Diary: At the Martyrs’ Museum
Roxanne Varzi, 8 March 2007
No one was guarding the gates to the grounds of the Imamzadeh Ali Akbar Cheezari in Tehran, where the son of the Imam Zayn al-Abedin is interred, the first time I visited, in 2000. The mausoleum now stands in a cemetery where hundreds of martyrs of the war with Iraq are buried.
The war institutionalised martyrdom. For the Iranians who volunteered to fight, the Iran-Iraq war, like the battle...