A casket draped in black makes its slow procession through Tehran, past millions of mourners whose chests beat in unison against the late-summer heat. Red fists—the funeral’s symbol—rise above a sea of black-clad bodies, fists clenched not in grief alone but in defiance. The slogan is stark: “We must rise”.

This is the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for thirty-six turbulent years, killed in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli war on February 28. It is not merely a religious rite. It is a geopolitical manifesto, a metaphysical referendum on empire itself.

Across five cities in two countries, over seven days, Iran expects between fifteen and twenty million mourners. Delegates from more than one hundred countries are in attendance. Pakistan’s prime minister walks alongside Tajikistan’s president. Armenian and Georgian leaders pay their respects. European anti-imperialist activists arrive without official invitations, declaring themselves on “the right side of history”. The body will journey through Qom, then to Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, before final burial in Mashhad, beside the shrine of Imam Reza.

Western capitals observe this spectacle with confusion or contempt. Fox News notes the absence of Western leaders as proof of Iranian isolation. The funeral is dismissed as regime propaganda, as a theocratic state’s desperate grasp at legitimacy.

But this is a catastrophic misreading. For the Global South, Khamenei’s funeral is something else entirely: a collective acknowledgment of a history that the West has chosen to forget. From Operation Ajax in 1953—when the CIA and MI6 toppled Iran’s democratically elected prime minister to restore Western oil control—through the arming of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, through the 2003 invasion of Iraq on fabricated intelligence, through the destruction of Libya and the devastation of Syria, the pattern is not a series of discrete misadventures. It is a continuous architecture of domination.

A former Iranian deputy speaker captures the Global South’s reading with brutal clarity: Khamenei’s “most important legacy was resistance against the global dominance of the United States and Israel, and the fact that this resistance........

© Middle East Monitor