JOURNALISTS are trained to count people. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand. A million. We are much less comfortable asking why they came.

When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral filled the streets, much of the international coverage did exactly what modern journalism is designed to do. It measured the crowds, analysed the succession, scrutinised the optics for signs of regime strength or weakness, and assessed what the spectacle meant for Iran’s relations with the United States, Israel and the Gulf. These were all important questions. But they were not the only ones.

Present in much of the reporting, but rarely central, was a different kind of inquiry: what does a funeral like this mean to the people who attend it? What role does ritual play in a society where religion, politics and history have long been intertwined? Can public mourning express grief, faith, social obligation and political allegiance all at once? And are newsrooms equipped to recognise that complexity, or do they instinctively translate every public ritual into a story about power?

This is not an argument about Ayatollah Khamenei’s legacy, nor an attempt to separate the Islamic Republic from its record. Nor is it to pretend the context away. Khamenei was........

© Dawn