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Article published In:
The Politics of Sound: Intersections of Music, Discourse and Political Communication
Edited by Lyndon C.S. Way
[Journal of Language and Politics 18:4] 2019
► pp. 617–633

From religious performances to martial themes

Discourses of Shi’a musical eulogies, war and politics in Iran

ORCID logo | Newcastle University

This paper deconstructs how religious musical eulogies, as the most important discursive practices of Shi’a rituals (Ghaffari 2019), were used as “war songs” serving to construct the Iranian national identity during the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran war. These musical practices (in)formed the wider ideological and persuasive rhetoric of Iranians. In this paper, I analyse the textual and musical features of the audio-recorded versions of ten well-known war songs. The Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2016) is used to analyse the discursive strategies and persuasive rhetorical tools within the lyrics. I draw on Machin (2010), Machin and Richardson (2012) and van Leeuwen (1999) to analyse various features of voice and the modality of sounds. This paper concludes that, by reflecting the power of religious discourse in the non-religious and highly nationalistic occasion of war, Iranian war songs were inspired by the religious eulogies in encouraging the Iranian nation to attend the war fronts.

Keywords: war songs, religious eulogies, Iranian identity, Shi’a rituals, discourse-historical approach, discursive strategies, multimodal analysis, modality of sounds, voice qualities, rhythm
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.War, religious eulogies and identity
  • 3.Approach to analysis
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Musical analysis of war songs
    • 4.2Textual analysis of lyrics
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18059.gha
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