On February 28, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated in a joint US–Israeli strike that opened the second war with Iran in 2026. According to American reports, Khamenei had asked the Assembly of Experts, during the first war in June 2025, to prepare to choose a successor for him. The same reports add that Khamenei himself nominated three clerics as alternative options in the event of his assassination. Indeed, the Assembly needed no lengthy deliberations after the assassination: on March 9, 2026 (barely a week later) it was announced that Mojtaba Khamenei would take over the position from his father, amid rare public objections inside Iran, which argued that this hereditary transfer reproduced the very model of the Shah’s rule that the revolution had risen to overthrow, alongside reports of heavy pressure exerted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to have Mojtaba installed quickly. 

On March 4, 2026, it was announced that Khamenei’s funeral (originally scheduled to be held that same month over three days in Tehran, Qom, and Mashhad) would be postponed because of the continuing war; the funeral rites were not held until nearly four months after the assassination. On June 13, the “Committee for Commemorating the Ascension of the Martyred Imam, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husseini Khamenei” announced, in Statement No. 3, the following funeral program: Saturday and Sunday, July 4 and 5, farewell ceremonies at the “Grand Musalla of Tehran” (also called the “Imam Khomeini Musalla,” per the statement); Monday, July 6, the funeral procession in Tehran; and Tuesday, July 7, in the city of Qom. Burial would take place on Thursday, July 9, at the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shi’ism, in the city of Mashhad, following funeral rites held there. According to the statement, that Thursday coincides with 24 Muharram, the eve of the “martyrdom of Imam al-Sajjad” (Ali ibn al-Husayn, the fourth Shia imam).

The statement made no mention of a funeral procession for Khamenei in Karbala and Najaf on July 8 (suggesting his procession through Iraq was not a foregone conclusion from the outset). The announcement that he would be honored in Iraq came only during a press conference held by the organizing committee on June 22, at which committee spokesman Iman Attarzadeh said the Iraq leg was “a response to the request of clerics, tribes, and Iraqi elites.” In practice, the body would travel from Tehran south to Qom, then cross the western border into Iraq, where it would be received officially at Najaf International Airport ahead of processions in Najaf and Karbala, before returning to Iran to complete the burial rites.

What stands out is not the number of mourners, nor the scale and manner of the broadcast and the attention paid to the event. What stands out is that every detail of this event was carefully studied and designed (from the sites chosen for the procession and burial, through the Quranic verses recited, to the absence and presence of certain figures, most notably the absence of the current Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei). And because the ceremonies were held four months after the question of power and succession had already been settled, the question here is not “who rules, or will rule, Iran?” but rather: why weren’t the six days of mourning used to formally introduce the new leader? In other words: why didn’t this event become an occasion to break Mojtaba Khamenei’s absence, as Iran’s new leader, at a moment that would, in principle, seem an ideal occasion to end an absence that had persisted since he assumed power? According to extensive Western coverage that tracked its details, the funeral was not conducted as a mere protocol event marking the death of the country’s supreme leader. It was instead managed as a fully integrated political operation, whose organizers deliberately packed it, to the maximum extent possible, with religious and mythological symbolism carrying political messages (local and regional) all serving a single purpose: preventing Khamenei’s killing from becoming a question about the future of the Iranian regime.

The timing of the funeral was not chosen at random; it was as deliberate as it was natural and predictable, given the nature of Iran’s Shia system and the religious-political doctrine that governs it. Delaying the funeral to the month of Muharram (the month tied to the great foundational moment of Shia thought, the Battle of Karbala) can hardly be attributed to logistics; it is closer to being the very thread that connects the event to its objectives. This does not mean the funeral would have failed to achieve these goals, or that Shia religious symbolism would have lost its effect, had it been held in another month (only that holding it in Muharram allowed these symbols to operate, so to speak, at maximum capacity).

Before the program above was announced, the organizing committee had said, in Statement No. 2 on June 9, 2026, that the funeral would take place after the tenth day of Muharram, the day on which Shia Muslims commemorate the killing of Hussein ibn Ali in Karbala. Tehran’s mayor, Alireza Zakani, likewise said that postponing the ceremonies until after the tenth of Muharram was meant to allow believers to complete the Ashura rites. These statements followed circulating reports that Iran had intended to hold Khamenei’s funeral in the first days of Muharram. Regardless of whether this apparent inconsistency was intentional, delaying the funeral to the second ten days of Muharram achieved two main objectives.

The first ten days of Muharram are known to be the days when emotional intensity peaks; after the tenth day, that intensity begins, so to speak, to return to a state of calm. In this sense, Khamenei’s funeral added another week to ten days of amplified emotional charge. The second objective was to erect a barrier preventing Khamenei’s funeral from being framed or read as competing with Ashura itself. The number of pilgrims who visited Karbala for Ashura this year reached roughly five million, while projections suggest the Arba’een commemoration of Hussein could draw around fifteen million visitors. Postponing the funeral to the second ten days thus made it possible to use the entire month as a ready-made ritual frame to receive and absorb a new event without competing with Ashura for attention.

What further amplified the general Shia imagination’s capacity to summon the Karbala episode (with its symbols and characters) onto present reality is that Khamenei was not killed alone. The same strike also killed his daughter Boshra, his son-in-law Mesbah al-Hoda Bagheri Kani, his son Mojtaba’s wife Zahra Haddad Adel, and (most significantly) Khamenei’s granddaughter, Zahra Mohammadi Golpaygani, roughly fourteen months old. The family’s coffins were displayed alongside Khamenei’s own at the Grand Musalla of Tehran, where delegations entered and took their final look at the coffins. Faced with the image of an entire “Imam’s” family killed (from grandfather to granddaughter) being mourned together in the month of Muharram, anyone versed in the Shia tradition would find it hard to ignore the direct echo of the Karbala episode, in which Hussein was not killed alone but alongside his household, including his infant son Abdullah. Nor is it easy for the general Shia imagination (cultivated and instilled in its adherents by the Iranian regime since 1979) to avoid drawing this connection between Tehran and Karbala, between Ali Khamenei and Imam Hussein, even without it ever being stated outright. The Iranian regime therefore has no need to declare this link explicitly: the official messaging accompanying the funeral process was itself deeply engaged in an intensive deployment of religious and mythological symbolism to craft political messages, and the image of the “leader/Imam” and his “family/household” killed together was one of the most powerful tools of this deployment. Hussein’s tragedy is now narrated as though it were being literally and factually re-enacted (not merely evoked metaphorically) as an ongoing continuation of the Karbala injustice and of the narrative of struggle between truth and falsehood, good and evil, on which Iran’s revolutionary discourse has rested since 1979.

It is worth noting that similar re-enactments and projections occurred at the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s former secretary-general, on February 23, 2025 (a funeral that practically spanned two days, with the actual procession beginning on the night of February 23, in a scene where the Shia imagination re-enacted the state of Sayyida Zainab bint Ali on the eve of the tenth of Muharram, the night that Nasrallah’s own funeral eve came to represent). What stands out is that, in Nasrallah’s case, the projection was limited to “Hussein and his companions”: the leadership of Hezbollah’s Radwan unit, assassinated together on September 20, 2024, stood in for the companions of Hussein killed alongside him at Karbala (even though the unit’s leaders were not killed with Nasrallah in a single strike). Still, that representation was present in the general Shia imagination. Khamenei’s funeral, by contrast, extended to represent “Hussein and his household,” and this representation carried even greater force, since its core elements were all present at once: the entire family, dying together, and dying by violence in what amounted to a battle.

Most states hold funerals for their leaders over a day or two at most. Even the funeral of Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, took place over June 5–6, 1989, and the delay in his burial on June 6 was due to crowds spiraling out of control, leaving 8 dead and 500 injured in a stampede. Put differently, Iran’s decision to stretch the funeral rites across six days in time (July 4–9) and five stops in space across two countries (Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala, Mashhad) is not a decision produced by logistics alone (whoever can organize a funeral procession that crosses international borders can certainly hold it in a shorter span). It is true that the numbers involved, estimated between 12 and 20 million participants, would be difficult to organize and absorb in a single day, especially given the organizers’ prior experience with Khomeini’s funeral (meaning the operational function of stretching the event across time and space was genuinely present in the organizers’ calculations). But this does not negate that this long stretch was also deliberate and calculated, as though reflecting a will to have the funeral proceed unhurriedly, meeting the mourners’ and observers’ enthusiasm and emotional charge with a certain coolness and “durability” to the procession that sustains those feelings (as if left to run for as long as possible without reaching the critical point at which it would lose its dignity). Mourning, receiving delegations, prayer, processions in Tehran and Qom, a pause in Iran before completing the procession in Iraq, a return to Iran to finish the procession, then burial. Every additional day means longer attention from local and global audiences and observers, means a deeper imprint on memory, and (most importantly) means one more day of deferring any question about who governs after Khamenei, or about the regime itself.

This prolongation of the funeral is very close to what the British anthropologist Victor Turner called the “liminal phase” or “liminal space” (that is, the moment when a community has exited its old general order but has not yet entered a new one, so that ritual, in this in-between state, becomes a tool for managing this suspended transition, more than merely an occasion for celebration or mourning alone). Prolonging this phase (whether by delaying or extending the funeral) gives the state/regime a greater opportunity and more time to monopolize the definition of what the leader’s absence means, before public opinion takes it upon itself to define that meaning instead.

The choice of the “Imam Khomeini Musalla” was neither accidental nor a mere logistical detail. The musalla itself is a foundational space: it bears this name in honor of Iran’s first Supreme Leader; it is the mosque where the official Eid prayer is held, with Khamenei himself leading worshippers; and it is where major sermons have been delivered (indeed, it is the very mosque where Khamenei delivered his famous Arabic-language eulogy for Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, on October 4, 2024). It is also worth noting that the mosque’s design is not confined to modern Iranian architecture: its designer drew on various spaces once considered part of Iran’s historical sphere of influence, particularly in the old imperial eras, such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, and others. This site thus combines a direct sensory link between Khamenei and the founder of the Islamic Republic, while also connecting to Iran’s Islamic and imperial history (in addition to serving as a political and religious center and platform).

In the musalla, no official (neither the president nor senior commanders) competed for the center of the frame. The center belonged to the coffin alone, in a space heavy with black in its curtains and its banners calling for vengeance. Strikingly, these black banners, inscribed in Arabic with “O for the vengeance of Hussein” (Ya la-Tharat al-Hussein), which appeared in the delegation reception hall, were placed alongside the Iranian flags in a deliberate arrangement, not simply next to every Iranian flag indiscriminately. To the right of the coffins’ display area stood a giant Iranian flag, followed by an image of Khamenei’s clenched fist in red and black bearing the slogan “Rise for God” (Qumu Lillah, an image that has since become the official emblem of the funeral). Next came a series of Iranian flags smaller than the large one, with a black vengeance banner placed between each. The same arrangement appeared to the left of the coffins’ platform. In addition, the wall facing the coffins held something resembling a mihrab, with three black banners plus an inscription in Persian, in green and red (the colors of the Iranian flag) reading “Aqa-ye Shahid-e Iran” (“Sir, Martyr of Iran”). All of this suggests that vengeance was, first and foremost, a message aimed at the visiting delegations.

Nor were there giant screens cycling through successive images, as happens at many modern ceremonies; instead, a kind of deliberate visual economy prevailed, whereby reducing the number of elements shown on screen granted greater power and presence to the few elements that were displayed. Visual symbolism was not confined to the coffin alone: according to a report published by Al Jazeera, a giant red banner was raised over the entire musalla building, alongside the image of Khamenei’s clenched fist, which the organizing committee described in Statement No. 4 as follows: “This ‘clenched fist,’ which serves as the official emblem of this unique-in-an-era funeral, is not merely a symbol; it is the crystallization of that same merciful hand of the Father of the Nation, which repeatedly confronted global arrogance and never trembled, and opened only for God.” The statement also quotes Mojtaba Khamenei as saying: “I had the honor of visiting his pure body after his martyrdom; what I saw was a mountain of firmness, and I heard that his intact fist was clenched tightly.”

The banner draping Khamenei’s coffin was not a generic Hosseini banner. According to a report published by Al Jazeera, this very banner had previously been raised over the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala. The phrase written on it, and on the other banners, was “Ya la-Tharat al-Hussein” (a call or demand for vengeance for the blood of Hussein ibn Ali). This is one of the most deeply rooted phrases in Shia tradition, and banners bearing it carry more symbolic, historical, and mythological weight than any other banner. This particular phrase binds together history and a promised future: it was the slogan raised by the “Revolt of the Penitents” (Tawwabin) in 65 AH (considered the first uprising to demand vengeance for Hussein’s blood) and it was likewise the slogan of Mukhtar al-Thaqafi’s revolt in 66 AH.¹ According to Shia narrative tradition, this phrase is also the slogan of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, when he emerges at the end of time demanding vengeance for Hussein and his household. Senior Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian and army chief Amir Hatami, have affirmed their right to avenge Khamenei’s killing and vowed to do so. Among the meanings these banners carry is that this battle of vengeance is an extended battle, or something akin to a permanent war (just as the wars of vengeance for Hussein and his household have stretched from the Tawwabin movement, through Mukhtar al-Thaqafi, to the Mahdi, who will lead the last wars on this earth at the end of time). Put differently, the full picture (choosing the month of Muharram, displaying Khamenei’s coffin alongside his family’s coffins) is completed by the banner, which does not merely summon Karbala as a tragedy to be recalled, but as the beginning of a “permanent revolution,” an open account that never closes. Just as vengeance for Hussein’s killing did not end with the killing of his killers, but turned into a centuries-long project of vengeance in Shia memory that remains open, to be closed only by the awaited Mahdi, the banner places Khamenei’s killing on the same path: not an ending, but the beginning of an open account whose timing and means remain unknown. By some readings, this ambiguity is itself part of the message: the threat stands, with no set date. What is notable, however, is that Iran’s vengeance banner is usually red, not black: after the assassinations of Qassem Soleimani and Ismail Haniyeh, and even after Khamenei’s own assassination, Iran had announced its intent to avenge them by raising a red banner reading “Ya la-Tharat al-Hussein” over the Jamkaran Mosque in Qom.

¹ Some authoritative Shia sources note that the slogan of Mukhtar al-Thaqafi’s revolt was actually “Ya Ahl Tharat al-Hussein” (“O People [avengers] of Hussein’s blood”).

The ceremony’s organizers arranged for delegations, after being introduced, to enter for a final look at Khamenei to the beat of funeral music that accompanied them to a designated spot, led by a reception soldier. Once the delegation took its place, the music would stop and a Quran reciter would recite a verse or a few verses (sometimes not the full verse but only a portion of it) after which the delegation would move on as the music resumed, accompanying them to where Iran’s president stood at the head of a number of officials receiving condolences; there the music would stop again, and the ceremony’s announcer would thank the delegation. Between one group of delegations and the next, there was a pause during which one or two Quranic verses were recited before a new batch of delegations was received. The subject of which verses were recited for each delegation received considerable (perhaps the largest) share of the coverage and analysis following the funeral, since this was unprecedented in modern Islamic history and a marked departure from convention in both Shia and Sunni Islamic culture.

A study of the verses recited for the 43 delegations shows that they were drawn from 12 different surahs. Some surahs recurred repeatedly: verses from Surat Al Imran, for instance, were recited for 14 delegations; Surat al-Fath for 7 delegations; al-Nisa for 6; al-Baqara for 4; and al-Ahzab for 4. Notably, the vast majority of these verses are Medinan, with only a small portion being Meccan. Medinan verses are known to carry far greater social and political weight than Meccan ones, and the Medinan period in the Prophet Muhammad’s life effectively marks the beginning of Islam’s ascendance, after being persecuted and weakened in Mecca. This is the source of Iran’s insistence on calling Khamenei the “Imam of the Downtrodden” (Imam al-Mustad’afin), an explicit throwback to the earliest revolutionary literature, even as the word “mustad’afin” has grown fainter and rarer in everyday discourse. Overall, the verses drew on a limited set of semantic fields: martyrdom and the afterlife; conquest and divine victory; steadfastness and refusal to surrender to grief; jihad and fulfilling covenants; in addition to descriptive fields characterizing the state of “believers” and “unbelievers.” A relatively small number carried a directly political character, appearing especially with delegations assigned specific verses, while many other delegations shared the same verses among themselves.

The overarching message of these verses recalls the words attributed to Abu Bakr after the Prophet’s death: “Whoever worshipped Muhammad, Muhammad has died; whoever worships God, God is alive and does not die.” Iran’s message here is not simply that Khamenei died and the project continues; it is that his death, in this particular manner, is a fresh impetus for the project and the start of a new phase resembling the Medinan period in Islamic history. The general Shia imagination is, by nature, capable of absorbing the killing of its leaders and re-presenting it as a re-founding of the idea (a notion that surfaced in a joke circulated after Mojtaba Khamenei’s selection was announced: “Trump killed Khamenei at 87, so Khamenei came back at 56,” or “Khamenei came back young”). This sense of continuity emerged in several places, including the recitation of “Think not of those who are killed in the way of God as dead; rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision” before the official Iranian delegation specifically, while what was recited before, for instance, the Popular Mobilization Forces delegation was: “And say not of those who are slain in the way of God, ‘They are dead.’ Nay, they are living, though you perceive it not.” Before the official Iranian delegation, the meaning of the event’s “returns” appeared in the word “receiving provision,” whereas the second verse focuses on the continuity of life itself without referring to returns or victory. This may also be reflected in the timing of the burial to coincide with the anniversary of the death of Ali ibn al-Husayn, the fourth Imam, who embodies the continuity of the Imamate through the line of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib and Sayyida Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, after the Karbala episode.

Surat al-Nasr was also recited in full before the delegation of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Bafel Jalal Talabani. This surah is known, in certain received exegeses, to signal the approaching completion of the Prophet’s message and his death (making it one of the choices most clearly signaling that Khamenei’s departure was being framed as the “completion of a mission,” not its “interruption”).

Notably, one of the pauses saw the recitation of verses from Surat Al Imran [151–152], which discuss the Battle of Uhud and include explicit self-criticism directed at the Muslims themselves, before closing on divine forgiveness (among the most striking texts on the entire list, introducing a note of internal accountability, however fleeting, into a scene otherwise composed almost entirely in the language of certainty and victory). It is also worth noting that in the countries where Iran maintains armed proxies (Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Palestine) the verses recited for delegations from these factions differed in their messages and meanings from the verses recited for the official state delegations of those same countries.

The most prominent verse of all accompanied the deputy Saudi foreign minister [Al Imran, 13], which divides the regional scene into “one party fighting in the way of God, and another disbelieving.” According to exegesis, this verse relates to the Battle of Badr, one of the earliest, most prominent, and most decisive battles fought by the Muslims. When this stark duality is recited specifically before a Saudi delegation, at the height of a diplomatic normalization track following years of estrangement and proxy conflict, its significance is hard to confine to abstract historical meaning alone. This tension becomes even more concrete when one recalls that the recent war did not spare Saudi territory itself: in March 2026, Iran struck Prince Sultan Air Base inside the Kingdom with ballistic missiles and drones, wounding more than fifteen American soldiers and damaging aircraft and equipment. That strike was not presented as targeting the Kingdom, but rather “American forces and interests” on its soil (a careful distinction Tehran maintained rhetorically even at the height of the bombardment). This lends an additional resonance to the verse “one party fighting in the way of God, and another disbelieving” when it is recited before the delegation of a country whose territory was in fact struck (not merely one of the West’s allies) under that same legal designation. Al Jazeera itself noted that the choice of this particular verse “was interpreted by analysts in more than one way,” reinforcing methodological caution against reading it as an unambiguous, intent-bearing message. By contrast, the Verse of the Night Journey [al-Isra, 1] was invoked for the delegation of Palestinian clerics, cementing the link between the Palestinian cause and the project of the Islamic Republic.

The only break in this scene’s discipline came from the Khomeini family delegation, led by his grandson Hassan, who left before the verse assigned to them finished being recited, and whose members did not raise their hands for the Fatiha reading. This was interpreted as an objection to the verse being recited: “Not equal are those believers who sit [at home], other than the disabled, and the mujahideen who strive in the way of God with their wealth and their persons” (the delegation left at this point). A small protocol detail, but the exception that reveals that the total discipline running through everything described above was not spontaneous in nature, but a carefully controlled decision.

² These delegations were: the Hezbollah delegation with families, the delegation of Pakistan’s prime minister, the Uzbek delegation, the Armenian delegation, the Egyptian delegation, the Georgian delegation, the Hezbollah delegation led by Mahmoud Qmatii, the Namibian delegation, the Saudi delegation, the Kazakh delegation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation delegation, the delegation of the chairman of the Senate of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Lebanese delegation represented by its defense minister, the Bafel Jalal Talabani delegation, the Congo-Brazzaville delegation, the Sri Lankan delegation, the Amal Movement delegation, the Houthi delegation, the Palestinian clerics’ delegation, the delegation of the Speaker of Iraq’s Council of Representatives, and the Iraqi Hezbollah delegation.

Official delegations from major regional states, alongside representatives of factions and organizations “allied” with Iran, all entered nearly the same scene. Despite the massive presence, the ceremonies did not turn into a diplomatic summit, nor were handshake photos presented as the core message (even though this was perhaps the first time in Iran’s history that such a range of state and group representation gathered together, and even though the state’s rhetoric did not shift in the face of the diversity of the outside world present in Iran). The message here ran deeper than mourning. Iran did not present the world to its own public; it presented itself to the world (on its own terms and in its own language). It was not, therefore, seeking external recognition from the world so much as demonstrating that it possesses its own symbolic space and inviting others to enter it, without changing its rules for anyone’s sake.

The absence of Iran’s new leader from the funeral proceedings was the single most striking detail. Although his selection as Supreme Leader had been announced some months before the funeral, Mojtaba Khamenei remained entirely outside the frame: no direct appearance marking a ceremonial moment of his emergence, no pre-recorded direct address (only written messages sent from a distance). All of this absence is justified as avoidance of direct security threats. But the security rationale alone does not explain why the regime chose this total silence instead of the limited, guarded appearances other governments facing similar threats typically make (especially since senior state and Revolutionary Guard leadership did appear, even though the threats surrounding these figures, particularly the Guard’s top commanders, are hardly less dangerous than those surrounding the new leader). Put more precisely, the gap is not wide enough to justify these officials appearing after their own long absences while Mojtaba Khamenei’s absence continued.

This absence, this occultation (ghayba), reflects neither weakness nor an incapacity to appear so much as a conscious, deliberate investment in a deeply rooted Shia imaginary: the imaginary of ghayba, in which a leader need not be sensorially present to be worthy of allegiance and obedience. It is enough that people “pledged allegiance” to Mojtaba without knowing much about him at all, since his media presence before assuming the position had been rare. In Shia thought and sentiment, the absent Imam remains a standing authority to which people cling despite his being hidden from view. When Mojtaba Khamenei chooses to be present through writing rather than image, through a message that is read rather than a sermon that is heard, he thereby invokes (whether deliberately or not) the very same symbolic pattern that accompanied the awaited Mahdi during his Minor Occultation, in which, according to Shia tradition, his communication with his followers was limited to four envoys who conveyed his messages and instructions.

This calculated absence also softens the force of domestic objections to the fact that the position passed by hereditary succession from father to son (something at odds with official rhetoric, which grounds the regime’s legitimacy in the revolution’s continuity rather than in heredity) with some even arguing that Mojtaba lacks the qualifications required of a Supreme Leader. When Mojtaba does not appear in a place of celebration, it becomes harder to portray the moment as the coronation of a crown prince succeeding his father. The absence attempts to draw a line distinguishing the Iranian system from monarchies, where the heir typically stands in the front row from the very first moment, because the required message there is the continuity of the throne. Here, by contrast, the new leadership remained outside the center of the frame, while the state kept repeating, through the elements of ritual alone, that continuity resides in the system, not in the person.

Khamenei will not be buried in the capital, Tehran, where he wielded power for more than three decades, nor beside the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, in the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery (a choice that would have reinforced a direct image of continuity between founder and successor) nor in Qom, the center of Iran’s religious seminary establishment. Instead, his final journey traced five stops: Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala, and finally a return to his birthplace, Mashhad, where he will be buried at the shrine of Imam Reza (after a journey that took him outside Iran for the first time since he assumed the position of Supreme Leader in 1989, and for the last time he will ever cross Iran’s political geography).

This route is not merely geographic; it is a graduated symbolic passage through successive levels of legitimacy: from the modern state and its institutions in the capital, Tehran; to the center of Iranian religious authority in Qom; then to Najaf, the seat of Shia religious authority (marja’iyya) that, together with Qom, forms one of the twin poles of the Shia world, and where the shrine of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib lies (that is, the point of connection to Shia doctrine itself); then to Karbala, which condenses the foundational martyrdom narrative of Shia thought; and finally back to sacred memory in a city that does not define itself as a political or seminary center, nor as Khamenei’s birthplace, but rather as a city of pilgrimage and visitation. The body’s actual passage through the very city where the Karbala episode took place does not merely evoke the Hosseini narrative metaphorically (it embodies it physically, reinforcing the religious language that governed the ceremonies from their very first day). The final message of this route was clear: the leader exited the position of governance and political decision-making, to enter a more enduring position (that of memory and pilgrimage).

When a political system loses its most prominent leader, it faces a limited set of options that other systems have already tested. In the Vatican, the pope’s funeral does not represent the climax of the event but only its first phase; institutional procedures for electing his successor via the Conclave begin immediately, so public attention remains split between bidding farewell to the deceased and anticipating the one to come. At the funeral of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, by contrast, the crowds slipped entirely beyond the state’s ability to control them, and the procession was repeatedly disrupted under the pressure of participants, turning popular emotion itself into the center of the event. And when the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, was buried in 1989, crowds overran the gravesite and organizers were forced to repeat the burial rites (a scene captured by cameras worldwide, reflecting that revolutionary charisma, at that time, still outpaced the young state’s institutional structure).

None of these three patterns recurred at Khamenei’s funeral. The ceremonies left no room for a succession question as in the Vatican, since succession had already been settled; the crowds, despite their unprecedented density, were not allowed to reshape the rhythm of the event as happened with Abdel Nasser; and the chaos of 1989 was not repeated, even though today’s numbers exceed those who took part in Khomeini’s funeral. This difference reveals the state’s transition from a phase of revolutionary legitimacy (which needs to prove itself through the spontaneity of crowds) to a phase of institutional and symbolic legitimacy, which proves itself through its capacity to produce a tightly controlled ritual that never slips from its grip.

It is fair to say that the Iranian regime did not organize a funeral so much as manage the transition of a person from the position of power and decision-making to the position of symbolic authority underpinning the legitimacy of the state and the system. Every detail of this event worked in one direction: transforming the leader’s death from a potential rupture into additional material sustaining the founding narrative of the Islamic Republic since 1979.

As these lines are being written, preparations are underway to return the body to its final stop in Mashhad. Yet the purpose of these ceremonies had already been fulfilled before the grave was sealed. From the moment the state chose to turn six days of mourning into a complete, integrated text (not a mere protocol marking a leader’s death) it became clear that the real stake was never the man’s body or his physical presence, but the narrative that would carry his name forward after his passing.

This, perhaps, is the lesson that extends beyond the Iranian case: systems built on doctrinal authority do not fear the death of their leaders so much as they fear losing the meaning that grants them their position. When leaders’ deaths align with the community’s narrative, and when that community succeeds in turning such a death into a tightly controlled ritual, it loses nothing by its leaders’ deaths (it instead produces fresh legitimacy from the very heart of what first appeared to be a moment of loss). That is what happened in the Iranian case, with one additional item left standing without an official date: the vengeance the banner itself promised.

This promise of vengeance, it should be noted, is no exception in the history of the Iranian regime, despite Khamenei’s own exceptional stature. It is one more link in a long chain of open-ended promises the regime has used to tighten its internal grip since its founding: beginning with the promise to liberate Jerusalem, with no clear specification of when that liberation would occur; continuing through the vow of vengeance for Qassem Soleimani, which in the first days after his assassination amounted only to strikes on two American bases in Iraq with no human casualties, before later being recast as the expulsion of American forces from the region representing the “long-term strategy” of retaliation; and not ending with the vows of vengeance for Iranian commanders killed during the two most recent wars. This long chain reveals that the true purpose of such promises is not to fulfill them, but to keep them alive: an unclosing horizon, an unaccomplished goal, an aim that in practice becomes a means of giving the regime a renewable pretext to mobilize its public, and a legitimacy that grants the system’s continuity added meaning as well as “credibility” before its audience. Vengeance for Khamenei, in this sense, is not an exceptional item (it is a major addition to a large ledger of open accounts).

It is no secret that the funeral ceremonies and their symbolism carry, at their core, a single meaning: the emergence of a new phase now taking shape. Nor is it any secret that new phases are, more often than not, built on blood (and, in some cases, cannot be built except through blood). Faced with all this, a legitimate question remains: will the blood spilled in past wars be the price of this new phase? Or do these symbols instead prepare the public to receive a new war in which it will not lose new historical leaders (because it has already lost them)? Questions addressed to a future as uncertain as the promised date of vengeance for the Supreme Leader.