Solomon2
Elite Member
The Iran the Funeral Cameras Don’t Show
By Masih Alinejad
07.08.26
I have received hundreds of messages from friends and contacts inside Iran. They are not messages of grief. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via AP)
...“Am I dreaming?” a man shouted into someone’s phone, as fires burned around a toppled monument. “Hello to the new world!” A 33-year-old woman from Isfahan told Reuters she had cried from joy and danced in the street. She would not give her name.
There is a history here. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died, I was a teenager. The regime shut down my middle school and forced us to attend his mourning ceremony. Today, Khomeini’s tomb is widely considered one of the most expensive and extravagant mausoleums ever built for a political leader. This is Iran’s reality: a population of people who have learned to perform grief when required, and who express their true feelings only in whispers, anonymously, or not at all. I have been the keeper of those messages for years. They fill my phone. They fill my social media. They are the Iran the funeral cameras do not show.
The Islamic Republic spent this week performing strength. But the regime has a problem: Almost everything about it—the chants, the flags, the scripted weeping at the coffin—is a performance. The people inside Iran, dancing in secret or driving north with 20 kilograms of rice they did not want, know this to be true.
I am determined for the rest of the world to know it as well.
S2 note: It's been requested that I cut down the length of my article posts. The full article can be read at the link.
By Masih Alinejad
07.08.26
I have received hundreds of messages from friends and contacts inside Iran. They are not messages of grief. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via AP)
...“Am I dreaming?” a man shouted into someone’s phone, as fires burned around a toppled monument. “Hello to the new world!” A 33-year-old woman from Isfahan told Reuters she had cried from joy and danced in the street. She would not give her name.
There is a history here. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died, I was a teenager. The regime shut down my middle school and forced us to attend his mourning ceremony. Today, Khomeini’s tomb is widely considered one of the most expensive and extravagant mausoleums ever built for a political leader. This is Iran’s reality: a population of people who have learned to perform grief when required, and who express their true feelings only in whispers, anonymously, or not at all. I have been the keeper of those messages for years. They fill my phone. They fill my social media. They are the Iran the funeral cameras do not show.
The Islamic Republic spent this week performing strength. But the regime has a problem: Almost everything about it—the chants, the flags, the scripted weeping at the coffin—is a performance. The people inside Iran, dancing in secret or driving north with 20 kilograms of rice they did not want, know this to be true.
I am determined for the rest of the world to know it as well.
S2 note: It's been requested that I cut down the length of my article posts. The full article can be read at the link.
