Millions of Iranians gathered across the country this weekend for the multi-day funeral ceremonies of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in joint US-Israeli airstrikes in late February. The body lay in state at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla, with authorities projecting crowds of 10 to 20 million over the coming week, in ceremonies that will pass through Qom, the Iraqi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, and culminate in burial at Mashhad’s Imam Reza shrine on Thursday. State media ran with imagery of red martyrdom flags and slogans of revenge. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif — who helped broker the Iran-US memorandum of understanding — was reportedly the most senior foreign official in attendance; European nations were reportedly not invited. The newly appointed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the ayatollah’s son, has not appeared in public since assuming the role — a conspicuous absence that Iranian officials have attributed to security concerns. Israel’s defence minister stated plainly that Mojtaba is “marked for death.”
The received wisdom
The progressive and liberal framing of this moment is essentially sympathetic to Iran’s grief, and cautiously optimistic about its political implications. The regime, goes the argument, has suffered a historic trauma — the assassination of its supreme leader — and yet appears to be channelling that trauma productively into renewed mass mobilisation. The revolutionary fervour on display is not simply manufactured by state media; real mourners turned out in the heat, and real rage is present in the crowds. That emotional energy, the argument continues, could compel the new leadership toward a negotiated settlement: the MoU brokered through Qatar and Pakistan already constitutes a 60-day ceasefire, Hormuz is reopened, and indirect talks resumed last week in Doha. War-weariness, economic exhaustion, and the opportunity to cast American-Iranian engagement as avenging Khamenei by extracting concessions — all of these give Mojtaba and the clerical establishment reasons to hold to the diplomatic track. The funeral, on this reading, is cathartic rather than bellicose.
A different read
This is a plausible reading, but it may mistake the theatre for the substance.
The imagery deployed at this funeral is not the imagery of a revolution inching toward moderation. Red flags symbolising martyrdom and revenge in Shia tradition, IRGC commanders making their first public appearances since the war began, and the absence of any Western delegation are all choices. The official slogan, “We must rise,” accompanied by a clenched fist, is calibrated to communicate to the domestic audience that the Islamic Republic’s fundamental character — defined by resistance to the “global arrogance” of the United States — remains intact under the new supreme leader.
This matters because the structural question Iran faces is not primarily diplomatic but constitutional. Khomeini’s original design in 1979 vested supreme authority in a single faqih, a jurisprudent whose legitimacy derived from religious standing, revolutionary credentials, and the confidence of the clerical establishment. Khamenei spent three decades consolidating that architecture. Mojtaba, whatever his father’s preferences, begins from a much weaker position: he has never held significant public office, his religious credentials are contested among senior clerics, and the mechanism of his selection — a rushed appointment by a clerical body after his father’s death — lacked the deliberation that legitimates authority. The fact that he cannot appear in public because Israeli intelligence has declared him a target compounds the problem: supreme leaders who cannot be seen rule by proxy, and proxies accumulate independent interests.
The historical parallel that comes to mind is the Soviet succession crises of the early 1980s. Three general secretaries died in three years — Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko — and the party struggled to maintain the fiction of collective authority during a prolonged succession emergency. The eventual resolution, Gorbachev, accelerated rather than arrested the system’s collapse. The lesson is not that Iran will follow the same path — authoritarian systems vary greatly in their resilience — but that the appearance of continuity at a funeral is not the same as actual institutional consolidation. Iran’s deep state is a fractured coalition of Revolutionary Guards, clerical factions, pragmatist technocrats, and ideological hardliners; the centripetal force Khamenei exercised over those competing interests was the product of 34 years. Mojtaba cannot simply inherit it.
For Western policymakers — and particularly for the Trump administration, which has been pressing for a formal nuclear settlement — the opacity at the top of the Iranian system is a genuine problem. Trump’s own July 4th statement that Iran was “dying to settle” suggests he reads the weakness as opportunity. But negotiating with a succession-weakened supreme leader who is surrounded by revenge-seeking IRGC commanders and cannot show his face in public is not a stable diplomatic counterparty. Deals made in conditions of extreme internal uncertainty have a poor track record; see Saddam Hussein’s various agreements during and after the Gulf War, or the Iranian commitments made under Rafsanjani that the hardliners simply reversed.
Turkey’s Erdogan has warned publicly that Israel must not be allowed to “dynamite” the US-Iran deal, a statement that confirms just how fragile the diplomatic architecture is perceived to be even by its regional supporters. The MoU exists; the communication channel from the Qatar talks is operational. But it is built on quicksand.
What to watch
Whether Mojtaba Khamenei makes any public appearance during the funeral procession or burial will be the single most informative data point of the coming week. His continued absence will intensify internal speculation about who actually commands Iran’s deterrent. Watch also the IRGC commanders who have appeared publicly — their messaging on the MoU and any independent statements about retaliation signals where the real power may be consolidating. And follow whether Iran’s indirect channel to Washington survives the emotional escalation of funeral week or goes quiet until the ceremonies are complete.
— J