{"id":30992,"date":"2026-07-08T13:48:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T13:48:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/?p=30992"},"modified":"2026-07-08T13:48:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T13:48:30","slug":"funeral-scenes-are-not-merely-a-political-message-ihab-zaki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/funeral-scenes-are-not-merely-a-political-message-ihab-zaki\/","title":{"rendered":"**Funeral Scenes Are Not Merely a Political Message** Ihab Zaki"},"content":{"rendered":"
**Funeral Scenes Are Not Merely a Political Message**
\nIhab Zaki<\/h5>\n
In one of the video clips that spread across social media, an Iranian man appeared overflowing with sorrow and pain. He said: I was not among those fond of Sayyid Ali Khamenei, nor was I a supporter of the system, but at the moment of his martyrdom I was overcome by deep remorse.<\/h5>\n
Regret began gnawing at my soul, and I did not know how to overcome my remorse over my position toward the Sayyid, to the point that I even thought of wiping the shoes of those coming to the funeral with my eyelashes, hoping thereby to overcome the remorse that was consuming me.<\/h5>\n
This is a model of the condition of the hateful and the rejecters; then what of the condition of the loving and the supporters? Indeed, what of those in love with the person and the path? What pain will accompany their souls for a lifetime? How will they live with an open wound that does not heal? And when will they feel the fire of vengeance die down in their hearts? What revenge will heal their chests? These are not merely passing questions; this is the creed that Iran will adopt and embrace, and the matter has already been decided as a matter of principle.<\/h5>\n
For that reason, the million-strong funeral scenes are not merely a political message. They are a path and the beginning of a trajectory, or rather a kind of revolution, granting the Iranian fighter in the field and the negotiator in the corridors of politics alike a sword of time, a sword of patience, a sword of resilience, and a sword of steadfastness. It gives them both a green light to overcome every obstacle in order to achieve the goals, no matter the cost.<\/h5>\n
It is a clear popular message to both the fighter and the negotiator: do not let your hands tremble in concern for our lives, our livelihoods, and our well-being; and in return, we will accept nothing less than a decisive victory, a victory we can boast of before the nations throughout history, a victory we can present to our grandchildren so that they may raise their heads to the sky and take pride in being the descendants of those who confronted the flames of the Great Satan and the earthquake of the demons, who confronted the empire of the greatest evil with living flesh, living insight, and whatever strength they could muster.<\/h5>\n
These millions did not gather merely to shed tears, but to draw a strategic path for the course of the conflict. For existential struggles are nothing but the harshest expression of the will of the belligerents, and this popular cohesion we are witnessing is nothing but the clearest expression of the cohesion of the environment that embraces the goals of the republic and the policies of the martyred leader.<\/h5>\n
This stands in contrast to the warrior on the other side of this conflict, namely Trump and the United States, where there is absolutely no popular support for this aggression. This is in addition to a conviction that has taken root in the American collective consciousness: that this is not their war, but rather they were dragged into it by “Israel.” Regardless of whether this conviction is true, its effect on the war’s popularity is significant. Moreover, American power has run up against Iranian capability, making an easy victory impossible.<\/h5>\n
The crowds that surprised Trump with their presence before their tears further increase the impossibility of obtaining an easy victory, indeed making even the mere image of victory harder to obtain. This surprise on Trump\u2019s part deepens Americans\u2019 resentment toward “Israel,” because it reinforces their belief that it is Israel that dragged their country into a war that is not their war. Although this is not the truth, Trump is trying to pin the consequences of failure and defeat on Netanyahu by proving to Americans that he understood the game and will not allow it to be repeated, especially when he said: “Netanyahu knows who the leader is.”<\/h5>\n
Nor was Trump the only one taken by surprise; “Israel” also expressed astonishment at these crowds. It was surprised by the limitations of its ability to analyze the information it gathers. Its assumption had been that it had enmity only with the “regime” in Iran, but with these crowds it discovered that its enemies number tens of millions in Iran, which makes it reasonable to say that the Iranian people are hostile to it. Worse for it, this hostility will become vengeful and retaliatory, not merely a conflict in which one side is partly solidaristic for legal, moral, humanitarian, and political reasons, because it is the direct cause of the loss of the supreme leader.<\/h5>\n
The world awakened after seeing these crowds to an Iran entirely different from the Iran it had known for five decades: Iran, the regional and even global power capable of changing equations; Iran that turned the world economy into a privilege granted by good behavior, not an obligatory right of hegemonic states. Whoever grants the certificate of good conduct grants a passage permit that preserves his economy, and this may lead Trump to think of aggression again, only to receive even greater surprises.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

**Funeral Scenes Are Not Merely a Political Message** Ihab Zaki In one of the video clips that spread across social media, an Iranian man appeared overflowing with sorrow and pain. He said: I was not among those fond of Sayyid Ali Khamenei, nor was I a supporter of the system, but at the moment of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":30993,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-news-and-analysis--"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30994,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30992\/revisions\/30994"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}