Taking its point of departure in the confluence of politics and literature, this paper examines one of the literary reflections of the declining influence of the political left and rise of Islamica-oriented discourse in the Arab East and Iran since the latter half of the 1970s. Following the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the country’s nearly decade-long war with Iraq, and throughout the 16 years of the Lebanese Civil War socio-political discourses on the idea of the martyr and the meaning of martyrdom shifted significantly, from one which once accommodated, broadly speaking, leftist political concerns, to one which had become dominated by Islamic themes. Focusing on the figure of the martyr, this paper will center on literary depictions of the evolving nature of martyrdom in the contexts of the Iran-Iraq War and the Lebanese Civil War in Arabic and Persian novels. By identifying martyrdom as a common theme, historically, socially and politically in both Iran and Lebanon, the paper will examine how Iranian and Lebanese novelists have attempted to write out the changing dynamic of martyrdom in their literary works. Focusing primarily on the works of Rashid al-Daif and Elias Khoury in Lebanon, and Shahriar Mandanipour and Ahmad Mahmoud in Iran, the paper will compare significant overlapping trends in contemporary Arabic and Persian war novels that reflect the changing socio-political discourse of martyrdom, the martyr, and the figure of the freedom fighter in Lebanese and Iranian novels in the last three decades. Critically, the paper will also call attention to the possibilities of comparison between modern Arabic and Persian literatures on the basis of shared aesthetic responses to common political trends that have affected Iran and the Arab World in recent history, a strikingly absent approach in the studies of both modern Arabic and Persian literatures.