MARGINALIA | The Funeral that Birthed the 3rd Islamic Republic

MAKATI CITY (MindaNews / 10 July 2026) – When does a funeral cease to be a funeral?

When does a coffin become a constitution?

When do tears become political theory?

Forgive the questions. But in moments like this, the usual categories are too small. “State funeral,” “leadership transition,” “succession,” “retaliation,” “regional escalation.” All these words are correct, but none of them is sufficient.

For a social constructivist, reality in international politics is not made only by tanks, missiles, oil routes, sanctions, borders, and written constitutions. It is also made by shared meanings. A flag is cloth until a people agree to die under it. A border is a line until armies and passports make it real. A leader is a man until institutions, rituals, memories, oaths, enemies, martyrs, and mourners construct him as something more. Alexander Wendt, the great social constructivist, had it right when he said that this “anarchy is what states make of it.” In other words, power is material but also interpreted and narrated and performed.

That is why the one-week funeral of deceased Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatullah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, is not just a funeral. It is also a founding ritual.

The body of the second Supreme Leader has been traversing space, travelling through geography as if journeying through history — from Tehran to Qom, from Qom to Najaf and Karbala, and then  back again in Mashhad. According to the Qatari newspaper Al Jazeera, funerals and processions were planned in Iran and Iraq from 3 to 9 July, with the processions on 8 July through Najaf and Karbala before burial in Mashhad. AP reported that there were funeral processions in Najaf and Karbala, with Iranian dignitaries taking part in the rites as tensions remained high across the Persian Gulf.

Many will debate the numbers. The biggest funeral in the history of mankind? Larger than the funeral of Imam Khomeini in 1989? Were the estimates mere political arithmetic, devotional testimony, or both?

Let the statisticians argue.

What is already clear is this: across five cities in two countries, the Islamic Republic has turned mourning into meaning. And meaning, in politics, is never innocent.

The funeral is the visible birth of what may be called the Third Islamic Republic.

The First Islamic Republic was the Khomeini period: February 1979 to June 1989. It was the republic of the Founder, Imam Ruhullah al-Musawi al-Khomeini, who was not just a political leader but also an uncontested religious authority, a marjaʿ al-taqlid, an Ayatullah al-ʿUzma, and the prime mobilizer of the Islamic Revolution which ended the Pahlavi monarchy.

In that first republic, legitimacy was almost singularly represented by one man. The Revolution would not require Imam Khomeini to prove that he was the Revolution; for millions already, he was its face and voice — its jurisprudential warrant and ascetic reproach to imperial arrogance. The post-revolutionary government confronted separatist tensions, internal purges, ideological rivalry, institutional birth pains, and then the eight-year Iraqi-imposed war from 1980 to 1988. When Iran, at last, agreed to a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 598, Imam Khomeini himself declared that the terms were like “drinking from a poisoned chalice.”

That was the first republic: charisma, revolution, war, and survival.

The Second Islamic Republic began in June 1989, when the Assembly of Experts identified (tashkhīṣ) and designated (taʿyīn) the then President Sayyid Ali Khamenei as the next Supreme Leader.

This transition was not as simple.

The 1989 Constitution vested the task of appointing the Leader in the religious experts (‘ulama) elected by the people, who would review qualified fuqahā (jurists) and elect the one possessing the required qualifications. Article 109 of the revised Constitution no longer required the Leader to be a marjaʿ al-taqlid; it required scholarship sufficient for religious leadership in different fields of fiqh (jurisprudence), justice and piety, and political-social perspicacity, prudence, courage, administrative capacity, and leadership capability.

This mattered.

Sayyid Ali Khamenei was a student of Imam Khomeini, a revolutionary, a former president, and a cleric. But in 1989, he was not yet a marjaʿ al-taqlid in the traditional sense. His religious authority had to be socially constructed over time—through institutions, public allegiance, seminary recognition, political consolidation, Friday sermons, war memory, revolutionary symbolism, and the everyday performance of leadership, and the passing away of aged senior jurists both in Qom and Najaf. Some scholars later recognized him as a marjaʿ; others did not. But the system moved, and history moved with it.

The second republic was therefore the republic of construction after revolution.

Its immediate challenge was reconstruction after the Iran–Iraq War. Its enduring challenge was institutional consolidation: the presidency, the parliament, the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council, the IRGC, the Basij, the hawzah (Islamic seminary), the Friday prayer network, and the vast ideological architecture of resistance. Sayyid Ali Khamenei did not inherit the charismatic certainty of Imam Khomeini. He had to build authority slowly, almost brick by brick.

That is why the present moment is so significant.

The Third Islamic Republic begins under heavier fire, and under deeper ambiguity.

As I wrote earlier in an earlier article “When Decapitation Fails” (March 9, 2026, https://mindanews.com/mindaviews/2026/03/marginalia-when-decapitation-fails), the new Supreme Leader would face challenges regarding both his religious and political credentials, much like his late father faced questions regarding his religious credentials in 1989. I wrote then: “The mantle is inherited, but credibility is forged over time.”

That line now feels less like analysis and more like prophecy.

Iran’s Assembly of Experts announced in March that Ayatullah Sayyid Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei had been designated as the third Leader of the Islamic Revolution, following the martyrdom of his father in the February 28 US-‘Israeli’ attack. Reuters later reported that Mojtaba Khamenei remained out of public view during his father’s funeral ceremonies, citing security concerns and reports that he had been severely wounded in the strike that killed his father.

This is a new kind of leadership test.

Imam Khomeini’s authority was visible. Sayyid Ali Khamenei’s authority had to be gradually established. Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei’s authority, at least for now, is being constructed in absence.

No public appearance.

No ordinary succession ceremony.

No visual intimacy with the masses.

No reassuring hand raised over the crowd.

Instead, the people are asked to believe through mediated signs: written messages, institutional pledges, reports of meetings, clerical statements, military loyalty, and the massive funeral of the father.

Let me be careful here.

The comparison is not theological equivalence. Nothing in contemporary politics can be compared in rank, sanctity, or metaphysical meaning to the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi—may Allah hasten his noble reappearance. But on an incomparable and much lower plane, there is a symbolic resemblance to the test of the devotees during the Minor Occultation (ghaybat al-sughra): how does a community maintain allegiance when the living authority is not openly accessible to ordinary sight?

In the Minor Occultation, the believers had deputies. In the Third Republic, the people have institutions.

And that is precisely the constructivist point.

Authority is not only seen. Sometimes, it is narrated.

Sometimes, it is mourned into existence.

Sometimes, the absence of the new leader from public view is filled by the powerful presence of the martyred leader’s memory and body being mourned before the nation.

This is why the funeral matters. The coffin of Sayyid Ali Khamenei is not only being borne through Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala, and Mashhad. In a very real sense, it is also bearing the weight of Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei’s emerging legitimacy.

In social constructivist terms, the funeral does more than give public expression to grief. It helps create the political reality that people are being asked to recognize and inhabit. It tells the Iranian people: the Revolution continues. It tells the region: the Axis of Resistance remains alive. It tells Washington and Tel Aviv: killing a leader is not the same as killing the cause he came to embody. It tells the hawzah: the matter has moved from intellectual debate to practical duty. It tells the IRGC: the chain of command remains sacred. It tells the world: the Islamic Republic is not a single life, but a living civilization of meanings.

Naturally, meanings are never beyond dispute.

The enemies of the Islamic Republic will construct the same scene differently. For them, the funeral may be read as coercive spectacle, dynastic succession, militarized mourning, or the last emotional mobilization of a besieged state. Some Iranians themselves may quietly ask whether a republic born against monarchy can accept the son of a Supreme Leader succeeding his father. Reuters reported that some senior political and clerical figures were uneasy about the optics of hereditary succession in a republic born from the overthrow of a hereditary monarch.

That question cannot be dismissed.

It must be answered not only by slogans but by governance.

For now, however, the on-and-off war postpones everything.

As this column is being written, there is no clear end in sight to the renewed US-Iran exchange of fire. On July 8, Reuters reported that the US military launched fresh strikes on Iran, saying these were intended to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to shipping. But from Tehran’s perspective, the earlier attacks on cargo ships were not random acts of disruption; they were enforcement actions arising from alleged violations of the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding requiring ships to pass through the Strait with Iranian consent. Iran then responded with attacks on Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, which host US military bases. Reuters also reported that President Donald Trump declared the interim ceasefire with Iran “over,” after the cargo-ship incidents in the Strait.

By July 9, the escalation had entered a second consecutive night. Al Jazeera reported explosions in Bushehr, Chabahar, Bandar Abbas, Sirik, Jask, and Abu Musa Island, as well as at least one death in Iranshahr. Iranian officials said the US strikes of July 8 and 9 had killed at least 14 people and injured 78 across five provinces. The attacks also struck a railway bridge in Golestan Province and other bridges along the route to Mashhad. Yet the bombing did not empty the streets: huge crowds continued to fill Mashhad for the final funeral procession, adding to the millions reported to have joined the week-long mourning rites across Iran and Iraq.

By the time the funeral rites reached their final movement, the Third Republic had already been born under fire.

Not after the war.

Not after reconstruction.

Not after the dust had settled.

But while missiles were still flying, while bases were still on alert, while the Strait of Hormuz remained a contested artery of global power, and while the new Leader had yet to emerge before the public gaze.

That is why this moment cannot be read only as succession. It must be read as construction.

A republic is not only a legal order. It is a story people agree to inhabit.

The First Republic told the story of revolution.

The Second Republic told the story of endurance and reconstruction.

The Third Republic must now tell the story of resistance as a global power—not merely as military retaliation, not merely as missile capability, not merely as survival under sanctions and strikes, but as a moral-political language against Global Arrogance.

In Qur’anic language, history is not random. “These are only the vicissitudes of varying fortune which We bring in turn to mankind” (Qur’an 3:140). Power rises, power falls, empires boast, empires bleed, the oppressed become organized, the arrogant become anxious, and the meaning of events is never exhausted by the event itself.

This is why martyrdom matters in the Iranian political imagination. It is not death as defeat. It is death as testimony. Shahādah is first an act of witnessing before it becomes an act of dying. The martyr bears witness against oppression, against falsehood, and against every Pharaoh who rises in every age.

But here is the harder question: Can the Third Republic transform martyrdom into wise governance?

Can it transform grief into justice?

Can it transform revenge into strategy?

Can it transform resistance into civilizational maturity?

Can it make the unseen leader visible through justice, competence, courage, humility, and service?

That is the real test.

A funeral can gather millions. But governance must serve millions.

A coffin can unite a people for seven days. But only justice can hold a people for generations.

The First Republic was born in revolution. The Second Republic was forged in reconstruction. The Third Republic has been carried on shoulders through Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala, and Mashhad.

But after the shoulders lower the coffin, the Third Republic must stand on its own.

[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and www.amazon.com/author/mansoorlimba.]