Western national iconography, while continuing
the well-established tradition of representing the
nation as a woman. They also have a resemblance
to Arab-Islamic cultural narratives of women who
encourage, shame, or even lead men into battle.
Shortly after the Iraqi revolution of 1958, the new
regime issued a stamp with the image of a woman
carrying a torch and followed by two men whose
fists are raised in rebellion. The woman clearly rep-
resents freedom and leads two main elements of the
Iraqi nation – the tribes and the peasantry – into the
modern, postcolonial era. But viewed in the con-
text of well-known narratives of resistance in Iraq,
in which a single woman is often “the spark that
kindles the flame” of revolt, either in the back-
ground or as a leader, the image takes on additional
resonance.
In a much more grandiose production, the post-
revolutionary government commissioned Jawàd
Salìm to build the “Monument to Liberty,” an
enormous sculpture in Baghdad’s Liberation Square
that tells the epic of the revolution. It includes two
women representing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
a female figure symbolizing liberty, mother figures
curled around a male martyr and a newborn child,
a tribal woman in a wailing pose, her arms raised in
grief and/or rage, and two figures of mixed gender
representing political demonstrators. The woman
demonstrator marches one stride ahead of the man,
both fists raised in the air, her face turned toward
the monument’s viewers; the two seem perfectly
matched in physical strength and forward momen-
tum. The female figure was instantly recognized by
Iraqi commentators not only as a symbol of the
new nation’s future but also as a representative of
its recent past; women had participated in the
rebellions of 1920, 1948, 1952, and 1956, and sto-
ries of female leaders and martyrs had developed
into local legends. The sculpture shows some of the
ways that national imagination can combine local,
Western, and Arab gendered iconography, resonat-
ing in familiar ways on multiple levels, while also
signaling new modes of conceptualizing both gen-
der and nation.BibliographyPrimary Sources
Arab Postal Union General Secretariat, Arab postal
stamps catalogue, Cairo 1976.
Itti™àd al-Sha≠b, Baghdad 1959.Secondary Sources
B. Baron, Egypt as a woman. Nationalists, gender and
politics, University of California Press (forthcoming).
S. al-Khalil, The monument. Art, vulgarity and responsi-
bility in Iraq, Berkeley 1991.524 national insignia, signs, and monuments
J. Massad, Colonial effects. The making of national iden-
tity in Jordan, New York 2001.
L. Wedeen, Ambiguities of domination. Politics, rhetoric,
and symbols in contemporary Syria, Chicago 1999.Beth Baron and Sara PursleyIranIn Iran the most important iconic sign of modern
nation/statehood has been the Lion and Sun
emblem. When first adopted in 1836 by Mu™am-
mad Shàh Qàjàr (r. 1834–48) as the official emblem
of the Iranian state, the lion was male, the sun
(fe)male, that is, a beautiful face, which in Qàjàr
iconography could be either male or female. Over
the following decades the sun burst into a magnifi-
cent Qàjàrìface and the lion became more mas-
culinized (see Figure 2). By the early twentieth
century, however, the sun gradually lost hair and
distinct facial features. These were permanently
erased some time in 1935/6. By the late 1970s, the
emblem was fully geometrized (see Figure 3). In the
aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, the Lion and
Sun, deemed an icon of monarchy, was replaced by
a calligraphic depiction of “There is no god but
Allah.”
The Lion and Sun’s genealogy is variously nar-
rated as pre-Islamic (Zoroastrian) or as Central
Asian Turkic. It is affiliated with the sign system of
astrological tables, and stands for Shì≠ìloyalty to
≠Alìthrough one of his given names, Asadallàh,
God’s lion. In the Qàjàr period, the emblem appears
on Jewish wedding documents (ketubas), and on
Shì≠ìbanners for Mu™arram processions. This enor-
mous traffic in signs between different sites of rep-
resentation accounts for the Lion and Sun’s unique
success as the sign of modern Iranian-ness. It is hard
to find any other modern icon of Iranian-ness that
belongs to as many domains of signification, bring-
ing together Zoroastrian, Jewish, Shì≠ì, Turkish,
and Persian symbolics.
The metamorphosis of the Lion and Sun emblem
coincided with a period of cultural change in Iran
when beauty was feminized. The sun’s gender was
correspondingly consolidated as female. Its efface-
ment thus makes a paradoxical statement about the
gender of modernity. During the very same period
in which real women became more publicly visible
in Iranian society, the symbolic sun of the national
emblem was effaced as it became more identified as
female. In fact, Reza Shah’s (r. 1926–41) order to
erase the sun’s facial features occurred within a year
of his order for compulsory unveiling of women in
public (1936).