Part of memoirs of Masoumeh Rasouli about sacred defense supporting
Selected by Faezeh Sasanikhah
Translated by M. B. Khoshnevisan
2024-03-18
The first martyr of village
When we were informed of his martyrdom, we wanted to do what we could. The town of Mallard did not have a flower shop. It came to my mind to make a flower basket ourselves. Since my mother had lived in Tehran in the past, she knew how to make flowers and had the equipment.
We gathered at my mother's house with the guys of the group. We used to put the wooden handles for making flowers on the heater and wait for them to get hot and ready to style. We applied gelatin on the satin fabric and waited for it to set. Then my mother drew the shape of a tulip flower on it and shaped it with special materials and made flowers one by one.
That day, we worked from morning to evening until we managed to make a beautiful tulip basket.
We were holding the flower basket and getting ready to go to the house of the martyr, which suddenly I remembered the first years of the revolution came:
It was the year 1358 (1980) and the war had not started yet. At that time, the eldest son, who later became my brother-in-law, had turned a part of their house into a club.[1] They said that we were going to perform a play; that's why we gathered at Fatemeh Sultan's house.
The name of the play was "Fighting"[2]. The end of the paly was like this: Ali Asghar Shafiei, who played the role of a martyr, was shot and fell on the ground. And we started crying.
It passed until the issue of war became more serious.
Now Ali Asghar Shafiei had gone to the front and this time he really became the first martyr of the town of Mallard![3]
When we arrived, we entered the martyr's house with a song and presented the bouquet to the martyr's mother.
Source: Tavakkoli, Leshgajani, Narjes, Research and interview, Rahimi, Mohammad Mahdi, We Also Fought, Mallard women's narrative of supporting the Sacred Defense, Rah-e Yar Publications, Vol. 1, 1401 (2023), pp. 143-144.
[1] To find out about how this cultural and martial club was formed and operated, refer to the book "The Cultivators of Towhid", written by Zainab Khazaei, which was published by Asr-e Sadegh Publications in 1396 (2017). There is also information about this in the caption of this book.
[2] The play "Fighting" directed by Seyed Mohammad Rafiq was performed during the Ten-Day Dawn celebrations in 1359 (1981). The theme of this play was about SAVAK and the fight against the Pahlavi regime. Martyr Ali Asghar Shafiei, Martyr Akbar Tahani, Martyr Seyed Hossein Rafiei and Hossein Shabanpour were actors of the play.
[3] What the narrator means by the first martyr, is the first Basiji martyr of the sacred defense. He was martyred on 30th of Tir 1360 (July 21, 1981). Before this noble martyr, Seyyed Hasan Aghili, who was the commander of the Basij and responsible for the security of Mallard, was martyred while performing his mission, and after that, Martyr Mosayebzadeh was martyred in the front and was buried on 7th of Aban, 1359 (October 29 ,1980) in the cemetery of Mallard.
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