Coat of arms of Iran

The coat of arms of Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution features a stylized Perso-Arabic script of the word "Allah" ("God") and also "La ilaha ill Allah" (There is no God other than Allah).

The logo consists of four crescents and a sword. The four crescents are meant to stand for the word Allah, and at the same time, an overlaid "La ilaha illa Allah" (There is no God but Allah). The five parts of the emblem symbolize the Principles of the Religion. Above the sword is a shadda: in Arabic script, this is used to double a letter, here it doubles the strength of the sword. The shape of the emblem is chosen to resemble a tulip, for the memory of the people who died for Iran: it is an ancient belief in Iran, dating back to mythology, that if a young soldier dies patriotically a red tulip will grow on his grave. In recent years it has been considered the symbol of martyrdom.

The logo was designed by Hamid Nadimi, and was officially approved by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on May 9, 1980.

The logo is encoded in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Symbols range, at codepoint U+262B (unicode|☫) under the name "Persian Symbol". It is unclear why it was included in Unicode 1.0 since technically it is a logo, not a character. It is not used in Persian text and is not referred to as "Persian Symbol" outside of the Unicode standard.

ee also

*Flag of Iran
*The Lion and Sun