It is conceivable that growing up Shia in the United States has given me a superiority complex. Against the monotony and orthodoxy of 21st-century Western Sunni practice, Shiism has always felt like a final refuge of ritual, one that has maintained the magic that makes religion compelling. Pride in one’s religious affiliation is not exactly a virtue, but my family has never shied away from our beliefs.
My father, who grew up between Pakistan, Abu Dhabi, and Texas, would boldly state that when other Muslims called him Kafir, he could only take pride in his loyalty to the Panjtan Pak, which, to him and many other Shias, represents the Prophet (PBUH), his daughter Bibi Fatima, his son-in-law and cousin Imam Ali, and their grandchildren Imam Hasan and Imam Hussain. For my mother, born in India but raised in Iran with her Iranian family, that pride collapsed entire religious worlds: “even Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians cry during Ashura,” she recounted to me during one childhood Muharram.
What was once a childhood observation about ritual now reads as a political reality, particularly as these same themes of grief and sacrifice have taken on new urgency in the present political moment. Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza has confronted the broader Western ummah with brutality that mainstream Islam does not have the capacity to absorb. It has raised urgent questions about our ability to live morally honest lives, let alone fulfilling ones, at the heart of empire. It has also exposed that many Muslims lack sufficient frameworks for grappling with justice, honor, duty, and sacrifice, as well as the modalities necessary to live out these ideals in everyday life. As Muslims in the West struggle to develop a political consciousness capable of grasping the crises facing our siblings in Palestine, Sudan, and now Iran, Islamic modalities that already integrate these themes are gaining renewed attention, among them, Shia practices.
The onset of the current crisis between the United States, Israel, and Iran has also produced a growing conflation between Shia religious identity and Iranian nationality. This conflation is not only inaccurate, but a reductive erasure of the many ethnic, religious, and national groups that live within the borders of the Iranian state. At the same time, Iran is a theocratic republic built on a particular strain of militarized Shia thought that permeates the lives of its residents, regardless of their personal affiliations.
When speaking of Iran as a state, I am also speaking of the form of Shia practice it propagates, one that is often romanticized by outsiders. This renewed interest in Shia modalities reflects the nature of Iran’s religious revival, which, as the historian Nikki Keddie argues, is itself a distinctly modern phenomenon. While much of Iran’s turn to Islam at both the state and local levels is new, it also follows a long tradition of communicating social, cultural, and economic grievances through “a religious idiom arraying the forces of good against the forces of evil and promising to bring justice to the oppressed.” Keddie peels back one layer in the story of Shiism in Iran, revealing that any notion of an ancient Iranian predisposition toward religious sacrifice is misplaced. Persia became a “Shia empire” only in 1501, and that transformation was, in large part, political.
Shiism has long been characterized as extremist and overly militaristic. I do not entirely reject these characterizations; they have, at times, been mobilized by Shia actors themselves in the building of empires, the waging of wars, and the maintenance of ritual systems that are both clandestine and inaccessible to outsiders. Images of death on the battlefield—of blood, sacrifice, and the divinely sanctioned right to violence in the struggle against oppression—hold a powerful appeal in the current moment. Yet these images, heavily romanticized, come at a cost.
Martyrdom, long central to both theological and political frameworks, has been instrumentalized by both Israeli and Iranian state actors to simultaneously deprive the region’s inhabitants of the possibility of living with dignity and advance their respective political aims. Its valorization as a symbol of resistance is not without consequence. As conflict intensifies, the language and imagery of martyrdom are mobilized in ways that come at the direct expense of human life. In truth, politically and theologically opportune martyrdom is rarely spontaneous; it is engineered by the institutions that shape public life. Only then can the clandestine and ritualistic be transformed into a machine that contorts believers into soldiers.
To understand how martyrdom moves from ritual to political instrument, it must be situated not only within theology, but within the structures of the state. When scholars seek to understand a state’s behavior, they often turn to approaches that examine not only how states interact in the international arena, but also how they process information internally, shaping the foreign policy behavior we see on the news. This framework, broadly known as neoclassical realism, helps illuminate this process by showing how states respond to external pressures through internal, unit-level variables. For both Iran and Israel, militarized theologies function as one such variable, shaping state behavior on the international stage.
For Iran, this is exemplified in the politicization of Karbala. The 680 ce battle, in which Imam Hussain was martyred by Umayyad state forces under Caliph Yazid, functions as the central narrative of sacrifice and moral resistance in Shia Islam. However, its complex ritual tradition has been propagated by the Iranian regime as an ideological structure that justifies war, absorbs loss, and coerces compliance. The mystical resonance of Karbala, articulated through centuries of communal religious practice, is now employed as a form of state-curated affect—mobilized in moments of external shock, such as the current conflict, and instrumentalized during periods of internal unrest, of which Iran has had many.
Now infamous for state-suppressed protests and well known for the brutality of its domestic security forces, Iranians face the daily indignity of living under heavy sanctions in a country also rapidly running out of groundwater. During protests against state corruption and the mismanagement of already precarious resources, martyrdom becomes a technology through which the state mediates the loss of life, curtails dissent, and robs Iranians of the conditions necessary for political agency.
Iran is not unique in transforming death into political virtue. While often framed as oppositional, Israeli and Iranian systems converge in their production of sanctified death. Masada, the first-century siege described by Flavius Josephus in which Jewish rebels chose suicide over Roman capture, is mobilized within Israeli state and military culture as a foundational narrative of sacrifice, service, and collective survival. As Yael Zerubavel demonstrates, Masada was largely absent from Jewish collective memory until Zionism elevated it to a site of “special symbolic significance,” positioning modern Israelis as inheritors of an ancient struggle.
Israeli actors reframed what might otherwise be understood as defeat into a necessary sacrifice for the birth of the state, with death functioning as the ultimate mediator between the individual and the nation. This transformation is ritualized through state practices that construct a continuous lineage between the defenders of Masada and present-day Israeli soldiers. At the same time, Masada foregrounds helplessness and siege, producing a social anxiety that translates into a state that perceives itself as perpetually surrounded and threatened, even though it is often the progenitor of regional instability.
The pilgrimage to Masada produces a myth of volunteerism and collective organization around the protection of a society that is structurally violent. It attempts to do in a single gesture what Karbala has done over centuries: create the illusion that the life of the Israeli citizen is part of a continuous lineage of the fallen. But unlike Karbala, Masada carries a perilous anxiety—as one Israeli informant observed in Zerubavel’s study, “the whole country is like Masada”—precisely because it lacks the ritual depth that makes Shia practice so compelling.
As a political fabrication designed for the sustenance of a state, rather than a religious world historically articulated over time, it lacks the capacity to produce martyrs capable of fulfilling the role required of them: to serve and to die. This anxiety becomes a liability, contributing to a “casualty phobia,” noted by Israeli sociologist Udi Lebel, that privileges soldiers over civilians and produces a society endangered by its own disillusions. If, for the Shia, “every day is Ashura and every land is Karbala,” then for the Israeli, every space becomes Masada.
I would like to problematize even this adage. While it assumes every day offers an opportunity to confront oppression like that faced at Karbala, such a stance is ultimately fanciful. It erases the embodied reality of Iranians caught within the crosshairs of a theologically inflected imperialist war. Their primary desire is not sacrifice, but the ability to live with dignity. To valorize martyrdom uncritically is to accept the conditions that produce it, in this case, that means accepting both Israeli and Iranian regimes.
The question is not how to die nobly, but why so many are made to die at all. Even the most devoted Shia knows that death comes only second to service. If you have not served, then your death carries no weight. The nation-state may succeed in contorting martyrdom into a form of state-curated affect, but for the believer, martyrdom is a death measured by the gravity of the service rendered in life.
For Muslims in the so-called West, the question is not how to perform sacrifice or indulge in theological blood sport. The question is much simpler: Do you serve? Have you truly lived in the frustrating service of others? Without this, any adoption of Shia aesthetics is at best appropriation and at worst desecration.
Our siblings in Iran deserve to live without missiles overhead. They deserve water, medical care, internet, and the right to dissent and organize. What they do not deserve is our romanticization of the symbols and state infrastructures that have contributed to their suffering. If martyrdom compels you, then the action it demands is not death, but service. Whom did you serve today who is more vulnerable than yourself? It is time we begin asking ourselves this question.
