This week, Iran is hosting a series of grand funeral processions for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His 37-year tenure as Supreme Leader ended in February when he was killed in the initial airstrike of the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict.
On Friday, the body of Ayatollah Khamenei was laid in state in a large hall in Tehran. Mourners, including clerics, officials, foreign dignitaries, and citizens, gathered to pay their final respects to Iran’s late supreme leader, who was killed in a joint strike by the United States and Israel on February 28.
The body of Khamenei is scheduled to be taken to significant Shi’ite sites in both Iran and Iraq, including Qom, Najaf, and Kerbala. His final resting place will be in Mashhad on Thursday, which is known for hosting the nation’s most revered pilgrimage site.
On Thursday evening, the casket was revealed to a sea of mourners, who emotionally swayed and beat their heads in time to mournful chants while flowers were cast into the crowd from the bier.
By Friday, the Ayatollah’s coffin, along with those of family members who perished alongside him, was placed in state within the grand prayer hall built to commemorate his forerunner, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The funeral is taking place at a critical moment for Iran, where the clerical rulers backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are riding high from surviving what they saw as an existential war against their greatest and most powerful foes.
Authorities aim to mobilise millions of people for the big processions over the coming days, offering transport, food and lodging to buoy the numbers.
But nearly five decades after the 1979 revolution, and for all the official proclamations of national unity in the run-up to Khamenei’s funeral, the Islamic Republic has rarely been so internally fractured.
Support for the clerical leadership is paper-thin, analysts say, and the new supreme leader, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in any new image since being wounded in the strike that killed his father.
Years of crippling sanctions have paralysed the economy as accelerating bouts of mass nationwide protests have been put down by security forces with increasing force, culminating in the killing of thousands of demonstrators in January.
Those deep problems have been brushed aside this week, with the authorities mounting a display of state power and mass support.
Tehran streets were tightly controlled, with military and police vehicles lining the major roads and police and members of the black-shirted volunteer Basij paramilitary force patrolling on motorbikes. Iran warned the US and Israel against any attacks during the funeral.
After the coffins arrived on Friday, borne high across the upraised hands of a waiting crowd, they were laid in the prayer hall on a white, stepped dais before a high, intricately tiled, arched recess, flanked by national and black mourning flags.
A black turban, worn by clerics claiming descent from Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, lay on the coffin on a folded chequered scarf, a symbol in Iran of militant revolutionary ideals and solidarity with Palestinians.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, Chinese National People’s Congress deputy head He Wei, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Iraqi President Nizar Amedi were among the foreign leaders and officials attending.
Families of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and senior commander Imad Mughniyeh, close Lebanese allies of Iran killed in Israeli strikes, attended the ceremony.
Iran’s own political leaders — the president, parliament speaker, foreign minister and others — filed in to weep and pray on Friday morning.
A group of generals stood saluting in front of the coffin. Among them was the new Revolutionary Guards head Ahmad Vahidi, having not appeared in public since his appointment for fear of assassination.
Sobbing crowds
In Iran’s theocratic system, Khamenei was not only head of state and leader of a revolutionary movement, but the representative on earth for Shi’ite Islam’s 12th imam, who disappeared in the ninth century.
His death in an enemy attack plays into a powerful Shi’ite tradition of martyrdom and mourning, in which processions of flagellants beat their chests or backs.
That potent symbolism has been evident in the black funeral flags hanging over city streets since his death, referencing the seventh-century martyrdom of Shi’ism’s third imam, Hossein.
In central Tehran overnight, a crowd stood sobbing and chanting, led by a Basij member, as others handed out posters of the late Khamenei.
“God willing, only by avenging his blood, demanding justice for it, and ensuring that our leader’s blood is not left unavenged, can this sorrow of the people be somewhat alleviated,” said Mobina Razaaghi, an 18-year-old student from Isfahan, attending the funeral events with classmates.
Killed alongside Khamenei, and displayed in coffins next to his, were his daughter, son-in-law and baby granddaughter, as well as the wife of his son Mojtaba.
Burial postponed due to war
Burials are meant to be conducted within a day of death in Islam, but because of the risks of holding a big funeral during the war it was postponed until after last month’s interim truce deal was agreed.
Hotels are offering 50 per cent discounts, schools, mosques and sports halls have been prepared to house mourners, and bus and rail networks are being diverted to serve the main events.
After what authorities are billing as a massive procession in central Tehran on Monday, the remains will be taken to the seminary city of Qom, the centre of Iran’s Shi’ite hierarchy, for ceremonies on Tuesday.
Ceremonies will then be held in Iraq’s shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala on Wednesday, with prominent attendees from Iran’s regional network of Shi’ite proxies.
He will be buried on Thursday, after another procession, in Mashhad near the tomb of the Imam Reza, a figure of great devotion in Iran.