This NYT story look at how Iran's religious and national identities are practically inseparable, and links that reality to the current conflicts over the Muhammad cartoons and the nuclear issue.

Some excerpts:

A drummer pounded out a thumping rhythm as a procession of hundreds of men and boys marched through a cemetery here, past the black and white photographs adorning the graves of those who died fighting Iraq. With each bang of the drum, the men and boys — some small children — pivoted and swung chains over their shoulders, pounding themselves on the back.

This is the month of Ashura, the most solemn Shiite occasion of the year, a period of annual mourning for Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. He was killed in a battle in A.D. 680, a moment that cemented the birth of Shiism and forged a set of principles which Iran defines today as its divine mandate to fight oppression and to glorify those who die doing so.

The West is not simply battling Iranians over terms of a nuclear program, or the propriety of publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. It is crashing into a religious identity that has over the centuries, even before the Islamic revolution, melded with a national identity. To many people, the nuclear issue and the caricatures represent a challenge to their faith and identity. For the government of Iran, the conflict with the West could not have come at a more opportune time, just as the religious fervor of the nation reaches a peak. Officials have tapped into that sentiment, constantly framing the conflict as a modern battle against oppression, just as Hussein faced in his day. By referring to the United States as the "World Oppressor," the president, and the leadership here, have consistently invoked the intense feelings associated with their people's deepest religious convictions, and tapped into a moral framework that pervades even the secular parts of society.

In his comments on Sunday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again portrayed the conflict as an effort by Iran to stand up against those who would deny its rights. "You can issue as many resolutions as you like and have fun with it, but you cannot prevent Iran's progress," the president said, while indicating that Iran planned to proceed with its nuclear program. "You know that you cannot do anything, because the era of bullying is over and you have to accept the realities."

That type of message was clearly evident at the Ashura procession here in Isfahan, a central Iran city that voted heavily in favor of Mr. Ahmadinejad last year and happens, coincidentally, to be the home of a uranium enrichment plant that the Iranians say they intend to ramp up.

The same message of defiance has resonated across the country, and has been amplified by the religious observances taking place in nearly every neighborhood and in every city and village. "Once again, we, the Ashuric nation of Islam, say to the Great Satan, access to peaceful nuclear technology is an obvious right, an irreversible right," Ahmed Shams, Executor of the Revolutionary Agenda in the religious center of Qum, said Friday to hundreds of men, women and children crowded into the courtyard of a shrine decorated in fiery blue tiles. "We shall not go short of any action to ensure that."

Qum is the religious center of Iran, where clerics from around the country, and the world, study Shiism. After the Friday Prayer, the streets were filled with people fuming with a sense of victimization. A protest was called for that day to declare outrage over the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which have led to a clash of values between those who say freedom of speech stops at sacrilege and those who say it does not.

The caricatures, the nuclear showdown with the West, and the message of Ashura were quickly packaged together as person after person drew on the image of Hussein driving into a battle in which he knew he would die — to stand against the oppressor.