Iran prepared to meet its late president at the holiest site for Shia Muslims in the Islamic Republic on Thursday, a final mark of respect for a supporter of Iran’s supreme leader who was killed in a helicopter crash earlier this week. Is.
President Ibrahim Raisi’s burial at Imam Reza’s mausoleum in Mashhad comes amid days of processions across much of Iran, which have sought to strengthen the country’s theocracy after the crash that killed the country’s foreign minister and six others. are
However, the services did not draw the same crowds as those gathered in 2020 for services for Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad.
This is a possible sign of public sentiment towards Raisi’s presidency, which saw the government clamp down on all dissent during the 2022 protests over the death of Mehsa Amini, who was allegedly favored by the authorities. Accordingly, she was detained for not wearing the mandatory headscarf.
This crackdown, along with Iran’s struggling economy, has limited the hours of coverage provided on state television and newspapers. Raisi’s involvement in the mass execution of some 5,000 dissidents at the end of the Iran-Iraq war has also never been discussed.
Prosecutors have warned people against displaying public signs celebrating Raisi’s death, and Tehran has seen a heavy security presence since the accident.
On Thursday morning, thousands of blacks gathered along a central boulevard in Raisi’s hometown of Birjand in Iran’s southern Khorasan province along the Afghan border. A semi-truck carried his casket down the road, with mourners reaching out to touch it and throwing scarves and other items in front of it as a blessing. A sign on the truck read: “This is a shrine.”
Raisi will later be buried at Imam Reza’s mausoleum, where the eighth Imam of Shia Islam is buried. The region has long been associated with Shia pilgrims. A hadith attributed to the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (peace be upon him), says that whoever is suffering from grief or sin will find relief by going there.
In 2016, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei appointed Raisi to run the Imam Reza Charity Foundation, which manages a broad group of businesses and endowments in Iran, as well as oversees the shrine. It is one of many boniads, or charitable foundations, funded by donations or assets seized after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These foundations provide no public accounting of their expenditures and answer only to Iran’s Supreme Leader. Imam Reza’s charity, called “Astan Quds Rizvi” in Persian, is believed to be one of the largest in the country. Analysts estimate that he is worth tens of billions of dollars because he owns about half of the land in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city.
The president will be the country’s first senior politician to be buried at the mausoleum, representing a major honor for the cleric.
The deaths of Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and six others in Sunday’s crash come at a politically sensitive moment for Iran at home and abroad.
Raisi, 63, had been discussed as a possible successor to Iran’s supreme leader, the 85-year-old Khamenei. None of Iran’s living past presidents — apart from Khamenei, who was president from 1981 to 1989 — can be seen on state television footage of Wednesday prayers. Officials have offered no explanation for his apparent absence.
Iran has set June 28 for the next presidential election. Currently, there is no clear favorite for the position in Iran’s political elite – especially no Shiite cleric like Raisi. Acting President Mohammad Mokhbar, a relatively unknown first vice president until Sunday’s crash, stepped into his role and even attended Wednesday’s meeting between Khamenei and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.