Objects Tell What Happened in the Eight-Year War!
Report of the meeting of the Faculty of Literature and Humanities of the University of Isfahan on the topic of “Rereading the Iran-Iraq War through the Mediation of Objects”Franak Jamshidi
Translated by Mandana Karimi
2025-11-27
“Rereading the Iran-Iraq War through the Mediation of Objects” is the title of Dr. Hamed Taherikia’s project for the Research Unit of Resistance Literature & Culture Researches and Studies Center, which was put on the agenda of this unit in the spring of 2025 and was completed on October 7.
At the aforementioned meeting, Dr. Hamed Taherikia provided a brief report of this project to the professors and students from various fields who attended the meeting. He initially referred to the background of his research on the topic of the 1980s of the Islamic Revolution; including:
- The Turn of Audio Culture and Changing Tastes of Music in the 1980s of Iran, Tehran: Agar Publishing House, in preparation for publication.
- Iran, Islamic Republic of, Tehran: Naqd Farhang Publishing (Criticism and study of 1979 to 1981 as years of transition and entry into the 1980s).
- Decent Gender in Iran's 1980s (2022), Tehran: Andisheh Ehsan Publishing (How male and female gender was formed in Iran's 1980s, citing some photographs and images).
Dr. Hamed Taherikia's project (which deals with phenomena such as war from the perspective of material culture studies and theories) can be considered a very different narrative of the Iran-Iraq war that focuses not on humans, but on objects. In his view, war is not just a field of conflict between humans, but a field for the interaction of objects with each other and the creation and sometimes re-creation of collective memory; a memory that is formed through objects such as weapons, clothes, headscarves, headbands, identity cards, bags, photographs, placards, and so on.
What can be inferred from the content of Dr. Taherikia's words is that in common narratives of wars (whether those published in the form of official historiographies or those found in the form of individual and collective memoirs), humans (including commanders, soldiers, families, and heroes, etc.) are at the center of attention. However, it seems that wars can also be studied from another perspective; a perspective that may reveal less-observed truths. In this project, Dr. Taherikia has tried to show that war, as much as it is the product of human decisions and wills, has also been carried out on the shoulders of objects; objects that may sometimes appear small and insignificant, but in practice have been both carriers of meaning and creators of meaning. Therefore, his effort in the aforementioned project was to bring the voice of these objects, which are apparently lost in the official history of this event but still flow in our collective memory, to the ears of his audience.
Taherikia begins the narrative of the journey of these objects through history from the first days when modern weapons entered Iran and new rifles, along with the first target practice, the first military drill, the first standardization of bodies through the wearing of uniforms on the bodies of soldiers, and in short, the first military technologies, changed the Iranian male body and imposed a new form of masculinity and order on Iranian society. These were the transformations that began with the introduction of weapons into Iran, starting with the Abbas Mirza era and continuing until the Constitutional Era and then the Pahlavi era, until in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, weapons were made available to the civilian population as a tool for resistance, a sign of liberation, a carrier of the dream of change, and, most importantly, a symbol of the people’s defensive war; those who were mainly included in the “Basij” or “Basij forces.”
In this way, war seemed to enter the revolution into a new arena; an arena in which every man was a potential warrior with objects such as a bag, an identity card, a uniform, etc., all of which were considered as gateways for the warrior to enter another world. For this reason, they could not be considered mere tools, but rather they were considered manifestations of a rite of passage; That is, the warriors were gradually separated from the city and village to which they belonged and brought into a sacred realm where death and life found a different meaning. With this in mind, the front and the rear were equally possessed by objects that, as if human agents, were trying more and more to make the sacred possible. In fact, objects reproduced the spirit of war. They were considered the closest companions of man, especially on the front line.
In his project, among all the objects that he has tried to provide the reader with detailed explanations about, Taherikia has spoken of weapons and discussed the tension between man and weapon in order to show how these objects (and above all weapons) made it possible to summon the sacred at a moment when death is just a step away from the man of war.
Dr. Taherikia also continued his discussion by addressing another important part of war; That is, he focused on captivity and showed that when in captivity, the human connection with weapons is destroyed and the war man becomes a captive man, why did the prisoners try and strive to make objects that were a sign of hope and attention to life, and how captivity, by pushing the prisoners to make and create new objects, led to the creation of a new body from the previously war man and now a captive, and why should we call and understand life in camps as a kind of attempt to find meaning with the fewest objects or to reconstruct the world through the most basic tools.
One of the new parts of Dr. Taherikia’s project is the separation of objects and their naming as “war objects” and “post-martyrdom objects,” which he mentioned as examples of post-martyrdom objects the martyr’s plaque and clothing, tombstones and photo frames, and all that is in the display cases installed above the martyr’s grave. Also, by calling destroyed objects “martyred objects,” Dr. Taherikia aimed to show how objects that are completely destroyed or incomplete, collapsed or ruined houses, burned buildings and trees, etc., play the role of eyewitnesses in today’s world and can testify to violence and war crimes.
The conclusion that Taherikia reached at the end of his discussion was that the Iran-Iraq War, rather than being a series of successful or unsuccessful operations, is a vast network of objects that have created the main fields of meaning formation on the fronts, in cities and villages, in homes, especially mourning homes, etc. Therefore, if we consider the human history of war to be full of voices that have been heard and are being heard, the history of the objects of war is full of silence that must be heard in its own way, because this silence reveals the truth of war more nakedly than any human narrative.
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http://oral-history.ir/?page=post&id=12940