Sayed Anwar
Tehran this week is draped in red and black. The air over five cities of Iran and Iraq carries the low murmur of a nation staging its own resurrection through grief. Known as Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, this man spent thirty five years as the most powerful person in Iran and a global leader of millions.
He was born in 1939 in Mashhad, the son of a modest cleric, in a household where religious study was less a career choice than an inheritance. He came of age inside the seminaries of Qom and Najaf, absorbing the language of jurisprudence and revolution in equal measure. Like so many of his generation of Shia clerics, his political education happened in the prisons and exile networks of the Shah’s Iran, where a young mullah’s opposition to the monarchy hardened into something more systematic. He was arrested repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s. By the time the 1979 Islamic revolution whisked the Pahlavi dynasty away, he was already a tried-and-true lieutenant of Ruhollah Khomeini, the man whose name would shape the Islamic Republic and, eventually, his own.
The new state wasted no time in repaying his loyalty. He became a founding ideologue of the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ political apparatus. In 1981, he escaped a bombing that nearly ended his career before it dawned, an assassination attempt that left his right arm permanently paralyzed. That same year he became president, a post he held for two terms while the country bled through its war with Iraq. The presidency in that era was a weaker office and subordinate to the Supreme Leader. Khamenei spent those years learning the limits of formal power and the deeper currents of informal power that actually moved the Islamic Republic. When Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was an unlikely heir. He lacked the religious credentials that the office of Supreme Leader traditionally demanded. Many senior clerics doubted he had the scholarly weight for the job. He got it anyway, elevated in rank almost overnight by an Assembly of Experts eager to approve Khamenei.
Khamenei built a system of parallel institutions, the Revolutionary Guard chief among them, that answered to him directly and could override the elected government whenever the elected government drifted too far from his preferences. He oversaw the curbing of the 2009 Green Movement after a disputed election, the calming of the 2019 fuel protests, and the quelling of Mahsa Amini uprising in 2022. He also presided over Iran’s nuclear program through years of sanctions, negotiations, and collapsed agreements like Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), positioning the country as a regional power broker and a “pariah state” at the lens of the West.
His period as a supreme leader is also marked by the fatwa (religious ruling) against the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons, perceiving these to be haram (forbidden) under Islam, along with others such as prohibiting insults against Sunni revered figures and forbidding the “unlawful” use of social media. These rulings have had significant religious, social, and political influence within Iran and across the wider Muslim world.
His foreign policy was built on a durable hostility toward the United States and Israel, a posture that outlines his anti-colonial position at centre of Middle Eastern geopolitics. He was vocal against the apartheid, targeted racism, and settler colonial measures against the Palestinians by the Israelis. Iran’s proxy network across Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen absorbed enormous resources and drew enormous retaliation, and by 2025 that confrontation had turned direct. The Twelve Day War between Iran and Israel that year, followed by American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, marked the moment his strategy of managed confrontation stopped being manageable.
On February 28, 2026, Khamenei was killed in Tehran during a series of Israeli airstrikes targeting senior Iranian officials, part of a joint operation with the United States using intelligence to locate the country’s leadership. His death was confirmed by the Iranian government the following day, and the state declared forty days of mourning alongside a week of public holiday. His son Mojtaba, whom he had reportedly resisted grooming as a dynastic heir, was nonetheless pushed into the role by Revolutionary Guard pressure on the Assembly of Experts, and was announced as the new Supreme Leader on March 9.
However, the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delayed for months, was finally scheduled for a multi city procession running from July 4 through July 9, ending at the Imam Reza shrine. It is not merely a burial. It is a speech delivered in silence, a message penned in the grammar of mourning rather than diplomacy. Every mourner who lines the streets of Tehran, Qom, and Mashhad this week is, whether they know it or not, a punctuation mark in that sentence. It is a party where piety and politics meet. It is, on one hand, a test of Mojtaba’s political career and Iran’s showcase of diplomatic and geopolitical muscle on the other, as delegations from more than hundred countries are expected to join the ceremony.
He carried Khomeini’s voice in his throat for thirty-five years, and now the incense rising over Tehran marks more than a death. It marks the passing of the founding generation itself. The mourners walking through Qom and Mashhad this week are not just burying a man; they are watching an era close, one whose full costs and achievements historians will spend decades weighing. The sentence he began must now, finally, find its own ending. Four months between death and burial, Ayatollah’s goodbye to Iran turned out to be nostalgia for millions of people all over the world. Iran’s goodbye to him may take it the longest. He will continue to live in the hearts of the people of Iran and beyond, maybe, forever.
Name: Sayed Anwar
Department of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
His Email Address: [email protected]
