Khamenei's Sons Mourn in Tehran; Iran's New Leader Stays Out of Sight

The image Iranian state television kept returning to on Sunday was not the crowd, though the crowd was immense. It was three men in black, Mostafa, Meysam and Masoud Khamenei, praying behind five coffins in the courtyard of Tehran's Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla. The fourth son, Mojtaba, the man who inherited their father's title of supreme leader, was nowhere to be seen.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran for more than three decades, was killed in an airstrike on February 28, the day the United States and Israel opened their war on Iran. His daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law and a 14-month-old granddaughter died with him, and their coffins lay beside his on Sunday, July 5, as Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, a 97-year-old cleric, led the funeral prayers. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf prayed in the rows behind the family.

The scale was the point. Iran's metro network said it clocked seven million trips between late Saturday and Sunday morning as mourners streamed toward the complex, many weeping, some beating their chests. A mass procession moves through central Tehran on Monday, July 6. Then the itinerary becomes a map of Shia Islam itself: Qom, the seminary city at the heart of Iran's clerical hierarchy, on Tuesday; the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in neighbouring Iraq on Wednesday; and burial in Mashhad, beside the shrine of Imam Reza, on Thursday.

That route is a message. The ceremonies opened under a giant red flag reading "O avengers of Hussein" unfurled over the Mosalla, and the official slogan, "We must rise," draws on a Quranic call to stand up for a divine cause, Al Jazeera reported. Red and black together are meant to fuse grief with the promise of retribution. Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Sunday the crowds were crying out two slogans: Resistance against the enemies, and revenge for the blood of Iran's martyred leader.

And yet the man all of this is meant to consecrate stayed hidden. There has been no public sighting of Mojtaba Khamenei, and no image of him released, since the February 28 strike that killed his father. People close to his inner circle told Reuters his face was disfigured in the attack and that he suffered a significant injury to one or both legs. He is expected to stay away from the ceremonies entirely, ostensibly because of assassination risk; Israel has threatened to kill him.

"Until the last moment, before the prayer began, I kept telling those around me that I hoped (Mojtaba Khamenei) himself would come. That was our only wish."

A young mourner speaking to Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency, quoted by Reuters

For readers far from Tehran, the absence matters more than the pageantry. Iran is negotiating with Washington over a permanent end to a war that produced Iranian strikes on U.S. bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and choked, then reopened, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. President Donald Trump told the news site Axios that the talks have been paused for a week for the funeral. The state on the other side of that table is now led by a man whose condition, whereabouts and even face are unknown.

The week's rougher edges showed too. Posters and graffiti at the Mosalla called for the killing of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Mohammad Rasouli, a poet who emceed the event, drew chants of "Death to America!" when he asked the crowd why Trump was still alive, the first direct threat against Trump by an official during the rites, CBC News reported. Authorities in Tehran insist the ceasefire will hold, and that the settlement they are negotiating will bring what they describe as huge economic benefits.

The mourning has a fixed schedule, city by city, through Thursday. The question hanging over all of it, when Iranians will actually see their new supreme leader's face, has no date attached.