The End of the Funeral Marathon and Mojtaba’s Absence: Why Did Some Clerics Refuse to Pray Over K...

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. It is Friday, 19 Tir 1405, July 10, 2026. The marathon funeral procession and corpse-parading of the Islamic Republic finally ended in Mashhad early this morning. Khamenei and four members of his family, including his daughter, grandchild, daughter-in-law and son-in-law, were buried in the Dar al-Zikr section of the Imam Reza Shrine. Even so, mourning and the third-day ceremony, and probably the seventh-day and fortieth-day ceremonies, are still ahead, and this business of chest-beating, mourning, glorification and exaggeration

0:56 about Mr. Khamenei will go on. It is too early to place Khamenei on the scales of history, because, as Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani put it, a historian can only turn to an event fifty years after it happens, and evaluating the record of this dictator of Iran needs more time. But in brief, one can say that Mr. Khamenei's record over 37 years of ruling Iran has been a negative one, full of murder, crime, purges and massacre. As for how negative his record is, it

1:52 is enough for anyone to take a look at the current state of Iran. Thirty-seven years of rule is a long time, long enough to turn a country completely around. All of China's transformation took place in the past 40 years, turning a poor, backward country into the world's second-largest economic power. The legacy Khamenei left behind after 37 years of rule is a country that is poor, helpless and ruined; a people that is unhappy, angry and burdened with political, social and cultural problems; and a sea of the people's blood from the killings in the crackdown on the Reform Movement, the Green Movement,

2:57 the massacre of Aban 1398, Dey 1396, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and the last of them, the massacre of the people last Dey. His legacy also includes thousands executed and thousands of political prisoners, and at the very end, a war that was the result of his misguided foreign policies. Then there is his purging of his closest allies, such as Hashemi Rafsanjani or Mousavi Ardebili or anyone who opposed him in any way; the house arrest of Engineer Mousavi; sidelining

3:54 Khatami or Rouhani and so on. In short, he created a country full of contradiction and tension. Especially since he insisted on bringing Ahmadinejad to power, and given that he himself and his office reached for the people's property and unjustly seized more than half of Iran's economy, the result has been a thieves' bazaar and a kleptocracy, so that on top of all the country's troubles, the people face an extremely corrupt government, which one can safely say is the most corrupt government in the 2,500-year history

4:51 of our country. In any case, placing Khamenei on the scales and examining his record in various areas requires more time; some time must pass after his era, documents must be published, various reports and so on, so that his good and bad, any achievements he may have had, as well as his mistakes and his crimes, can be better assessed. But at Khamenei's burial ceremony in Mashhad, according to an announcement by Islamic Republic television, Mr. Nouri Hamedani, a cleric who is 102 years old, was supposed to go and lead the prayer, but he did not go, and

5:56 apparently they said he was ill, though television did not mention it. Instead, Mostafa Khamenei, Khamenei's eldest son, led the funeral prayer for him, and the other sons, Masoud and Meysam, were also at the ceremony. But there was still no sign of Mojtaba Khamenei; he was the great absentee. The excuse that he does not appear for security reasons is, in my view, a baseless excuse, because one way or another Mojtaba could have at least given a video message about the killing of his father, and of his wife, his sister and the others, and shown some kind of presence. A truly big question mark

6:57 has been raised over whether Mojtaba is alive or dead, in a coma or conscious, whether he even has his arms and legs or not. In short, the state of this important institution, in fact the most important office and institution of the Islamic Republic, namely the Guardianship of the Jurist and the person of the Supreme Leader, has been shrouded in ambiguity. Another notable point about this marathon funeral procession, from Tehran to Qom, from Qom to Najaf and Karbala, and from Najaf and Karbala to Mashhad, is that in Karbala and Najaf a number of senior clerics, including Ayatollah Sistani, apparently refused to pray over the body or coffin of

7:57 Khamenei. Two accounts have been put forward. One is that they shirked it because of Khamenei's crimes, and the other is that they said, on religious grounds, that one cannot pray over an empty coffin and that they must see the body inside it before praying over it. Either way, this is another point: whether anything of Khamenei was buried at all, and after a hundred-odd days, what kind of ceremony was this? Another point is that in this mobilization and bringing people into the streets, with 300 journalists from around the world invited and present in Iran, various reports by

8:52 impartial and international journalists put the crowd in Tehran at between one and one and a half million, and nationwide at one and a half to two million people. Slogans calling for revenge, for killing Trump, and against the memorandum of understanding and peace were perhaps the most visible thing, and this is reflected in the reports of foreign journalists and news agencies too. In fact, these flags and banners about killing Trump and the slogans and so on are something Trump himself referred to in his remarks in Turkey, and today America's CNN wrote that the Israelis

9:46 also poured oil on this fire and gave Trump an intelligence report, citing their own so-called intelligence agency, saying that the Islamic Republic has planned to assassinate Trump. Trump is a man who takes even the simplest criticism of his administration, even of his officials, personally, takes offense, gets stubborn and seeks revenge. On this issue, which concerns him personally and is a threat against him personally, he has shown harsh reactions, including saying that he has in effect left instructions that if anything happens to him at Iran's hands, they should take revenge in this way or that. In any case, perhaps one of the reasons for the severity of this exchange

10:46 of fire that took place over the past few days is this state of Mr. Trump's, and the fact that he was told the Islamic Republic is determined to assassinate him. As we said before, following the Islamic Republic's attack on three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, America first struck 80 locations in Iran; then, when Iran attacked Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, they struck 90 locations again. They inflicted a great deal of damage, and after these exchanges it seems the exchange of fire has now stopped, and according to

11:47 Reuters, Qatari negotiators have gone to Tehran. Mr. Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, spoke by phone with Pezeshkian and called for the peace understanding reached with such difficulty in the Islamabad agreement to be preserved. And the Egyptian foreign minister and the Turkish foreign minister are among those who have called for negotiations to continue. Mr. Trump has also announced that the ceasefire is over, and it is not clear what he means. He probably means that, since Article 1 of the 14-article understanding is the ceasefire, but he has said that negotiations are continuing. In any case, if the fire of war flares up again, one can say that two

12:46 parties, at least two camps, will have gotten what they wanted. One is these hardliners in Tehran, at this very ceremony, and a number of Majlis members and others who keep calling for war. The other is Israel, which is pouring oil on this fire, hoping that if the war flares up and it can again enter operations with American support, this time Iran's energy infrastructure will be targeted. Article 5 of the memorandum, as I mentioned before, is somewhat ambiguous, and Iran cites it to say that management of the Strait must be in its hands, so if a ship passes without its permission, it will attack it. America says no such thing exists, but that Articles

13:39 4 and 5 go together, meaning America lifts the naval blockade and Iran must open the Strait and clear the mines. In any case, the International Maritime Organization, under the United Nations, with 176 member states, has issued a statement saying member states should not accept Iran's attempt to take control of managing the Strait or impose tolls there. Oman had also earlier written a letter to the United Nations saying it in no way agrees with collecting

14:31 tolls and abides by international regulations, which regard the Strait of Hormuz waterway as an international waterway. In news from Iran, Saberin News first reported that last night on Fakouri Boulevard in Mashhad, two people in military uniform armed with Colt pistols attacked a checkpoint and killed four Basij members. But the security deputy of the Khorasan governorate said today that no, it was a personal dispute; presumably a Basiji got into a fight with someone, another person came to help, and in the end two people were killed. Saberin News had said four people were killed. In any case, it is

15:30 one of those matters shrouded in ambiguity. The Iranian students' mathematics olympiad team won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in China among 49 participating countries and took first place, followed by Poland and Brazil. Hoping for the victory of Iran and Iranians.