'Martyr families': Iran's last war leaves bitter legacy

My 23-year-old cousin, Ali, newly married and the father of a two-month-old baby, was killed in the Iran-Iraq war in 1985. From that moment, everything in my uncle’s family changed.

As talk of another war grips the nation, the devastating legacy of the Islamic Republic's defining conflict casts a long shadow.

Before Ali’s death, my female cousins, his sisters, were the main supplier of pop music in our extended family, duplicating cassette tapes that were banned by the ever-encroaching Islamic rules. They were good dancers too, showing us younger ones how to shake hands and bottoms in tandem.

And then their brother, my cousin, died—martyred, in their words. Overnight, they became observant Muslims. They had to. They all adopted the chador, the black cloth covering all but a woman’s face. My cousin’s 21-year-old widow also joined the ranks of women in black, absorbed into a new world of mourning and restriction.

A year later, one of my cousins, the martyr’s younger sister, got married. She had a wedding only in name. There was no dancing, no music, no clapping or loud cheering.

This transformation was common among families who lost loved ones in the war. The Islamic Republic, having cemented its rule after the revolution, framed the war as a religious not a national affair.

The Sacred Defense, it was called - a holy struggle to preserve Islam.

Those killed in the war had given their lives for their faith, the state propaganda went. So for their family to turn away from that faith would be to dishonour their memory and blood.

The martyrs were glorified by the state, not as national heroes but as loyal servants of the faith and its embodiment, Ayatollah Khomeini. As such, their families received benefits—monthly stipends, housing assistance, government jobs, university admissions quotas.

In a country racked by war, poverty, and cutthroat competition for higher education, these privileges created a rift between martyr families and the rest of society.

Atefeh, Ali’s daughter, was born two months after her father got killed. She is 40 now, recalling her life as a martyr’s daughter, a life she had never chosen.

“I never saw my father, but his shadow fashioned my life,” Atefeh says. “The pressure was too much for little children like me. They kept telling us we had to honor his sacrifice and follow our fathers’ or brothers’ path. What was their path, though, I wonder. My dad’s wasn’t Islam, for sure, if the few pictures we have of him are any clue.”

Atefeh attended one of the many Shahed schools, established for the children of martyrs. She says she always wanted to attend a regular school and blend in. But she was constantly reminded that she had to be a role model because of her father—that she was obligated to be ‘modest’: to wear long and loose clothes, avoid boys, shun fashion, close her ears to music and open instead to the words of God, the Quran.

“Sometimes, I hated my father and the fact that we were part of a martyr’s family,” she says.

As she grew, Atefeh fought harder with her mother and managed to convince her to go to a regular high school. She wanted to be ‘normal’, as she puts it. She tried to hide her father’s fate even. But it wasn’t that easy.

“Being a martyr’s daughter meant people saw me a certain way before even meeting me,” Atefeh says. “Other girls at school assumed I was religious and had no interest in the things they enjoyed. It was an Ugly Duckling kind of situation.”

On the other side, the authorities at school scolded her for not being strict enough, constantly reminding her that her father had died for the hijab and she had to have a proper one.

“But nowhere in my father’s will did he mention the hijab,” Atefeh says with a bitterness that comes off a long, dulled anger. “That was just a lie, or a gross exaggeration at the very least, by the government, to claim that martyrs prioritized women’s veiling.”

Because of the pressures she endured growing up, Atifeh refused to use the university admissions quota for martyr families. She didn’t want the privilege, but others assumed she had taken the spot of a more qualified student. She rarely had the opportunity to explain herself.

As public resentment toward the government grew, so did hostility toward martyr families. Many saw them as symbols of the regime, beneficiaries of an unjust system.

Some children of high-profile martyrs have tried to distance themselves from the government in recent years, openly criticizing its actions. But the state has so thoroughly co-opted the image of martyrdom that shedding the label is nearly impossible.

In February, when a group of Iran-Iraq war veterans and commanders announced plans to protest the 15-year house arrest of war-time prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard, they were detained—and the public barely reacted.

Atefeh has been an outspoken critic of Iran’s ruler for quite a while. She despises them and ‘their martyr enterprise‘ as she puts it.

“I never say or write that I am a martyr’s daughter when I criticize the government because even that feels like an unearned privilege,” she says.

Over the years, my female cousins fought to remove their chadors, and more recently, their headscarves. It took decades for Atefeh and her aunts to reclaim even minimal personal freedoms and shape their own lives.

But changing public perception has proved almost impossible.

Iranians—a vast majority at least—are angry with their near-half-century-old theocratic rule. They are fed up with everything it stands for and promotes, including the "martyr enterprise" in Atefeh’s words.

“It’s hard to blame people for lumping together martyr families and the Islamic Republic,” she says. “Many deserve it for becoming part of the system or shutting up to gain something. But some gained nothing and are stigmatised nonetheless. It’s all fair perhaps, but it’s painful too.”