Juan Cole Informed Comment
The multi-day funeral ceremonies for the assassinated leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ended this past week with four stages. On Monday, enormous crowds staged a procession through Tehran. On Tuesday, Khamenei’s coffin was taken to the Iranian holy city of Qom, a center of seminary life. On Wednesday, it was taken to Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, where, again, huge crowds mourned the fallen cleric. Most Iraqis do not accept the theocratic doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent put forward by his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, but many honor the leadership of great Shiite scholars and jurists. The confidence among right wing think tanks in Washington, D.C., that Iraqi Shiites are splitting with Iran was shown to be misplaced.
Khamenei was a major religious leader, followed or at least admired by many Shiites throughout the world — in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, among other places, as well as in the US, Canada, Trinidad, Argentina and other places in the Americas.
Honoring and mourning and weeping for martyrs is central to Shiite piety, and Khamenei’s funeral was steeped in these traditions.
The American public, fed pablum and largely kept ignorant by its “news” media, is wholly unaware of how much hatred these believers have for them in the wake of Khamenei’s killing.
On Thursday Khamenei was buried at the shrine of Imam Reza in the eastern city of Mashhad in Iran.
These funeral ceremonies were marked by public emotion and flagellation. For the pious, the US and Israel had murdered a great spiritual leader. But even for more secular-minded nationalists, Khamenei’s death was taken as an affront to nationalist feelings and wrought up with resentment of Western imperialism.
Al Jazeera reports of these processions and gatherings that among all the black, there were also red placards calling for blood vengeance against the perpetrators of Khamenei’s murder. Tha’r, or blood vengeance, is the right of a tribe that has seen one of its members murdered by a member of another tribe to demand the death of the perpetrator.
Some mourners in the crowds in Mashhad chanted slogans against the current Iranian civilian leadership, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, for engaging in negotiations with the murderers of Khamenei. According to the UK-based al-Quds, they chanted, “Negotiating with the enemy is treason to the nation.”
These three politicians more or less have taken over the conduct of Iranian foreign policy since Khamenei’s murder. None is a cleric, and many conservatives see them as too liberal and too willing to strike a deal with the Trump administration.
Foreign Minister Araghchi at one point had to be surrounded by his security guards as he marched with the mourners, when some of them began chanting against him as a traitor who had sold out his country and others threw water bottles and rocks in his direction.
Photo of Imam Reza Shrine, Mashhad, by Moslem Daneshzadeh on Unsplash
The American press calls such people “hard liners,” as though they are unreasonable to be upset that a foreign country casually whacked their leader from the sky. “Hard liners” in this context is anyone who does not kowtow to Washington and Tel Aviv and accept their political dominance. The US newspapers of record are now amplifying Israeli propaganda that Iran wants to assassinate Donald Trump in revenge. A lot of Iranians would love to see that happen, and some called for it during the funeral ceremonies, but assassinations of heads of state are more an Israeli policy than an Iranian one.
Iranian state television at one point muted the sound as it covered the funeral in Mashhad to prevent the broadcast of these incendiary messages. That step in itself became a scandal, causing conservatives in parliament to protest about censorship.
Al-Quds also quotes the Iranian wire service Khabar Online as complaining that Khamenei’s funeral should have been a moment of national unity, criticizing those in the crowd who tried to use it for political purposes by attacking state officials.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
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