The Changing Face of Martyrdom

We don't know much about Neda Agha Soltan. We know she was 26 years old. Some reports say she was a philosophy student. We do know that on June 20, 2009, she was watching a protest in Tehran when she was shot to death.

Because today's world is radically different from that of the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, we all saw Neda look right into the camera after friends lowered her to the ground. Then we saw her bleed. We saw her eyes go blank.

Within an hour the public face of Muslim martyrdom shifted from a plane plowing into a building, a masked man killing Russian schoolchildren or a gunman in Mumbai.

Today we see a young woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was wearing blue jeans. She could have been anyone's daughter, sister, friend.

We in the West don't understand much about the important role that sacrifice plays in Islam. And since our vision of martyrdom inspired more fear than empathy, we didn't want to know much about it.

According to Robin Wright in Time, the act of throwing off tyrants is woven into the fabric of Islam. Not only is it a Muslim's right to rebel against oppression, it's a duty.

As usual, the devil's in the details. The interpretation of the word tyrant makes all the difference. But today Muslims and non-Muslims alike are assigning the label of tyrant to Neda's killer and the regime that spawned him.

The Green Wave now has a face, and it's not Mousavi's. It's an ordinary Iranian woman, drawn to the protest by her politics or her religion or perhaps just curiosity. [Edited to add: Neda's fiance Caspian Maken gives us a few clues in his BBC Persia interview, translated into English on The Huffington Post.]

Yesterday I saw a photograph of a woman protester. She wore the traditional Muslim attire, accented with a green headband. One of her eyes was blackened, either by a personal skirmish or, more likely, makeup, in a show of solidarity. She was smiling.