ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall focus on the significance of women's public rituals and symbols involving death (see also Chapter 6) and the way in which rituals involving death have been politicised under the Islamic Republic. The Islamic state requested various rituals to be offered to the deaths of those characterised as 'martyrs' and as political conspirators (monafeqin) since the Iranian revolution in 1979. The local and state positions involve divergent ideas about the religio-political meaning of death and its social consequences.
