Ashraf symbolized a “nascent historical being” called a revolutionary Mojahed woman

AshrafRajavi was one of the pioneering women in the struggle of Iranian people duringthe regimes of the Shah and Khomeini. She was a student at Sharif Industrial University in Tehran. To join the ranks of the struggle against the regime of the Shah, she quit the university and worked full time for 

the resistance.

She married Mr. Massoud Rajavi in 1980 and continued her political activities as a vanguard of the struggle for freedom within PMOI. Finally, in a savage attack upon a PMOI base in Tehran by Khomeini’s revolutionary guards on February 8th 1981 she was martyred along with Moussa Khiabani, the second in command for the PMOI, as well as a number of other PMOI members.

In her successful revolutionary life, as well as in her unforgettable saga of martyrdom, Ashraf symbolized a “nascent historical being” called a revolutionary Mojahed woman; women who joined the ranks of the struggle in the thousands and brilliantly shined in this resistance.

Prominent revolutionary vanguards are not just a single person, rather, they symbolize the aspirations and values of a people and a revolution; they represent the suffering and the spilled-blood of those who fought for freedom with all they had through all their might. Along with her revolutionary characteristics, Ashraf was full of love for her comrades. In a letter to her husband Massoud Rajavi, she writes:

 “…with all our children, with all my beloved ones, with all my most cherished, those who are heroically martyred, I am always with them, I get tortured with them, I cry out with them, I die with them and I come back to life with them. I don’t know what to do with this fire that has engulfed all my body from the head to the deep of my bones; I don’t think this fire will ever die out. In these conditions, dying is easier than to live. When I hear the news of the fallen, believe me, I go to sleep with their memories and wake up with their memories and I live with the hope to avenge them. My tears don’t allow me to write. Forgive me if the handwriting is not good or unreadable. It is as if my body can no longer tolerate this restless soul, I want to fly and go, to go where the children are, to those sisters that had no place to sleep at night and now they are comfortably sleeping in their graves. How can one resolve this contradiction, for how long can one hold the water in a spring? World did not learn what happened to our nation in these months. I believe, in the culture of nations, there are no words to describe what is happening here. It is as if a new culture needs to be invented.”

 Ashraf learned martyrdom and the path to struggle and sacrifice one’s life during the years of resistance against the Shah and came to accept it. She even gave up her child in this struggle…that is much harder than sacrificing one’s own life. During the heat of the struggle, in the days that they could have been attacked at any time by Khomeini’s revolutionary guards, in another letter to Massoud about her child Ashraf writes:

 Yes, when Ashraf talks about martyrdom and giving one’s life for her people, contrary to frozen mindsets that are incapable of comprehending the logic of revolution; it is not an ideology of death or passively seeking martyrdom, it is in fact a love for humanity, love for freedom, love for life, and a deep love for her compatriots, especially the Iranian women and children that bring her to resist and sacrifice for them. It is so that Ashraf Rajavi is truly an eternal symbol for the Iranian woman who 

has chosen the path of struggle.