From religious performances to martial themes
Discourses of Shi’a musical eulogies, war and politics in Iran
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.
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
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
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2024.
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Journal of War & Culture Studies ► pp. 1 ff.
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