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The Morgue Is Karbala, Mourning in Each Other’s Skin. Part III: Sideways Belonging

In the last part of her contribution, Mina Khanlarzadeh turns to the vernacular infrastructures through which grief travels sideways into regional mother tongues and vernacular repertoires, where belonging is rebuilt under pressure.

As Parts I and II have shown, inherited political idioms in Iran have become unreliable under the weight of state violence. Grief and refusal have therefore been rerouted into the body and, as Part III argues, into vernacular repertoires.

Wie Teil I und II zeigen, haben sich herkömmliche politische Redewendungen im Iran unter dem Druck staatlicher Gewalt als unzuverlässig erwiesen. Trauer und Verweigerung werden stattdessen durch den Körper kanalisiert und, wie in Teil III dargelegt wird, durch neue umgangssprachliche Redewendungen.


When protesters were killed on January 8 and 9, 2026, the public pointedly refused the state’s lexicon and did not call them shaheed (martyr). That displacement became even clearer in late February, when the Supreme Leader was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike and officially declared a shaheed by state media, confirming what the earlier refusal had already announced: that the word had become the establishment’s property. In many recent commemorations, those killed by the state are called jāvid-nām (everlasting name), farzand-e mihan (child of the homeland), or jān-fadā-ye mihan (one who gave their life for the homeland) instead of shaheed—a word many now feel has been captured by the state and by the founding narrative through which the Islamic Republic legitimized itself. At first glance, the turn toward mihan (homeland) can look like a simple secular-national substitution. Yet one strand of this reorientation—sharpened during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement after the killing of the Kurdish woman Jina Amini—reimagines national community laterally, through vernacular voices and mother tongues.

“Az khun-e javānān-e vatan lāleh damide” by Ashakn Goodarzi, January 2026.

The auditory life of this vernacular polyphony appears in the way music now travels across regional lines. Grief widens to include the pain of different ethnic and linguistic communities, and what the state’s nationalist imaginary once treated as regional becomes part of a shared soundscape. The Lori song “Dāya Dāya,” often linked in oral histories to resistance in Lorestan during World War I, is being resung and remixed across genres; Kurdish laments, Lori mourning rhythms and dance traditions long treated as peripheral now move to the center of public mourning. A Mazandarani dance song, “Dele Dige,” once danced at parties by many who would later be killed in the protests, now returns at their funerals as the sound accompanying grieving families across Iran. The archive widens beyond regional repertoires to older and once-policed popular songs. The early twentieth-century constitutional-era anthem “Az khun-e javānān-e vatan lāleh damide” (Tulips rise from the blood of the nation’s youth) resurfaces, as it has whenever young people are killed, and the songs of the exiled singer Dariush—now reworked by a new generation of hip hop and popular musicians—are taken up again. In this widened archive, classed hierarchies of taste are rearranged: repertoires once dismissed as too popular or unfancy become shared vocabularies of belonging and loss. What returns is not nostalgia but usable material—music that once lived in taxis and private spaces, kept outside political or cultivated public culture, now heard in new juxtapositions that make audible a changed vernacular soundscape of opposition.

This expanded archive includes newer forms of vernacular performance such as rap. The rapper Bacheh Lur (“Lur kid,” invoking Luri identity), in a video posted to Instagram in January 2026, covers his face with a scarf associated with Kurdish and Luri dress and situates himself in Khorramabad: “the mountains are tall and the valleys are deep; be careful not to fall, all of you together.” From within that swaggering warning to the state and its forces, he also names the pain of the city as inseparable from his own: “These are the pains of my city, as wide as my heart.” He recasts gharbzadegi (West-struckness) as ghamzadegi (grief-struckness): “bro calls me gharbzadeh [West-struck]; I myself have become ghamzadeh [grief-struck].” If gharbzadegi named, in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s influential 1960s critique, a condition of alienated and imitative modernity, then this reformulation suggests that inherited idioms of social diagnosis have lost much of their explanatory grip and that grief now names the truer mark of the present.[1] Yet this grief is articulated from the mountainous world of Khorramabad, through a register in which local landscape, wounded attachment, swagger, masking, and vernacular visual codes make sorrow and defiance audible at once. The song closes with his certainty that one day he will be arrested for his singing. Defiance and its cost are held in the same breath, and when words give out, he ends the song with a scream.

Screenshots from Bacheh Lor’s Instagram video, January 2026.

What this widened archive reveals is a shift in how national belonging is being imagined. If a nation is, in Benedict Anderson’s sense, an “imagined community,” then what matters here is the way shared belonging is being reconstituted through vernacular forms rather than through the state’s sacralized script.[2] Within strands of opposition, grief travels sideways: a stranger killed by the state becomes someone I come to know through the particular forms in which their loss is carried, whether in a family’s ritual, a vernacular song, or a mother tongue. National belonging is thus practiced across difference, preserving distance even as relation is forged. In Bakhtin’s terms, the state’s centripetal drive toward a unitary official language is interrupted by the centrifugal force of socially distinct voices, idioms, and speech worlds within a single language.[3] Some of those voices are ones the government can neither speak nor claim as its own.

This vernacular reclaiming extends beyond melody and into the street’s own language, where rejection of the Islamic Republic is increasingly voiced through a profane lexicon. Since the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, chants have circulated that use explicit curse words, insult the nāmus (honor) of officials—most often the former Supreme Leader and his office—or crudely desecrate state symbols. This lexicon ranges from culinary satire to explicitly sexualized insult, often mobilizing inherited traces of patriarchy against the state’s claims to sanctity. Its force is therefore double: it profanes the regime’s sacred self-presentation, but does so by drawing on codes in which the degradation of female kin becomes the medium of humiliation. In this context, profanity functions as an immediate weapon, valued for speed, force, and collective cadence; it strips the regime of the reverence on which its authority depends. Banned words return the way banned songs do, as collective public repertoire. A regime that claims sacred authority is dragged down into the dirt of the street, even as those forms of insult remain entangled with the very patriarchy many many protesters seek to undo.

The state’s reaction to this tonal rupture clarifies what is at stake for its self-presentation as sacred authority. In a widely circulated response, the pro-regime speaker Hesamuddin Haerizadeh describes Women, Life, Freedom movement as the moment when “fohsh sho’ār shod”—when obscene cursing became a protest slogan—chanted collectively and amplified online. He lingers on the fact that it surfaced at Sharif University of Technology, among students widely known as nokhbeh—the country’s top STEM talents—and treats that detail as proof that a line had been crossed in public life. He recodes this profane register as a civilizational threat, pairing fohsh (obscene cursing) with fahshā (sexual indecency) and naming both as pornocracy: the rule of base desire over sacred order. Citing Usul al-Kafi, he casts fohsh as shamelessness (bi-haya’i) and even as “partnership with Satan.” In this frame, the chant becomes evidence of corruption at the level of origin and lineage—a failure of “purity of lineage” (tahārat-e nasab)—so that profanity appears as a symptom rather than as politics. By recasting the political chant as a symptom of tainted lineage, the state attempts to move the conflict out of the realm of grievance and into that of pathology, rendering the protester not a citizen but a corruption to be purged.

Re-singing a regional song, taking up a banned popular archive, or chanting in a profane register becomes a way of reclaiming a home the state can no longer credibly narrate as its own. Families keep their children’s deaths from being absorbed into the state’s narrative by mourning in their own idioms, while strangers take up those forms as a shared claim without erasing the differences that shape them. That plurality is the force of the moment, even as it remains exposed to renewed projects of homogeneity—whether through state repression or through reactive nationalism within the opposition, which welcomes vernacular culture only when its political claims are muted. The turn to the vernacular is thus more than a cultural shift: it is a tactical evacuation of a contaminated linguistic order. What emerges from that evacuation is a home reclaimed from the ruins of a poisoned language, but one still pressed on multiple sides by violence and the costs of refusal.


1: Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (Weststruckness), trans. John Green and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1982).

2: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6–7.

3: M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 270–272.


Mina Khanlarzadeh is a historian and visiting faculty member at Deep Springs College in California. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her research focuses on modern intellectual and cultural history and the history of science, with a particular focus on the Middle East. In 2025 she was a Value of the Past Fellow at ZfL Berlin.


Title image: “A greeting to those who have stayed close to us in our dreams for forty days, though distant when we are awake.” Calligraphy by Sina Afshar, January 2026.

All images in this contribution are shared here with consent of the creators.

The Morgue Is Karbala, Mourning in Each Other’s Skin. Part II: The Kinetic Testimony

Given the unreliability of inherited idioms, political grief migrates into embodied and vernacular forms. In this part, Mina Khanlarzadeh follows that movement into rhythm and the body.

When the state saturates inherited words with the memory of its violence, those words become unreliable as public idioms of grief and resistance. Part I traced that damage at the level of inherited idioms; Part II follows its rerouting into the body, through which grief is carried and made public.

Wenn der Staat lang überlieferten Begriffen durch seine Gewalt eine andere Erinnerung einschreibt, verlieren diese Worte ihre Eignung als öffentliche Ausdrucksformen der Trauer und des Widerstands. Teil I hat diesen Verlust auf der Ebene der Ausdrucksformen nachgezeichnet; Teil II verfolgt die Umleitung in die Körper, durch die Trauer transportiert und öffentlich gemacht wird.


At the funerals of protesters killed by the state during the January 2026 uprising, mourners gathered at gravesides and turned to bodily gesture: they danced, clapped, ululated, and played music in a space where sorrow and Qur’anic recitation were expected. The street had already made the body the primary ground of confrontation, as protesters advanced against armed forces with nothing but their bodies. At the graveside, it became the medium through which grief was carried when inherited idioms had failed and public mourning had to proceed under threat and surveillance. In March 2026, on the last Thursday of the Iranian year, mourners gathered at Sepehr Shokri’s graveside to commemorate Sepehr, who had been killed during the January 2026 protests. Facing threats of further violence from state forces, his mother cried out: “You have weapons; my son only had a chest. He came forward with his chest alone.” Her subsequent declaration—“we have nothing left to lose”—names a condition in which state violence and absolute dispossession leave the bare body as the final ground of confrontation. Arman Gorjian’s father names a related dispossession at his son’s graveside: “We have reached absolute poverty. We doubt your Islam… I had seen dance ceremonies, but I had never seen a mother dance at the grave of her dead child.” His phrasing links two shifts: the dispossession of inherited idioms, as the state’s Islam no longer functions as a credible language of resistance, and the emergence of an unprecedented bodily grammar of grief. For both parents, what remains is not joy but a condition of absolute poverty. In one scene, the poverty appears as the body stripped to exposure; in the other, as language stripped of credibility.

Taha Soleimani’s funeral shows what this “absolute poverty” sounds like when language itself gives out. Taha Soleimani had been missing for twenty days after his arrest. When his family finally received his body, it bore the marks of torture. He was dead. His uncle begins to speak—“my nephew was lost”—but as he tries to continue, to name what has happened, he runs out of words. He falls into a thick, suffocating silence. He raises his hands and asks those around him to clap. They begin at once, together, as if the cue were already familiar. The clapping breaks the silence and gives it a pulse. Grief becomes collective without a slogan. Rhythm here is not joy but kinetic testimony.

Taha Soleimani’s funeral

Several commentators have read the dancing and clapping at the funerals of protesters killed by the state as soog-e shad or joyous mourning. Nahid Siamdoust, for instance, frames them as an extension of the “affective politics of joy” she traces in Iran’s alternative public sphere. In her reading, because women’s public dancing in streets and buses previously formed “joyous counterpublics,” the funeral dances must arise from that same genealogy. But this commits a category error: it treats resemblance in gesture as proof of shared intent. A dance on a bus and a mother’s movement at her child’s grave may resemble one another in form, but they are not the same act. One is an elective claim to visibility; the other is an embodied testimony unfolding in a space saturated by loss and surveillance. The “joy” frame rests on an assumption of expressive abundance—a sudden, self-assertive break into visibility—yet these funerary gestures emerge not from surplus but from scarcity and devastation.

If Taha Soleimani’s funeral shows how rhythm fills the space where language breaks down, Arshia Barari’s shows the bodily cost of that shift. His mother dances and suddenly collapses, a gesture grief alone might produce, but one that carries more weight here. The body is being asked to bear more than grief alone: catastrophic loss, refusal of the state’s script, and the burden of making that refusal publicly legible. The collapse registers a limit, a point at which the body, made into a medium, can no longer bear all that is being asked of it.

Arshia Barari’s funeral

This embodied shift is at times strategic. At the chehelom (fortieth-day commemoration) of Sepehr Shokri, a family member asked the crowd to stop chanting political slogans. The threat was clear: if the chanting continued, security forces would return and smash the gravestone. In place of slogans, he redirected grief into sound, urging mourners to clap and perform kel zadan, the high-pitched ululation often reserved for weddings. Rhythm here is a rerouting produced under coercion, a way to keep mourning public without handing the state material it can seize and punish.

These funeral gestures do not replace older idioms of mourning. In a widely circulated clip, at the chehelom of Ilya Ojaqlou, his mother dances and then, mid-motion, breaks into matam-like self-striking, an embodied form of Shi’i mourning lament. Her body buckles and others rush to hold her up. The abrupt pivot shows that dance and matam can coexist in the same body, in the same moment, blocking any easy reading of the dance as joy. In another viral video from the chehelom commemoration of Hesam Asivand in Lali, Khuzestan, mourners perform sineh-zani, the rhythmic chest-striking associated with Shiʿi mourning for Hossein, for Hesam. As a male relative strikes his chest with increasing intensity, his body lurches and sways until he nearly collapses, and another mourner steps in to hold him. Mourning for Hossein and mourning for the present dead converge here at the level of gesture. Karbala returns here as an embodied grammar of grief: the hand no longer keeps time with a distant sacred story alone, but registers the pain of a contemporary crime. In repurposing sineh-zani for those killed by the state, mourners turn a sacred repertoire long claimed by the establishment against the establishment itself.

At Rostam Mobarakabadi’s chehelom. Screenshots by author.

At Rostam Mobarakabadi’s February 2026 chehelom, the graveside becomes a site where disparate idioms of mourning are recomposed into a vernacular ritual language. Rostam’s mother holds his portrait high, her steady posture giving the image a public bearing. Together, body and photograph testify to her son’s life ended by state violence. Beside her, a female relative keeps time with a gesture that sits in the tense middle ground between dast zadan (clapping) and matam, weighted by a downward beat that echoes sineh-zani without becoming it. She claps with a heavy, percussive force, a pulse drawn inward toward the heart rather than outward in celebration. The murdered son’s name is Rostam, invoking the hero of the Shahnameh, and the anthem sung at the graveside calls up Kaveh the Blacksmith against Zahhak, the tyrant of Persian epic. The scene does not belong to a single tradition; it is a vernacular synthesis in which Shiʿi cadence, dance, and the Shahnameh’s mythic register layer without resolving their tension. By casting the street as a “trench” and the present ruler as Zahhak, the lyrics draw on an epic vocabulary of revolt to name injustice and commemorate the dead without returning to the state’s idiom.

Taken at face value, testamentary requests for music, dancing, and joy can mislead. Mehrzad Nazari, killed during the January 2026 protests, wrote in his will that his family should abstain from crying, mourning rituals, Qur’an recitation, and prayer, and instead play music and remain joyful. Before his execution during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, Majid Reza Rahnavard similarly asked that his funeral be marked not by sorrow but by dancing and happiness. The “joyous mourning” reading folds such requests too quickly into a narrative of affective rupture. The problem is methodological: by taking these requests at face value, Siamdoust’s reading approaches these funerals through a prior thesis—an “affective politics of joy”—so that the archive of funerary videos can only confirm what the framework has already rendered legible. The result is an erasure: by gathering these heterogeneous practices into a single story of “joyous” renewal, the framework obscures the coercion, devastation, and “absolute poverty” that pressure these bodies into motion.

What recurs across these scenes is not a single logic of rupture and refounding but a pressured recomposition. The Lur tradition of dancing at funerals is itself a mourning custom, not a joy tradition. Nor do these scenes resolve into the “authentic Persian culture” against state-imposed Islamic culture that the framework assumes: sineh-zani returns as an embodied Shiʿi repertoire, and Rostam Mobarakabadi’s chehelom layers Shiʿi cadence, Shahnameh epic, embodied gesture, and protest poetics without privileging any single tradition. Under duress, regional mourning customs, inherited sacred repertoires, and embodied improvisation are brought into proximity by loss, generating fragments of new political idioms assembled unevenly. If anything links these disparate acts, it is the condition named by Arman Gorjian’s father: “absolute poverty,” in which mourning and refusal must work with whatever remains.

But the body is not grief’s only medium. Part III turns to the vernacular infrastructures through which grief travels sideways into regional mother tongues and vernacular repertoires, where belonging is rebuilt under pressure.


Mina Khanlarzadeh is a historian and visiting faculty member at Deep Springs College in California. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her research focuses on modern intellectual and cultural history and the history of science, with a particular focus on the Middle East. In 2025 she was a Value of the Past Fellow at ZfL Berlin.


Title image: Grieving figures dance, embrace the dead, cut their hair, and play music in acts of embodied mourning. Illustration by Farinaz Soleimani, January 2026.

All images in this contribution are shared here with consent of the creators.

The Morgue Is Karbala, Mourning in Each Other’s Skin. Part I: The Lexicon in Exile

In the first part of her contribution, Mina Khanlarzadeh examines the Karbala narrative— the Shiʿi story of Hossein’s martyrdom, which for decades served as a public grammar for naming injustice in Iranian political culture.

In the aftermath of the January 2026 massacres in Iran, this blog contribution asks how grief and political refusal find a voice when inherited idioms can no longer be fully trusted.

Vor dem Hintergrund der Massaker im Iran im Januar 2026 geht dieser Blogbeitrag der Frage nach, wie Trauer und politischer Widerstand Ausdruck finden können, wenn man den überlieferten Sprachgewohnheiten nicht mehr uneingeschränkt vertrauen kann.


Author’s note: This blog contribution was substantially completed before the late-February 2026 U.S.–Israeli war against Iran. Its archive focuses on the January 2026 killings and the commemorative practices that emerged in their immediate aftermath, and it does not engage with the war or what followed from it.


In the aftermath of the January 2026 massacres in Iran, I kept returning to the way people reached for words and found the old ones no longer fit. Since the 2009 Green Movement, expanding state violence and unmet demands have produced not only anger, but a deep repulsion toward the world the state has built—its rituals, imagery, and inherited idioms. As the state repeatedly captures those forms and saturates them with the memory of its violence, shared political vocabularies have become unreliable. This blog contribution asks how grief and political refusal find a voice when inherited idioms can no longer be fully trusted. To pursue that question, I turn to the Karbala narrative—the Shiʿi story of Hossein’s martyrdom, which for decades served as a public grammar for naming injustice in Iranian political culture.

For decades, the story of Hossein—the third Shiʿi Imam—served as Iranian society’s public grammar for naming injustice. Hossein refused to pledge loyalty to Yazid, the Umayyad ruler, and was surrounded and killed in Karbala; his death became the central Shiʿi story of shahādat (martyrdom). In the years leading to the 1979 Revolution, Karbala circulated as a widely legible idiom of resistance. The pre-revolutionary Iranian thinker Ali Shariati crystallized this by distinguishing between a “Red Shiʿism” of protest and a “Black Shiʿism” of state ritual, in which mourning for Hossein is absorbed into institutional order. In 1974, the Marxist poet Khosrow Golsorkhi identified himself with Hossein before a military tribunal, casting the Shah’s court as Yazid’s tyranny (see section 7). These episodes show that Karbala could function as a shared political language even for the nonreligious.

After the Revolution, the Islamic Republic claimed Karbala as official property, and after 2009 that capture made the idiom increasingly unreliable as a shared language of refusal. As former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei put it in 2013, “Military war, intellectual war, spiritual war, social war: the combination of these is called mujāhadat [struggle]. Whoever is devoted to Imam Hossein is devoted to political Islam… Islam is muqātila [combat].” In official discourse, attachment to Hossein is thereby fused to a condition of permanent struggle. In February 2026, in his final public address, Khamenei invoked Hossein’s declaration at Karbala—“someone like me does not pledge allegiance to someone like Yazid”—conscripting the sacred grammar of resistance into the state’s confrontation with the United States. After his death, state media declared him shaheed, saying he would be gathered in the hereafter with Hossein. The state’s Islam invokes familiar idioms, which is precisely what makes this capture so dispossessing.

When Karbala is invoked by those who kill, its vocabulary can no longer serve unambiguously as a grammar of resistance. In a recent video, the sister of Reza Naseri, who was killed in June 2025 by the state’s paramilitary Basiji forces, sits beside his grave and says: “My brother was killed by someone who goes on pilgrimage to Karbala every month, who constantly invokes the name of Hossein.” Under such conditions, symbolic abandonment is not always a sign of total rejection of faith; it can also be a refusal to inhabit a political vocabulary now compromised by its association with violence.

The rupture also surfaces in mourning rituals for people. In one account, as mourners stood to recite namāz-e mayyit, the traditional prayer for the dead, a veiled aunt shouted: “Don’t pray… There is no God… my son… his stature… his big colored eyes… he was 23 when they killed him… don’t pray, there is no God.” The accompanying line—Sūg-ash az īmān obūr kard-e būd—is stark: her grief had passed through faith, and faith could no longer hold it. In many such funerals, the dead were buried without Islamic prayers, their send-off carried instead by greetings and slogans. Even ritual had become unevenly inhabitable.

Portrait of Sepehr Shokri, by Aylene Fallah, from the Javidnam series, 2026.

When Sepehr Shokri’s father wanders through the morgue to find his son, he calls out, Sepehr-e bābā, kojāyi? (Daddy’s own Sepehr, where are you?) and Bābā Sepehr (Daddy Sepehr). In the emotional grammar of Persian, calling the child bābā collapses the distance between parent and child, making the father’s own sense of self inseparable from his son. His kojāyi? is both lament and protest, naming the violence that has imposed an absolute absence where a beloved should be. In the cold of the morgue, with nameless bodies stacked on the floor and labeled “rioters” or “foreign agents,” this familial language becomes an authoritative register for naming injustice and refusing the state’s final word on who his son was. Yet if Karbala has become unreliable as a vocabulary of resistance, devastation can still force its return. As Sepehr’s father passes among the bodies, he cries, “Karbala injāst, mardom” (Karbala is here, people). In that cry, sacred ground is relocated from the state’s staged rituals to the cold floor of the morgue. Unlike Shariati’s “Red Shiʿism,” this is not a political program but an unscripted reflex, a fragment of an older idiom returning under pressure.

Screenshots from Shahmir’s rap clip, provided by the author.

A rap song by Shahmir, circulating on Instagram in February 2026, invokes Sepehr’s father: “Nonstop, his voice echoes in my head, asking where Sepehr-e bābā is.” The artist then names the consequence of this grief: “Tasuʿā and Ashura”—the two peak days of ritual mourning for Hossein—“no longer have meaning.” In declaring those days meaningless, Shahmir suggests that the inherited religious frame has been overtaken by the present. He re-pins grief to the specific dates of recent state killings: “18 and 19 Dey [January 8–9, 2026] have become tāsiān and dāghiyān.” By displacing Tasuʿā and Ashura with these Gilaki terms, Shahmir reroutes grief away from a distrusted religious idiom and into vernacular speech. Tāsiān names the hollow cold of a home emptied by loss; dāghiyān names a restless, burning agitation. As Gilaki is tied to Gilan, these words, paired with the allusion to burning, gesture toward the violence and fire in Rasht’s bazaar. In this new chronology, the inherited calendar loses its authority, unable to contain the magnitude of the present. What follows is not the disappearance of the sacred, but its dispersal: the inherited idiom splinters into a plurality of vernacular names, times, and languages.

Nehayat Rahimi’s chehelom.

At the chehelom (the fortieth-day mourning commemoration) of Nehayat Rahimi in February 2026, her mother adopts the physical grammar of a taʿziyeh (a ritual play centered on Hossein’s martyrdom), pacing in circles with her daughter’s photograph. She begins by invoking the foundational treachery of Shiʿi memory—Imam Ali struck from behind by Ibn Muljam—only to subvert it. Because Nehayat, too, was attacked from behind by the state’s security forces in Gorgan’s Kaj Square, her mother declares, “Compared to Ibn Muljam, you are the coward,” recasting those forces through a foundational scene of Shiʿi betrayal. “Who is the Yazid of this era? The ones who martyred and turned forty thousand dead into everlasting ones.” She then reassigns Karbala’s coordinates: the sahrā-ye Karbala (desert of Karbala) is no longer a distant site, but the pavement of Kaj Square, just as Tasuʿā and Ashura are reattached to the dates of the 2026 killings. This is not an isolated gesture. Other bereaved mothers, such as Kamelia Sajadian, whose son, Mohammad Hassan Torkaman, was killed during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, similarly reattach Ashura and Karbala to the time and place of their children’s deaths, prying the idiom from state custody and turning it into a vernacular geography of loss.

What this archive reveals is not the disappearance of Karbala, but the damage done to it as a public idiom. Victor Klemperer’s account of poisoned language helps explain how states damage public language from within, as ideology enters everyday speech through repetition until words begin to carry the force of the state’s violence. Like the “tiny doses of arsenic” he describes, swallowed unnoticed until a toxic reaction sets in, poisoned words eventually come to feel dangerous to use.[1] In contemporary Iran, the inherited idiom of Karbala as resistance and refusal has been marked by the memory of state violence and absorbed into the state’s ritual theater. Yet damaged idioms do not simply disappear. At times, people refuse them, as when families reject the namāz-e mayyit and instead send off their dead with slogans. At other times, they displace them, as when Shahmir replaces the inherited sacred peaks of Tasuʿā and Ashura with the vernacular of tāsiān and dāghiyān. In Bakhtinian terms, these acts reconfigure Karbala’s chronotope: the fused time-space that determines, in narrative, what happens, where, and to whom. Borrowed from physics and adapted to literature, the chronotope names the way time and space are bound together in narrative form.[2] In this archive, the chronotope helps clarify how shifting these coordinates makes their suffering narratable and their dead nameable. By relocating Karbala from inherited ritual settings to the morgues, pavements, and graves of the present, and from liturgical recurrence to the dates of state killing, the bereaved pull the sacred into the immediate reality of their own lives. They decide anew when Karbala happens, where it unfolds, and who—in the face of the state’s dehumanizing labels—has the final right to name its dead. Yet given the unreliability of inherited idioms, political grief also migrates into embodied and vernacular forms—not as a retreat from language, but as its reinvention. Part II follows that movement into rhythm and the body; Part III follows it into the vernacular infrastructures through which belonging is rebuilt.


[1]: Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 15–16.

[2]: Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–85.


Mina Khanlarzadeh is a historian and visiting faculty member at Deep Springs College in California. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her research focuses on modern intellectual and cultural history and the history of science, with a particular focus on the Middle East. In 2025 she was a Value of the Past Fellow at ZfL Berlin.


Title image: “Sepehr-e bābā” (“Daddy’s own Sepehr”). Image courtesy of Women Life Freedom Art (@womenlifefreedom.art), Instagram.

All images in this contribution are shared here with consent of the creators.

How to decolonize? Konzept einer kritischen Stadtführung zu postkolonialen Perspektiven auf Köln

In diesem Beitrag stellt Merle Bode den dekolonialen Ansatz der Gruppe Decolonize Cologne vor.


Die Gruppe Decolonize Cologne gibt in Köln Stadtrundgänge mit postkolonialer Perspektive. Welches Konzept steckt hinter der Idee, dekoloniale Geschichtsschreibung zu betreiben und koloniale Spuren in der Stadt zu zeigen? Dabei geht es auch um persönliche Verortungen und Bezüge zur Gegenwart.

The group Decolonise Cologne offers city tours in Cologne from a postcolonial perspective. What is the concept behind the idea of practising decolonial historiography and highlighting colonial traces in the city? It is also about personal locations and references to the present.


Decolonize Cologne ist eine Gruppe aus Köln, die sich seit 2019 mit postkolonialen Perspektiven auf die Kölner Geschichte beschäftigt und kritische Stadtrundgänge gibt. Das Team besteht aus Dr. Azziza Malanda, Bebero Lehmann, Linda Jalloh und Merle Bode. Im Folgenden geht es um einen Rundgang in der Kölner Südstadt, den Dr. Azziza Malanda, Linda Jalloh und Merle Bode geben. Welches Konzept steckt hinter der kritischen Wissensvermittlung und wie sind wir selbst in post(koloniale) Geschichten verwoben?

Postkoloniale Perspektive und kritische Geschichtsschreibung

Wir machen mit unserem Rundgang deutsche Kolonialgeschichte als gewaltvolle Vergangenheit präsent, da bei vielen Teilnehmenden kaum Wissen darüber existiert. Wir hinterfragen gemeinsam, wer eigentlich die Geschichte der hiesigen Dominanzkultur schreibt und wie sich diese im Kölner Stadtbild wiederfindet. Ein Beispiel dafür ist der Kölner Bismarckturm im Stadtteil Bayenthal. Dieser muss zunächst als koloniales Denkmal eingeordnet, nämlich mit Kolonialgeschichte in Verbindung gebracht werden. Dann erst können wir die weiß1 männlich bürgerliche Repräsentation einer kolonialen und nationalen Siegergeschichte, die sich in diesem Denkmal findet, kritisch dekonstruieren.

Stadtrundgang mit Decolonize Cologne vor dem Kölner Bismarckturm, Foto: Decolonize Cologne.

Deutscher Kolonialismus ist nicht auf den Zeitraum 1884-1918 beschränkt, sondern eingebettet in eine über 500-jährige Geschichte von Gewalt, Genoziden und Unterdrückung, bis in die Gegenwart. In den Rundgängen zeigen wir, dass sich koloniale Praktiken und Strukturen in allen Bereichen gesellschaftlicher Ordnungen widerspiegelt: Die Wirkmächtigkeit einer kapitalistischen Produktionsweise und Machtsysteme wie Rassismen und (Hetero)Sexismus prägen die Gesellschaft und uns selbst. Es geht also nicht nur um die Frage nach Vergangenem, sondern auch um das Fortwirken in der Gegenwart.

Perspektivwechsel

Ein zentraler Bestandteil einer kritischen Annäherung an post(koloniale) Geschichte sind Perspektivwechsel: Wer kommt als Akteur*in vor, aus wessen Perspektive wird Geschichte erzählt? Dafür betrachten wir Akteur*innen aus einer intersektionalen Perspektive. Das heißt, wir fragen danach, wie sie in gesellschaftliche Machtverhältnisse eingebettet sind. Positionierungen nach Gender, Race, Klasse, Ethnie, Nationalität, Religion usw. geben Aufschluss über Handlungsmöglichkeiten.

Gender: Eine koloniale Kategorie

Frauen oder FLINTA*2 kommen in hegemonialer Geschichtsschreibung kaum vor. Doch was bedeutet es eigentlich, wenn wir im kolonialen Kontext von der Kategorie „Frau“ sprechen?3 Wir betrachten die patriarchale binäre heterosexuelle Geschlechterordnung als ein koloniales Konzept. Das zeigt sich, wenn wir die Rolle weißer Frauen im kolonialen System aufzeigen. Ein Beispiel ist der Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialabteilung, der wie in vielen deutschen Städten auch einen Ableger in Köln hatte. Die Frauen der oberen Mittelschicht engagierten sich Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts aktiv für koloniale Projekte.4 Verbindungen von Kolonialaktivistinnen zur damaligen Frauenbewegung zeigen zudem ein problematisches Erbe des Feminismus auf: Rassismus durchzog die weiß dominierte bürgerliche Frauenbewegung und diente nicht selten der Machterweiterung weißer Frauen.

Eine Schwarze5, diasporische Perspektive nahmen Kolonialmigrantinnen und ihre Kinder ein. Regina Savi de Tove (geb. Bruce) kam im Jahr 1900 in Wuppertal zur Welt. Ihre togolesische Familie reiste als Showgruppe, führte sog. Völkerschauen in ganz Europa auf und bestritt damit ihren Lebensunterhalt. So kam sie als Kind auch nach Köln. Später absolvierte Regina Bruce / Savi de Tové in Hamburg eine Ausbildung als Kindergärtnerin und leitete ein Kinderheim. Aufgrund des zunehmenden Anti-Schwarzen-Rassismus, den sie in der Weimarer Republik erlebte, entschied sie sich Mitte der 1920er Jahre, für einige Jahre bei der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft in Lomé (Togo) zu arbeiten. Sie blieb schließlich in Togo, kehrte aber mehrfach nach Deutschland und auch nach Köln zurück. Ihre Geschichte steht exemplarisch für Schwarze Frauengeschichte in Deutschland.6

Kolonialwaren und Widerstand

Ein weiteres Beispiel für einen Perspektivwechsel bietet die ehemalige Schokoladenfabrik Stollwerck, die ab 1872 hundert Jahre lang die Kölner Südstadt prägte. Noch heute erinnern unkritische, teils romantisierende Überbleibsel wie Überreste der Fabrik, die Plastik des sogenannten „Stollwerckmädchens“ und das Schokoladenmuseum an das Unternehmen, ohne dessen Kolonialgeschichte offen zu legen. Stollwerck bezeichnete sich einst selbst als größtes Schokoladenimperium der Welt und warb damit, Kakao als Rohstoff ausschließlich von Plantagen deutscher Kolonien zu beziehen. Auch Kölner Unternehmer wie Max Esser waren direkt in die koloniale Plantagenwirtschaft involviert, etwa durch die Errichtung von Kakao-Plantagen in Kamerun.7 Dies ging einher mit der Enteignung von Land, Monokultur und Raubbau an der Natur, deren Nachwirkungen bis heute spürbar sind. In deutscher Dominanzkultur werden außerdem kriegerische Interventionen, Vertreibung, Zwangsarbeit und Niederschlagung von Widerstand nicht erzählt. So beispielsweise die kamerunische Widerstandsgeschichte um Rudolf und Emily Duala Manga Bell, die sich gegen die rassistische Segregationspolitik der deutschen Kolonialverwaltung und der damit einhergehenden Vertreibung der Duala einsetzten. König Rudolf Duala Manga Bell und Ngoso Din wurden deshalb wegen angeblichen „Hochverrats“ verurteilt und am 8. August 1914 hingerichtet. Einer der Nachfahren von Manga Bell lebt in Köln, sein Vater Jean-Pierre Felix-Eyoum ist der Urgroßneffe und reichte 2022 eine Online-Petition bei der deutschen Bundesregierung ein, um die Rehabilitierung von Rudolf Duala Manga Bell und Adolf Ngoso Din und eine Revision des Urteils zu erreichen. Eine juristische Rehabilitierung ist nach Aussagen des Auswärtigen Amtes nicht möglich. 2024 kam es zu einer „politischen Rehabilitierung“ durch die Bundesregierung.

Stadtrundgang von Decolonize Cologne in der Kölner Südstadt, Foto: Decolonize Cologne.

Unser eigener Bezug zum Thema

Was hat Kolonialismus mit uns zu tun? Diese Frage thematisieren wir anhand eigener Biografien und Verortungen in dieser Gesellschaft. Als Team bringen wir unterschiedliche Erfahrungen mit – unter anderem in Bezug auf Rassismus. Schwarze Repräsentanz und Perspektiven sind uns dabei ebenso wichtig wie die Sichtbarmachung der Normativität weißer Positionierung. Da hier eine weiße cis Frau schreibt, zeige ich anhand eines persönlichen Beispiels meine eigene Verwobenheit in koloniale Machtsysteme auf. Es geht darum, sich der epistemischen Gewalt bewusst zu werden: aus welcher Perspektive lerne ich, was lerne ich nicht und wie formt dies mein Wissen.

Um zu zeigen, dass Kolonialgeschichte nicht nur abstrakt bei „anderen“ verortet werden sollte, greife ich die Frage nach dem eigenen Bezug zunächst anhand des Beispiels des „Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum für Völkerkunde“ (RJM) und der Frage des „Sammelns“ auf. Das RJM wurde 1906 eröffnet und enthielt zu einem großen Teil „Exponate“ aus deutschen Kolonien: Alltagsgegenstände, Kunstwerke aber auch menschliche Gebeine. Sie dienten als geordnete und kategorisierte „Dinge“ auch der materialisierten Zurschaustellung vermeintlicher weißer Überlegenheit. Der gewaltvolle koloniale Kontext, in dem diese Sammlungen entstanden, ist bis heute kaum aufgearbeitet.

Die Sammelpraxis fand aber nicht nur während beispielsweise Expeditionen und Raubzügen, sondern auch im Privaten statt. Auch heute sind Souvenirs von Reisen Teil von Wohnungseinrichtungen und zeigen den Alltag kolonialer Spuren auf. Auch ich bin mit einem kolonialen Mitbringsel im Wohnzimmer aufgewachsen: EinPerlmutt-Schmuckkästchenaus China, das mein Urgroßvater mitgebracht hatte. Erst im Zuge der Konzeption der Führung begann ich, mich genauer mit dieser Familiengeschichte zu beschäftigen: Anton Bode trat 1907 mit 18 Jahren freiwillig in die Kaiserliche Kriegsmarine ein und wurde Berufssoldat. Ab 1911 war er als Teil des sog. Ost-Asiengeschwaders in Kiautschou – seit 1884 deutsche Hafenkolonie – stationiert und bereiste außerdem die deutschen Kolonien in der Südsee. Damit war er direkt in das deutsche koloniale Herrschaftssystem eingebunden. Dies wurde mit Gewalt aufrechterhalten, um deutsche Wirtschaftsinteressen zu schützen. 1933 trat mein Urgroßvater in die NSDAP ein, wurde Ortsgruppenleiter und 1946 in einem Entnazifizierungsverfahren verurteilt. Meine Familiengeschichte, ebenso wie Orte und Geschichten unseres Stadtrundgangs, zeigt, wie eng koloniale und nationalsozialistische Geschichten miteinander verwoben und gemeinsamer Bestandteil kritischer Erinnerungskultur sind.8

Briefmarke aus der deutschen Hafenkolonie Kiautschou als Teil des Familienarchivs, Foto: Merle Bode.

Prozesshaftigkeit

Unsere Erfahrungen, unser Wissen ändert sich und damit auch das Konzept des Stadtrundgangs. Es bleibt wandelbar und ist Teil eines fortlaufenden Prozesses. Ein (post)kolonialer Stadtrundgang ist daher nichts Abgeschlossenes, sondern lädt uns und die Teilnehmenden zum ständigen Ver-Lernen ein. Indem wir uns an diesem Prozess beteiligen und ihn anstoßen, werden wir Teil einer Erinnerungspraxis, die kollektiv verbreitete Geschichtserzählungen und Amnesien kritisch in Frage stellen. Heutige Ungerechtigkeit historisch zu verstehen, bedeutet auch, Perspektiven für eine dekoloniale, gerechte Zukunft zu ermöglichen.


1 Um deutlich zu machen, dass die Kategorie „weiß“ ein rassistisches Konstrukt ist, nutze ich die kursive Schreibweise, wie in der Kritischen Weißseinsforschung in der BRD mittlerweile üblich.

2 FLINTA* steht für Frauen, Lesben, inter, trans, nicht-binäre und agender Personen.

3 Wir entwickelten die Führung zunächst mit dem Kölner Frauengeschichtsverein, daher stand die Frage nach „Frausein“ von vornherein im Fokus.

4 Franken, Irene; Bischoff, Eva: „Fremdland zur Heimat wandeln nur die Frauen“ – Koloniale Frauenvereine in Köln 1893-1919, in: Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne/Horstmann, Anne-Kathrin (Hg.): Köln und der deutsche Kolonialismus. Eine Spurensuche, Köln/Wien 2013, S. 37-42.

5 „Schwarz“ als politische Kategorie und Selbstbezeichnung schreibe ich groß.

6 Zu Schwarzer deutscher Geschichte: Oguntoye, Katharina: Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte. Zur Lebenssituation von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen in Deutschland von 1884 bis 1950, Berlin 1997; El-Tayeb, Fatima: Schwarze Deutsche und deutscher Rassismus, Frankfurt/Main 2001; Kelly, Natasha A.: Schwarz. Deutsch. Weiblich. Warum Feminismus mehr als Geschlechtergerechtigkeit fordern muss, München 2023.

7 Röschenthaler, Ute: Kakao am Kamerunberg: Der Kölner Kaufmann Max Esser und die Folgen seines Pioniergeists, in: Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne/Horstmann, Anne-Kathrin (Hg.): Köln und der deutsche Kolonialismus. Eine Spurensuche, Köln/Wien 2013, S. 65-72.

8 Vgl. Attia, Iman; Rothberg, Michael, „Multidirectional memory und Verwobene Geschichte(n)“, in: Bauche, Manuela; Otoo, Sharon Dodua (Hg.), Geschichte schreiben, Frankfurt am Main 2018, S. 92-105.


Merle Bode gehört zum Gründungsteam von Decolonize Cologne und gibt zusammen mit einer Kollegin postkoloniale Stadtführungen durch die Südstadt von Köln.


Titelbild: Decolonizing RJM: Performative Führung von Decolonize Cologne mit dem kamerunischen Künstler Zora Snake. Foto: Decolonize Cologne.

Between Sacredness and Bulldozers: The Struggle over Sulaiman-Too’s Cemeteries

Aksana Ismailbekova writes about the competing claims on Sulaiman-Too, the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Kyrgyzstan, and how memory and development clash in this context.

Sulaiman-Too in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, intertwines sacred space, religion, memory, and kinship. Cemeteries honor ancestors, transmit knowledge, and sustain community, yet state-led urban development threatens graves, exposing tensions between heritage, religious devotion, and modernization.

Sulaiman-Too in Osch, Kirgistan, verbindet heilige Erde, Religion, Erinnerung und Familien miteinander. Die Friedhöfe dort dienen der Ehrung der Vorfahren, sie vermitteln Wissen und stärken die Gemeinschaft, doch die staatlich gelenkte Stadtentwicklung bedroht die Gräber und offenbart Spannungen zwischen Kulturerbe, religiöser Hingabe und Modernisierung.


Sulaiman-Too (“Solomon’s Mountain”), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. For centuries it has been a pilgrimage site and sacred burial ground. Photo: Aksana Ismailbekova.

In Central Asia, as in many parts of the world, to disturb the dead is to disturb the moral order. Graves are not mere plots of land; they are nodes in a network of sacred relations. When the state burns or bulldozes cemeteries, it risks burning bridges of trust with its citizens. This intertwining of sacred space, memory, and community is not limited to cemeteries alone. It extends to other sites of devotion and pilgrimage, such as Sulaiman-Too, the sacred mountain which is located at the heart of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. The mountain is not only a geological landmark in the Fergana Valley, but also a spiritual place that has attracted pilgrims, saints, migrants, and ordinary believers for centuries. Sulaiman-Too was a site of ritual devotion. This mountain also has a reputation of being a holy place, hosting shrines, mosques, and sacred caves[1].

But Sulaiman-Too is also a place for the deceased relatives of many Osh residents. Since Soviet times, the mountain’s slopes are occupied by numerous cemeteries — the resting places of Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars, and others who used to live in Osh and called this their home. Among the graves lie prominent Soviet-era singers, scholars, community leaders, and ordinary local people. The families of these people would get together during Ramadan to clean the graves, pray, and honour the memory of their ancestors. This commemoration is also an important family and religious ritual where all the family members within several generations would learn the importance of the remembrance of their deceased relatives, passing on oral knowledge about the names and lives of their ancestors that might otherwise be forgotten[2]. This is a key part of local kinship systems, linking past, present and future through social gatherings during Ramadan.

Yet, in recent years this sacred geography has collided with the ambitions of the current state. The recent cemeteries have been burned, graves dismantled, and bones exhumed in the name of urban development, road extension, and “green zones.” As the mayor of the city said ‘let us remove all the cemeteries in order to create a green zone to earn money from tourists’[3].

A Cemetery in Conflict

Local residents recall that during the Soviet Union, the state decided to use Sulaiman-Too for burials — partly due to a shortage of land, partly to free up fertile fields for cotton production. Between the 1960s and 1978, the southern cemetery was active; burials in the northern cemetery continued until as late as 2013. In total, more than a thousand people were laid to rest on the slopes.

By law, graves should not be reused or repurposed until at least 25–30 years have passed. Yet, according to residents, the state began pressuring families to relocate remains barely 13 years after the last burials. Bulldozers appeared. The mayor’s office spoke of re-cultivation, greening, and urban development[4].

Every year some tragic episodes occur where parts of the cemeteries are burnt in what are apparently wildfires. Official explanations point to climatic conditions and accidental fires. Some local residents, however, pin blame on a lack of water due to the state not maintaining irrigation systems, and others see it as an intentional attempt to clear space for new projects.

For many families in Osh, this was not only an outrage but a deep spiritual violation. As one elderly resident told me, “99% of those buried here are our ancestors. Some of the bones belong to people whose children and grandchildren are still alive, live nearby and visit them often. This place is sacred for Uzbeks, but also for all the peoples of Osh.”

Cemetries near the Sulaiman Mountain. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Three Days to Collect the Dead

In July 2025, the situation also escalated dramatically in other parts of Osh city, where the decision was to remove the cemeteries located near the local mahallas in order to widen the roads. Residents were told they had just three days to exhume their relatives and re-bury them elsewhere. Those who lived in Osh had to carry bones down the mountain and pay the required 3,000 som (30 Euro) fee for a new burial site[5]. But what about families who had migrated to Russia or Europe? Many could not return in time. Their ancestors’ remains were collected in heaps, with bones buried together in communal graves.

This rushed process left many residents in shock. An 88-year-old male informant, whose parents were buried on the mountain, recalled bitterly: “We have lived here for generations. How can they [the State] tell us our cemeteries must disappear? They want to make a park, a green zone. But our ancestors deserve peace. Let the deceased rest in peace, please!”

Development vs. Memory

The dispute over Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is not just about land. It is about ethnicity, such as Uzbek mahalla cemeteries versus the Kyrgyz state. It is also the clash between heritage and development, sacredness and business. The state envisions wide roads, recreational spaces, and tourist-friendly landscapes. But Osh residents envision continuity — a landscape where the living cares for the dead, where cemeteries signify communal identity, and inter-generational knowledge is transferred.

One of the most painful aspects has been the silencing of disagreement. Few locals dare to protest openly, fearing repercussions from the authorities. One man explained, “We cannot express our opinions, as this may lead to problems and pressure from the state.” Another added, “Please broaden the road on the other side of the road. But don’t disturb the graves.” Their requests, however, were ignored.

The cemetery of the Soviet deputy,Sultanov Kadyrmat, who used to be a member of national parliament. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Sacred Mountain, Global Heritage

The irony is that Sulaiman-Too is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its cultural and spiritual significance is internationally recognized. Tourists climb its trails, visiting sacred caves and shrines. Yet, the cemeteries — equally a part of its sacred landscape — are treated as obstacles to development.

For some locals, hope lies precisely in UNESCO. One community elder, Aziz, aged 76, expressed faith that international protection might shield their cemeteries: “UNESCO supported us before. They sponsored our houses. Tourists do not only come to see the mountain or the apartment blocks, but also to see the traditional houses of the people living there, their clothing, and their customs. Maybe they will protect us again.”

But UNESCO’s mandate is limited, and cultural heritage often becomes a battleground of selective preservation. Which parts of the past deserve saving? Which can be erased for the sake of “progress”?

Why Cemeteries Matter

To outsiders, it may be tempting to see cemeteries as replaceable, especially in crowded cities, such as Osh. Yet anthropology reminds us that cemeteries are not just about the dead — they are about the living. They are places where memory is protected, where families renew bonds across generations, where cultural identity is affirmed. This is the heart of the local kinship system, Islam and community.

It is precisely this deeper social and religious significance that makes current developments in Osh resonate with earlier historical struggles. There is a parallel between Soviet times and today: while burial rites were actively defended against state repression during the Soviet era, today they face new pressures—urban development and shifting social priorities—that threaten their continuity. In both cases, cemeteries symbolize a boundary for the community, marking a domain where religious identity and kinship ties must be protected. As Marianne Kamp (2010) argues, during the Soviet times death practices (i.e., performing funeral prayers) represented a kind of red line for Central Asians, and many were ready to defend them against the state at any cost, especially when other religious practices were repressed.[6]

Between Stones and Stories

The story of Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is unfinished. After the Soviet times, new state projects (i.e. between Soviet times and the current developments in Osh) threaten the graves every year. Each year, the state plans the expansion of roads against the quiet resistance of families. Meanwhile, tourists snap photos of the mountain, unaware that just beyond the trail lies a battlefield of memory.

As one local put it emotionally: “This is not only a cemetery. It is our history, our ancestors, our identity. To erase it is to erase us.”

The future of Sulaiman-Too will depend on whether development can learn to coexist with sacredness — whether roads and green zones can be built without uprooting bones. For now, the mountain stands as a reminder: heritage is not just about monuments, but about the fragile bond between the living and the dead.


[1] Liu, Morgan. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne. Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh:University of Pittsburgh Press.

[2] Ismailbekova, A. 2017 Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[3] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[4] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[5] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1101498778600604&rdid=bCohodiCTh5OaIFm

[6] Kamp, M. (2010) ‘Where did the mullahs go? Oral histories from rural Uzbekistan’, Die Welt des Islams, 50(3–4), pp. 503–531.


Aksana Ismailbekova is a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. In 2025 she was a Leibniz — Newcastle University Fellow.


Title picture: Gateway to a staircase leading to a museum precinct on Sulaiman-Too mountain. Adam Harangozó, CC BY-SA 4.0.