Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This article explores how provincial Iranian laymen and officials who support the regime (here, Basijis) mobilize the bodies and blood of martyrs to sacralize the national landscape in Post‐Revolutionary Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a powerful cohort of religious scholars and everyday citizens has emphasized the need to (re)generate the authentically Islamic interior of the nation while resisting an immoral, “Westernstruck” exterior. A significant part of this sacred defense against Western cultural invasion has been the exhumation of bodies of Iran‐Iraq War (1980‐88) martyrs from the battlefront for reburial and commemoration at sites across the national landscape. This article, based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the Fars Province of Iran, investigates these ongoing practices of reburying and memorializing martyrs. I argue that the exhumations and reburials of martyrs are strategic religious practices that organize the bodies of Iranian subjects around key reference points, specifically the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala, the 1979 Revolution, and the Iran‐Iraq War. In addition, I show how acts of commemorating martyrs emphasize the sacrificial blood of male citizens, a bodily substance that draws further symbolic efficacy from its associations with the life‐giving blood of kinship. This is the first ethnographic account of how martyrs are interred and commemorated in provincial Iran.</jats:p>