–9, as far as its participants were concerned, every month was Muharram; every procession became a demonstration; everywhere in Iran was Karbala’ (Chelkowski and Dabashi, 2000: 71).

At the same time, the Karbala paradigm handed a trump card to the clerics. They seized the opportunity to mark what emerged from the revolution as not just a republic, but an Islamic republic. While others might protest that they too shared the Shia ideals of justice, the clerics were ideally placed to monopolise the interpretation and propagation of the Karbala myth.

The war with Iraq (1980–1988) exacerbated the politicisation of Karbala. As hundreds of thousands of men went to their death, the message of the clerics was that they were defending not just the revolution, not just the nation, but the Shia faith itself. Karbala had come again; Saddam was the modern incarnation of Yazid. All were called upon to be martyrs. Furthermore, ‘Martyrdom was no longer a predominantly discursive phenomenon; rather, it was now incarnated in the flesh and blood of hundreds of thousands of Iranians’ (Talebi, 2012: 125). Again, as in the revolutionary heyday, ‘all battlefields were Karbala, all months were Muharram, and all days were Ashura’ (Gruber, 2008a: 30).

Thus, in the years leading up to the revolution and in the decade which followed, the Karbala myth proved a powerful mobilising tool in the hands of astute and powerful memory entrepreneurs. The leadership could demand great sacrifices from the people, even to the point of volunteer soldiers walking across Iraqi minefields in order to clear them for the regular army by stepping unprotected on the mines.

It is easy to dismiss the phenomenon as religious fanaticism. It is also possible to be highly cynical about the way in which the leadership has used the ‘systematic martyrdom that occurred during its eight year war with Iraq to maintain a permanent state of mass mobilization and to ward off criticism by presenting itself as the guardian of the honor and blood of martyrs’ (Dorraj, 1997: 519). Overall, the ‘cult of martyrdom’ could be dismissed as mass hysteria or religious indoctrination. At the same time, the message meshed with the recent popular experiences of the overthrow of the Shah, the threat to the revolution from Iraq and the death of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens. The prevalence of death was interpreted as martyrdom, that is, a ‘reward’ (Shirazi, 2012: 101), and as such was embraced, valorised, commemorated in speeches, songs, films, posters and monumental murals.

Murals and memories of martyrdom

‘Nowhere in the Islamic world … has there been a more deliberate and long-lasting effort at creating propaganda in visual form than in post-revolutionary Iran’ (Gruber, 2008a: 16). That memory work has focused on the official memory of the struggle to establish the Islamic Republic, through overthrowing the Shah and then the war with Iraq. Despite a conclusion in relation to other societies that ‘the way that public memorials seek to educate about the past is through the transfer of basic – often gruesome – information about victims’ (Bickford, 2014: 509), there are no graphic representations of war and death in the murals of Iran. Instead, the focus is almost exclusively on portraits of individual males who lost their lives in the Iran–Iraq War (Marzolph, 2003: 89). In point of fact, only a small proportion of the hundreds of thousands who died in that war have been immortalised on the walls; for example, although a significant number in itself, only 1400 martyrs have streets in Tehran renamed after them (Chelkowski and Dabashi, 2000: 121). Out of 33,000 Tehrani martyrs, only 140 are portrayed on the city’s walls (Karimi, 2008: 61). Often the murals consist of a simple portrait, not over-idealised, with often no more accompanying text than the martyr’s name. The representation would not be out of place in a family album (see Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Portraits of martyrs with accompanying names. (© Bill Rolston)

At times, there are clues given as to the martyr’s function – a pilot, a naval officer – without any details of the operations in which they were involved.

On rare occasions, the details of the martyr’s death are well known. For example, Muhammad Husayn Fahmida, a 13-year-old schoolboy, in 1981 strapped grenades to his body and crawled under an Iraqi tank to blow it up. He has been immortalised in posters (Gruber, 2009: 686–7), school books for primary school children (Chelkowski and Dabashi, 2000: 132) and murals (Gruber, 2008a: 31; see Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Muhammad Husayn Fahmida, the 13-year-old martyr of the Battle of Khorramshahr, 1981. (© Bill Rolston)

The martyr is not just an individual, but rather an individual instance of a collective phenomenon, linked on the one hand to a long tradition of martyrdom stretching back to Imam Hossein and on the other to more recent politics (see Deeb, 2008). Thus, it is not unusual for direct reference to be made to the Karbala story, for example, by juxtaposing the martyr’s portrait with a representation of the image of the veiled Imam Hossein (see Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

The martyr Seyyed Mujitaba Hashemi, a commander during the irregular wars in Kurdistan in 1985, and, top right, Imam Hossein on horseback. The accompanying caption states, ‘Our God, we send greetings to the Prophet and his family’. (© Bill Rolston)

On occasions, the seal of approval is given by the juxtaposition of one of the Supreme Leaders to date, Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei. The gaze of the Leader, either sombre or benign, thus confers a blessing not just on the mural but on the act of martyrdom itself.

Not all martyrs were military personnel: government ministers and functionaries were killed, either at the front or in attacks by oppositional forces within Iran. Various nuclear scientists have been assassinated in a campaign which the Iranian government blames on the Israeli secret service Mossad. Senior clerics such as Abbas Shirazi have died (see Figure 6), either at the front or in bomb attacks and also media personnel such as Seyyed Morteza Avini. All have been commemorated in murals.

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Figure 6.

Abbas Shirazi, Vice-President of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation, Commander of War Propaganda, cleric and martyr in the Iran–Iraq War, 1984. (© Bill Rolston)

Some died as the result of attacks by groups such as the Mojahedin-e Khalq. In June 1981, the Mojahedin killed 74 people in a bomb at the Islamic Republican Party headquarters. Among the dead was Ayatollah Beheshti, the head of the judiciary who is depicted in one mural. During 1981, the Mojahedin killed more than 1000 government officials (Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC), 2009). The conflict was far from one-sided. Many Mojahedin leaders were assassinated or exiled, and in 1988, an estimated 4500 to 5000 political prisoners were executed, many of them accused of being associated with the Mojahedin (Parvaresh, 1994).

Despite the intimate connection made between contemporary martyrdom and the battle of Karbala, direct representation of Karbala is rare in murals. One exception is a reproduction of Mahmoud Farshchian’s 1976 painting, ‘The Evening of Ashura’ (see Figure 2 above). This depicts the female relatives of Hossein along with children mourning his death and that of the others before themselves being taken captive and brought to Damascus. At the centre of the painting is Hossein’s riderless horse (Za’feranlou, 2012). There are however various oblique references to Karbala in murals, not least the use of the panjah symbol, a symbolic hand, the five digits of which represent the Prophet Mohammed, his daughter Fatima, his son-in-law Ali and his grandsons Hassan and Hossein (Gruber, 2012: 88; Rauh, 2013: 1323). Numerous other symbols appear in the murals which refer to martyrdom: the tulip (Ram, 2002: 96), the rose (Marzolph, 2003: 90) and birds (Chehabi and Christia, 2008: 13), especially doves (Fromanger, 2012: 54). Water is depicted, not simply because it is fundamental to life but because Imam Hossein’s contingent was refused access to water by the enemy (Marzolph, 2003: 91). There are also butterflies and moths (Gruber, 2013: 172), as well as candles (Gruber, 2013: 173). A number of these symbols derive from Persian poetry and Sufi mysticism.

There is one major exception to the rule that murals depict martyrs, that is, when they portray the Supreme Leaders, Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Representations of Ayatollah Khomeini outnumber those of Khamenei as befits his role as the architect and leader of the 1979 revolution. In one mural, based on a photograph of the Ayatollah when he was in exile in Neauphle-le-Chateau in France in 1978, Khomeini is shown walking, with eyes downcast, while the background displays the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the centre of the flag is the word ‘Allah’, and above and below it, the phrase ‘Allahu akbar – God is great’ occurs 22 times (see Figure 7). The number is significant. The anniversary of the 1979 revolution is celebrated on the 22nd day of the Iranian month of Bahman.

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Figure 7.

Ayatollah Khomeini with Iranian flag in background. (© Bill Rolston)

Despite the self-identification of many leaders of the 1979 Revolution, clerics included, with third-world liberation, there are remarkably few murals in Iran relating to other societies striving against colonialism, imperialism and repression (Chehabi and Christia, 2008: 7). The main exception is Palestine, but the prism through which it is viewed is that of Iran itself. Thus, while there is clearly an identification in the murals with the plight of fellow Muslims, at least as important have been the foreign policy needs of the Islamic Republic. Support for Palestine was ‘part of a larger bid to establish regional legitimacy and supremacy after the US-led invasions of its two neighbouring countries’ (Gruber, 2008a: 36), Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, ‘the liberation of Jerusalem was a mainstay of official rhetoric concerned with exporting the Islamic Revolution abroad’ (Gruber, 2008b: 177). This was captured in rhetoric concerning the Iran–Iraq war, where the liberation of the holy shrines of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq was represented as a step on the path to the liberation of Jerusalem. As Khomeini put it on one occasion, ‘the road to Jerusalem goes through Karbala’ (Gruber, 2008b: 171). References of solidarity with Palestine continue to appear in murals. One (see Figure 8) displays the Dome on the Rock in Jerusalem and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The accompanying text states, ‘Palestine is a piece of the heart of Islam’. One square in Tehran has been renamed Palestine Square and boasts a sculpture which includes a map of Palestine and a number of militant pro-Palestinian murals.

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Figure 8.

The Dome on the Rock in Jerusalem and statement from Ayatollah Khamenei (portrayed): ‘Palestine is a piece of the heart of Islam’. (© Bill Rolston)

While anti-Israeli murals were apparent at an earlier stage, this is not so currently. Even the quantity of anti-US murals has declined since the heyday, although the preponderance of such murals around the former US embassy in Tehran (the so-called ‘nest of spies’) remains. One of these murals juxtaposes anti-Americanism with another nest, that of doves being attacked by US rockets (see Figure 9).

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Figure 9.

Iranian soldier, and doves’ nest under attack from rockets fired from a US jet. (© Bill Rolston)

There is no reference in murals to struggles elsewhere in the Muslim world – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, despite the support of the Iranian state for Shia militants in a number of these places. However, one mural honours Khaled Eslamboli, the Egyptian army officer who assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981 and was executed in 1982 (see Figure 10). Regarded in Iran as a martyr, his image also appears at the entrance to Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery to the south of Tehran which contains the graves of thousands of martyrs from the Iran–Iraq war.

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Figure 10.

Khaled Eslamboli, Egyptian army officer who assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and was later executed. (© Bill Rolston)

Silences

There are some significant silences on the walls of Tehran. Representations of women are rare. In this light, the creation in 2006 of a section of the Shohada (Martyrs) Museum dedicated to women was significant if initially mystifying. Women did not share in military combat during the Iran–Iraq war, their only roles being those of nurses and other auxiliaries distant from the front line (Shirazi, 2012: 108). The women represented in the Museum are political activists who opposed the Shah, women who died in Iraqi bomb attacks and Palestinian suicide bombers (Shirazi, 2012: 111). For some commentators, this is viewed as ‘a clever, calculated strategy to demonstrate “equal and honourable” status for Iranian women in accordance with Islamic tradition … throwing a bone, so to speak, to equal rights for women …’ (Shirazi, 2012: 109).

There is only one female martyr displayed in Tehran, Fouzieh Shirdel, whose picture appears on a number of billboards. She is depicted with two men, all three being chosen as ‘martyrs of the year’. Shirdel was a nurse in a hospital in Paveh, a town in Iran’s Kurdistan province. In August 1980, the hospital was attacked by a militant group who were combating the newly formed Islamic government in Kurdistan. She refused to leave the patients under her care and was killed. ¹

The other major silence relates to the Green opposition. Many of the battles for political legitimacy waged in 2009 between the Green opposition and the state were fought out at the visual level. The Greens sought to reclaim symbolism which had been monopolised by the state. Their colour was green, the colour associated with the Prophet and with Islam, ² and they took every opportunity to display it through flags, banners, head scarves, arm bands, eye shadow, nail paint and so on (Fischer, 2010: 520). They repeated the slogans and practices of 1979, and often with identical repercussions. Protesters chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ from rooftops in the evenings as was also done during the revolution against the Shah, and as then, the state sought to ban the practice (Rauh, 2013: 1328). The Shah had banned Ashura ceremonies in 1979, and the Islamic Republic repeated this move by banning Ashura ceremonies at Khomeini’s tomb in 2009 (Yarbakhsh, 2014: 82).

‘[W]ords and gestures that for 30 years had sustained the political imagination of revolutionary Iran were redeployed in order to challenge the state by means of its own vocabulary’ (Yarbakhsh, 2014: 81). Thus, the Greens chanted ‘Down with the dictator’ instead of ‘Down with the Shah’; and instead of ‘Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic’, they shouted ‘Independence, Freedom, Iranian Republic’ (Rauh, 2013: 1333). They called for Ahmadinejad’s death and targeted the Supreme Leader: ‘Khamenei is a murderer, his leadership is invalid’. ³

The ability of the Greens to paint murals was severely restricted; however, they utilised walls in other ways, leaving bloody handprints or the letter V (denoting peace and freedom), painted in green. Sometimes they simply threw plastic bags filled with green paint against walls. Most of their painted slogans were short and unsophisticated, painted hastily for fear of discovery. This did not prevent the Basiji and other state functionaries expending a great deal of effort in erasing or amending the messages. ‘V = WC’ became a common scatological distortion; on other occasions, the V was converted into a Star of David. ⁴

The Greens’ strategy was to declare that they were not simply Iranian but Muslim too (Khatib, 2013: 107). More radically, they reclaimed the mantle of the 1979 revolution, arguing that it was they rather than the regime which was true to its ideals, echoing Hossein’s message that it was he, rather than Yazid, who remained true to the ideals of Islam. For the Greens, the parallels with Karbala were many. Thus, the regime’s killing of their supporters during Ashura ceremonies in 2009 was easily interpreted within the Karbala paradigm. As the regime killed and injured protesters on the streets, people left bloodstained handprints on the walls. In doing so, they recalled one of the important symbols of Shia Islam, the panjah.

To first appearances, it might seem strange that an opposition movement objecting to the capture of the revolution and state power by clerics should itself employ religious symbolism. Once again, this points to the deep significance of the Karbala myth for Shia faithful in general and Iranians in particular. Once more Karbala was everywhere; the protesters were victims facing the tyranny of the tyrant. In referencing Karbala and martyrdom, the Greens were making a claim to political legitimacy by denying the state the monopoly of religious symbolism (Rauh, 2013: 1339).

There has been a struggle in Iran over meaning, public memory and public representation before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which can be seen in areas such as cinema (Naficy, 2012) and public architecture (Grigor, 2009). The focus of this article, however, has been on how these issues have been expressed in public murals since the Revolution. There have been some shifts in relation to the number and form of murals and other public symbolism, but overall, there has been a rigid focus on the representation of martyrdom in the recent past, albeit tied into the martyrdom of Imam Hossein many centuries earlier. The state has been the source of this unidirectional public memory which allows almost no space for counter-memory. As a result, for all the visual ‘loudness’ of the murals of Tehran, there are also some powerful silences.

Conclusion: banality and reception

Visiting Tehran five years after Karimi’s (2008) remarks, I got a sense of the banality of the murals from the young adults I met; many seemed genuinely astonished when their attention was drawn by my interest that there were so many murals in Tehran. It was clear that when encouraged to comment on the murals, their position was a complex one; many seemed to reject the form but not the totality of the message of the murals. In terms of how the murals are received by the public, this is an insight which matches the findings of other researchers such as Gruber (2008a).

The propaganda work of the Iranian state has involved a sophisticated merging of a specific interpretation of Islam with an appropriation of political martyrdom. Memories of war have been utilised in the consolidation of elite power. The official memory represented in public memorialisation has not emerged from consultation or the partial incorporation of opposition interpretations, but from the victory of one narrative. Memory entrepreneurs have created a powerful state-friendly myth which simplifies the past and removes any sense of a dialectics of memory.

At the same time, it has to be stressed that the official narrative of the Iranian state has not been created out of nothing. It resonates with elements of popular culture, not least the memory of the dead of the Iran–Iraq war. From the beginning, the clerical leaders of the revolution in 1979 were concerned ‘to implant the seeds of an Islamic lifestyle in the minds of the new generation’ (Kazemipur and Goodarzi, 2009: 163). They were aided in that task by the sheer number of martyrs during the Iran–Iraq war. Keeping alive the memory of martyrs became ‘a continual mission of the state’ (Talebi, 2012: 123) during the 1980s. However, as the direct memory of those upheavals has declined, there has emerged evidence a ‘fading reverence’ (Talebi, 2012: 136) for murals, even martyr murals. That decline was most pronounced in relation to young people. Although still personally religious (Kazemipur and Goodarzi, 2009), many youths reject a state-sponsored approach which sees religion as political expedience (Kazemipur and Goodarzi, 2009: 172). Gruber (2008a: 45) found that ‘the majority of Iranians believe that it should remain a personal, rather than politicized act’ and that young people questioned consider ‘martyrial scenes particularly vulgar and distasteful, and also judge the theme of martyrdom as necrophilic, dépassé, and obstructive to the therapeutic act of moving onward to less sinister goals in life than seeking death’ Gruber (2013: 17).

In a situation where the revolution has been well and truly established, there is no ongoing war with a neighbouring state, the internal opposition has been neutralised and even relationships with the old enemy, the United States, seemed to be mellowing under President Obama, it became more difficult to play the Karbala card. And yet that is precisely what the martyr murals continued to do. In the face of rejection of or unease with the murals, the state response was not to seek an alternative form of hegemony, but rather to, as it were, ‘turn up the volume’ of the old message of martyrs. The martyr murals ‘are specifically targeting a younger generation that experienced neither revolution nor war’ (Gruber, 2008a: 33). In this sense, the purpose of the murals remains what it has always been. But there is a wider and more urgent need, the need for state legitimacy in the face of an element of popular rejection or indifference. For the state, now, more than ever, ‘keeping its martyrs in the eye of the public is tied up with its need to maintain its own legitimacy …’ (Talebi, 2012: 138).

Recent years have witnessed a slight relaxation with the sponsorship of beautification murals by the Tehran municipality. The themes of these murals frequently do not touch on politics, and even those which do so are softer than before. For example, the martyr, if portrayed at all, ‘is not depicted as a brave young man in battle but rather as a mystical bird’ (Karimi, 2008: 13; see Figure 11). At the same time, the beautification murals cannot stray too far from the orthodoxies of the state in public space. More significantly, public space reveals nothing of the subaltern memories which may be preserved in more private spaces through oral accounts and other means. Beautification murals notwithstanding, opening up the walls of Tehran to a multiplicity of voices is a project which awaits wider political developments.

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Figure 11.

Beautification mural, with the martyr represented as an angel. (© Bill Rolston)