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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.

The Politics of Teaching Conflict: Memory and Education in Kenya

Auf Grundlage von Interviews mit kenianischen Pädagog:innen untersucht Meredith Whye die Rolle der Schulbildung in Kenia für einen stabilen Frieden.

Kenya has worked to position itself as a global and regional peace maker, however these efforts stand in contrast to its ability to handle peace internally. Continued political violence has impacted Kenyan governance, yet new school curricula remain largely silent, particularly on the 2007/2008 post-election violence and broader patterns of state repression. Despite total education overhaul, education in Kenya avoids addressing past conflicts instead using vague calls for peace. Drawing on interviews with Kenyan educators, post-conflict education in Kenya will be examined as a vehicle for peace that ignores the question of why peace is needed.

From Post-Election Violence to Education Reform

Widely seen as an example of stability in a high-conflict region, the violence that followed Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election shook not only the nation but the world. The announcement of President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election sparked allegations of fraud, leading to widespread protests along ethnic lines and state-sponsored violence. In the violence that followed, over 1,500 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. The violence had lasting impacts on Kenya, most notably a new Constitution in 2010. Largely seen as a resolution to the political violence of 2007/2008, the Constitution set in motion longer-term policy implications.

The Constitution and policy guide, Kenya Vision 2030, called for education reform. Due to the slow nature of Kenyan legislation, complete educational reform in Kenya only gradually became reality. After a series of working papers, reports, and a nation-wide needs-assessment, the new Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) was implemented in 2021. Notably, the reform shifted Kenya’s content-based and assessment-focused structure to a competency-based approach. Kenya is one of the last nations in the East African region to reform their educational curriculum to this new standard of ‘best practices.’

Despite Kenya’s domestic struggles, Kenya has positioned itself as a regional and global peace broker, mediating conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic ofCongo (DRC), and more recently, leading peacekeeping efforts in Haiti. Yet, while advocating for stability abroad, Kenya’s new CBC avoids engaging with its violent past. The reform promises to create “engaged, empowered and ethical citizens,” and to “avert the behavioural and values crisis in the country.” However, policy documents do not specify which crises or why they occur in the first place. Instead, the first goal of Kenya’s national education calls for peace and unity:

Kenyan Education should: Foster nationalism, patriotism, and promote national unity. Kenya’s people belong to different communities, races and religions and should be able to live and interact as one people. It should also promote peace and harmonious co-existence.

Allusions to crisis and the timeline of publication suggest that the 2007 post-election violence played a crucial role in reshaping Kenya’s education policy. However, this is not taken up by curriculum policies, texts, or materials. Instead of acknowledging the political violence or its causes, such as ethnicity, land disputes, or corruption, the curriculum does not engage with political violence nor times of crisis in Kenya’s history. This domestic avoidance is striking given Kenya’s peacekeeping efforts, where it has sought to promote stability in conflict zones like the DRC.

Instead, in the name of fostering peace, the CBC broadly emphasizes cohesion, unity, and patriotism, leaving out any mention of past or current political violence. However, avoiding discussions of political violence does not create neutral citizens. Rather, it leaves young people to absorb the narratives available in their communities, which can be biased or incomplete. By neglecting these difficult topics, Kenyan education fails to provide students with tools needed to understand the structures that sustain conflict.

A Kenyan classroom. Photo: Meredith Whye.

Silencing Conflict

Teaching contested pasts has been extensively studied in high-conflict and politically extreme cases, such as Germany, Rwanda, and South Africa. In these cases, the selection of memories and versions of the past depicted in textbooks are hotly debated. While these cases present strong examples of how different nations grapple with their contentious histories, Kenya presents a different case. Kenya has experienced low-intensity but persistent political violence, especially during presidential election cycles.

Despite the shock of the 2007 political violence, it neither began nor ended then. Political violence has permeated Kenyan society since colonialism, creating a population that has, as Daniel Branch writes, “become accustomed to endemic social and political violence.” This may explain why, in Kenya, politicians have not been held accountable for past human rights violations, nor for inciting violence. Despite his alleged role in the 2007 post-election violence, current Kenyan president William Ruto saw his ICC case dropped, further reinforcing a culture of impunity. His political rise, shaped by shifting alliances and ethnic power dynamics, reflects broader patterns in Kenya’s governance. Therefore, what is taught in Kenya (and what is left out) becomes interesting in light of continued political violence, the lack of accountability, and control of official narratives.

Yet the exclusion of political violence from educational curricula does not mean young Kenyans are unaware of it. Instead, they encounter it in their daily lives—through protests, media, and their communities. This contributes to growing generational tensions in Kenya, where older political leaders view the youth as a destabilizing force. Indeed, the widening age gap between “geriatric leaders and restless youth” is a major source of political tension across the African continent. Rather than empowering young people for civic engagement, political elites often frame them as needing control and containment.

Approaches to contentious pasts

Falk Pingel of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media, identified three broad approaches to handling contentious histories following a period of national conflict: Separation – Avoiding difficult historical truths, Harmonization – Presenting a national past that smooths over conflict, and Multiperspectivity – Encouraging a critical and nuanced engagement with history.

Separation involves adopting one-sided narratives, often perpetuating conflict by reinforcing competing “truths,” such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the 1992–1995 war. Harmonization seeks to impose a singular, unifying national narrative, as attempted in Rwanda. Rwanda promoted a vision of unity, but efforts to produce new textbooks ultimately failed. Multiperspectivity encourages dialogue between conflicting historical perspectives, treating history as an evolving, communicative process. This approach was pursued in South Africa after Apartheid.

What happens when a new curriculum does none of these? Kenya is a case in point: with little mention of Kenya’s post-independence history, educators are left to decide if and how they cover current issues.

Dilemmas in Teaching Political Violence

Teachers often find themselves in a difficult position—faced with the realities of continued political violence but with educational materials that ‘sanitize’ Kenya’s past. This leaves teachers to individually contend with how they approach teaching conflict. Emma, a Kenyan primary teacher and scholar, wrestles with teaching political violence:

“Are we talking more violence? Am I going to put more on the violence or talk about peace? What brings peace and helps people? I would concentrate more on things that bring us together… What is peace? How do we bring peace? And what are the benefits of peace?”

For Emma, teaching should be about fostering inclusion and promoting harmony, without negativity. She questions the necessity of teaching about violence in school at all:

“…why am I to teach about the negative? Why don’t I teach about the positive? I would spend my more energy on such things, because if we did them properly, then there should be no violence.”

Kenyan schoolchildren solving exercises. Photo: Meredith Whye.

Conversely, Roger, a teacher educator and university professor, disagrees. He warns against ignoring the issues of Kenya, citing the on-going violence and corruption in Kenya. At the time of these interviews, the Kenyan Vice President, Rigathi Gachagua, was being impeached on accusations of tribalism and ethnic favoritism. On teaching Kenya’s political violence in education, Roger says:

“Let’s talk about reality. The reality here is Kenyans should teach tribalism and all those things in the curriculum and the leaders themselves practice tribalist way of doing things in the government. Because if you say the Vice President is tribal, what about the president? The president has employed all his people in the government, all his people, so it’s a big problem.”

This highlights a continued issue—political violence has not ended. Even if children are not taught about political violence in the classrooms, they are experiencing it via media or in their lived experiences. Peter, an educational practitioner and expert on indigenous education, says:

“Even now, even today, there is conflict in Tana River. Just today, if you read today’s papers, there’s conflict. There is conflict everywhere in Kenya… But the challenge is that children are learning within this conflict. So sometimes you ask, how are they managing their learning? You know, the people come and shoot the school, even kill the children, even kill the teacher, even kill the chief, you see, but the children are still supposed to learn.”

The challenge of education is not simply to determine what is taught but how narratives are framed. In Kenya, where legacies of violence have impacted society long before the 2007, the decision to exclude these events from the curriculum is not incidental—it is political. By avoiding discussions of political violence, the education curriculum risks (or aims at) producing citizens who are unprepared to critically engage with the structures that perpetuate conflict. Ruth, a primary teacher, faces this fact:

“We have to teach from known to unknown, and what we know is those post-election violence…”

Educators charged with developing Kenya’s new curriculum face an important question: should they continue treating education as a peaceful tool without teaching the violent past? The experiences of Emma, Ruth, Roger, and Peter show that this question is not abstract— children are growing up within ongoing political violence, yet their textbooks and teachers remain silent.

If Kenya is truly committed to peace, both internationally and domestically, then its education system must move beyond avoidance and engage with the political realities shaping young Kenyans’ lives. As its recent AU election loss reveals, Kenya is a nation eager to lead but unwilling to confront its internal fractures. Instead of sanitizing the curriculum, Kenyan education should equip students with both the historical information and critical thinking skills required to analyze the roots of conflict, rather than concealing them.


Meredith Whye is a doctoral candi­date at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Curriculum & Global Studies. As a Fellow of the Leibniz Research Alliance Value of the Past, she visited PRIF in February 2025.


This article was first published on the PRIF blog. Republished with the kind permission of the author and PRIF.


Title picture: While avocating for stability abroad, education in Kenya avoids addressing past concflicts. Photo: Meredith Whye.