The suicide bomber is in the post; THE BROADER PICTURE

In Iran, postage stamps go for the jugular. Blood, corpses, fire and martyrdom, revolution and death take their established place at the top right-hand corner of electricity bills, love letters, subscription renewals and advertising mail. A phil atelist's dream or a nightmare? For just 100 Iranian rials - about two pence - you can purchase a brightly coloured portrait of Palestinian "martyr" Fathi Shkaki at your local Iranian post office. This is the man who was assassinated by Israeli agents in Malta last year after boasting that his Islamic Jihad movement had suicide-bombed a bus-stop crowded with Israeli soldiers. Dip into a Tehran bookshop and you can buy a whole set of revolutionary stamps containing more anger, rhetoric and religion than your average postman would experience in a lifetime. The artwork is professional, its content a combination of cruel reality and myth. A dead American pilot lies cremated in the Iranian desert in 1980, after a vain mission to rescue US diplomats in Tehran, while Iraqi bombs fall on Iranian children inthe 1980-88 Gulf War; Afghan Muslim fighters parade across a map of their devastated country while Iranian Revolutionary Guards - in a flight of historical fancy - march towards the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem under a green Islamic banner. In perhaps the mo st painful and politically dramatic of all post-revolutionary Iranian postage stamps, a missile explodes against the underbelly of an Iran Air passenger jet over the Gulf in 1988; the missile, fired in error by the flustered captain of the USS Vincennes, killed 248 civilians and crew and led, within six months, to the bombing of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie. Many of Iran's stamps are copied from news agency photographs. The blackened corpse of the American pilot lying in front of his burned-out helicopter is taken from a news photo. So is the image of a blindfolded US diplomat taken hostage in America's Tehran embassy in 1980. Other stamps are more imaginative: the Iranian fighter driving, fist raised in defiance, into the fires of the Iran-Iraq war, or an entire map of Lebanon surmounted by the sy mbol of the pro-Iranian Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla army, complete with Kalashnikov rifle. Personalities have always translated easily to postage stamps. Iran's first day issues have included a set of "martyrs" from the Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. All stare out, unsmiling and bearded, in front of a Star of Da vid that covers both the Al-Aqsa mosque and a map of mandate Palestine. Mohammad Mossaddeq, the democratically elected Iranian prime minister toppled in a CIA-MI5 coup d'etat in 1953 because he dared to threaten Anglo-American oil interests, watches, gr ey-faced and gloomy, from a 1980 issue. Many Iranians believe that if Mossaddeq had survived, Iran would never have experienced an Islamic revolution. It is the old man who symbolises that titanic event who dominates Iran's philatelic art. On different stamps, Ayatollah Khomeini mournfully surveys the Iranian masses, hosts of martyrs' roses and the bayonets of American aggression, hugging childrenor a ddressing the faithful. One stamp - again taken from a news photo - shows him descending the steps of the plane which returned him to Tehran from exile in Paris, the elderly cleric leaning on the arm of the French flight attendant (now, surely, the most famous Air France steward in the world). Only the very earliest post- revolutionary issues depict the man who was flung so unceremoniously from power. Just as the Irish were forced to use British stamps in the first weeks of independence - King George V's head overstamped with "Provisional Government" - so the Shah of Iran appears on the eight-rial stamp in the immediate aftermath of his overthrow. The "King of Kings" and "Light of the Aryans" can still be made out behind prison cell bars of ink. Printed across the monarch's stamp is one word in the Persian language: "Revolution".

Ex-prime minister Dr Mossaddeq (above). Top (clockwise from top left): "Jerusalem day"; the war with Iraq; the failed US hostage rescue; a US hostage. Right (clockwise from top left): stamps honouring Hizbollah, the Afghan mujahedin, Hizbollah again; and the 1988 Iranian Airbus shooting

Left: five Palestinian Islamic 'martyrs'. Above: Iraqi bombs falling on Iranian children. Below left: one of the Afghan mujahedin (top) and (below) the UN Security Council resolution, number 598, which demanded the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Iranian territory during the 1980-88 war

Above: four tributes to the Islamic 'martyr' Fathi Shkaki, the leader of Islamic Jihad in Palestine, who was assassinated by Israeli agents in Malta last year. Far left and left: various sympathetic versions of Ayatollah Khomeini; and (near left) the Shah, overstamped with prison bars to symbolise his overthrow in the immediate aftermath of the revolution