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Iran’s Persistent Sadness

The country’s culture of bereavement may be producing a cycle of misery

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Iran’s Persistent Sadness
An Iranian man mourns victims of the 2024 explosions at a procession marking the fourth anniversary of Qassem Soleimani’s assassination. (Getty Images)

At 6:12 a.m. on Jan. 8, 2020, a Boeing 737-800 took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport after an hourlong delay. It carried 176 passengers and crew, including 15 children. The jetliner belonged to Ukraine International Airlines, operating a flight registered under the International Air Transportation Association number PS752. Three minutes after departure and while ascending, it was shot down by two TOR-M1 missiles. All occupants on board were killed. After three days, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) admitted responsibility for downing the commercial plane. It blamed “human error” for the shocking tragedy.

Five hours before the plane was shot down, the IRGC had fired a salvo of at least 12 ballistic missiles at the Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq’s Anbar province, hosting Task Force Lion. Details on the casualties of what was dubbed Operation Martyr Soleimani remain ambiguous, but it has been reported that 110 U.S. military personnel sustained traumatic brain injuries.

The guards launched the fusillade of missiles in retaliation for the killing of the former commander of IRGC’s Quds Force, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated in a drone strike the previous week on Jan. 3 while visiting Baghdad. Authorized by the United States, the strike had killed nine others, including five members of an Iraqi paramilitary group.

Soleimani’s funeral rites took place Jan. 4 to 7, spanning eight cities in Iraq and Iran. On Jan. 7, a stampede erupted at the burial procession in his hometown of Kerman, where he was supposed to be entombed, killing 56 people and injuring 200 others. The national mood after the killing of Soleimani was characterized by a mix of distress, vengeance and instability. These anxieties stemmed from the unanticipated removal of Iran’s second-most powerful person, who had been consistently lionized as a hero, and the humiliation the government had suffered because of how he was killed.

The impulse to unite the nation around a common cause inspired by his legacy and to repair the damaged self-esteem that the Islamic Republic draws on in its projection of soft power was strong. In a country of 85 million, there were both those who deplored Soleimani’s loss and those who openly celebrated it, and the clerical establishment wasn’t naive enough to overlook the simmering polarization.

So to harness emotions, the regime set off on a protracted period of mourning, aiming to rekindle support for the IRGC and the offensive posture against the West. No other tool from the traditional statecraft playbook could do the job better than summoning the post-1979 “culture of bereavement.”

Although religious grief was not invoked immediately after the revolution, the Islamic Republic has nurtured a culture of bereavement that outshines the joyous traditional festivities like Nowruz, the celebration of the Persian New Year, thus transforming the cultural habits of Iranians.

The origins of the culture of bereavement that shape Iran’s political sphere are not solely religious. Bereavement is consciously instrumentalized as a tool of social control that feeds off institutional grief and reproduces it in a symbiotic relationship driven by religion.

The government’s tendency to perpetuate occasions of mourning and trivialize experiences of joy has led to a state of ceaseless desolation that defines the emotional tone in Iran. Even if individual Iranians are characteristically known as sociable, witty and friendly, the country collectively appears to have an unhappy and frustrated soul.

Against the backdrop of the Islamic Republic’s manipulation of the population, which has been visible in people’s gradual withdrawal from expressions of exuberance to an embrace of despair, group emotion provides a gauge of Iran’s vulnerabilities. Shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, researchers began to delve into what they found to be an unusual spectacle: the new rulers’ deliberate inflation of religious grief to achieve political goals, which ruined the vivacity of communities in the process.

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, a retired comparative sociologist and medical anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, lived and worked in Iran for years both before and after the 1979 revolution. In 1988, DelVecchio Good and Byron J. Good, also a psychological anthropologist at Harvard, published a seminal study in the Journal of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, chronicling the transformation of emotional discourse in Iranian society.

The authors’ interest in grief in Iranian culture began long before the Islamic Republic flaunted sadness as the appropriate and required demeanor for its citizens to adopt. They observed through interviews with Iranians, both at home and in emigre communities, that the government was placing special value on lamentation. One respondent in the study, an immigrant to the United States, said in 1985, “Sadness has become the symbolic action of a good Muslim. You are not supposed to smile, to look happy, to look clean. This is the kind of character that is now admired.”

At the time the research was being conducted, the authors established that the regime prescribed grief as an insignia of religious and political fidelity, setting the trajectory for the nation “through the daily broadcasting of mourning rituals, of ‘rawzeh’ [a rhythmic elegy] sung by turbaned mullahs on television and radio, almost to the exclusion of other programming.” Things haven’t changed since.

In the “World Happiness Report 2024,” a partnership of Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which uses six criteria to measure happiness (including social support, life expectancy and freedom), Iran is ranked 100th out of 143 countries. In the ranking, where Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden unsurprisingly appear as the top four countries, Iran is below Venezuela, the Republic of Congo and Iraq.

Similarly, in the latest edition of the less frequently referenced but reputable Happy Planet Index published in 2021, which assesses life expectancy, well-being and carbon footprint, Iran is ranked 115th out of 147 countries, trailing Belarus, Pakistan and Myanmar. On a scale from zero to 10, with 10 being most happy, Iranians have rated their well-being at 4.8 according to the findings of the Gallup World Poll, which are incorporated in the ranking.

Whether because of the country’s culture of bereavement or spurred by other government disruptions, fits of anger, sadness, stress and pain appear to be common among Iranians. Indeed, Gallup’s Global Emotions Report 2022 found that Iran is the world’s 10th-angriest country, with 39% of those polled saying they experienced anger “during a lot of yesterday.” In Finland, the country identified as the least angry, only 6% of those polled indicated they had experienced a lot of anger the preceding day.

In the absence of more reliable data, polls can further our understanding of what is a complicated state of mind gripping Iran. Still, they may fail to capture a complete picture of a society’s collective mood, particularly one that has continually struggled to redeem itself from the throes of poor governance before being retraumatized. Some Iranians rely on sarcasm as a coping mechanism to downplay the severity of losses, economic woes and natural disasters. Others air their political grievances in family gatherings and at the workplace. As such, much can be lost or appear unrealistic in such rankings.

Here, it’s anecdotal evidence of the shared experiences of people that lays the ground for a conclusion: Iran is not beaming with happiness. Instead, there is every reason to assume the top brass has become fixated on melancholy. A dearth of festive occasions in the calendar and active intrusion by the state and its vigilantes to stifle wedding ceremonies, concerts and even a water pistol fight among a group of teenagers at a park are some examples of the enduring resistance to joy.

With pathways to stress reduction and relief being adamantly blocked by the authorities in the name of chastity and spirituality, the nation’s mental health indicators are portentous. A 2023 study found 31.03% of Iran’s population is afflicted by at least one form of mental health disorder. The theocracy founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is mandated to honor an unfaltering fixation on pain.

In March 1989, Khomeini addressed a group of people on a religious holiday in which he argued that resisting the world’s imperialist powers and establishing a new Islamic civilization “involves pressure, hardship, martyrdom and hunger, and our people have chosen this path themselves, will pay the price and are proud of it.” He added that defeating the civilizations of the West and East “is impossible without martyrdom.” Glorification of self-inflicted wounds and despair was implanted in the nation’s post-1979 psyche from the early stages.

How much of this misery is a natural consequence of the oppression and economic stagnation that defines Iranians’ lives? And how much is it manufactured by a regime that has weaponized a uniquely anguished approach to Shiite Islam?

In a rare study of the effects of political Islam, prominent Iranian scholar Asef Bayat has explored the rationales behind the Islamists’ unease with expressions of fun, which he defines as a range of joyful conduct, from games, joking and dancing to particular ways of speaking, laughing and carrying oneself. In his September 2007 essay, “Islamism and the Politics of Fun,” for the journal Public Culture, Bayat argued that fun defies rigid disciplines and established norms of behavior, often constituted by authorities.

Bayat hypothesized that “fear of fun” is an aversion to the debilitation of power that many religious traditions share. By suppressing the manifestation of people’s identity through fashion, criminalizing the mingling of two sexes, and forbidding innocuous actions such as men shaving their beards or women wearing makeup, theocracies in Afghanistan and Iran have been pursuing goals more foundational than popularizing their moral stylebooks.

“Rather than simply a doctrinal question, anti-fun-damentalism is a historical matter, one that has to do significantly with the preservation of power,” he wrote.

This ulterior motive is best illustrated by the statements of Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, the late Shiite cleric and theologian frequently praised by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Mesbah Yazdi was informally known as the “theorist of violence” for his radical views and his disavowal of the popular vote in legitimizing religious governments.

He is on the record saying, “The most dangerous thing that threatens humanity is for men to forget devotion to God, to establish cultural centers instead of mosques and churches, and to be driven by film and art rather than prayer and supplication.”

Swayed by such dogmas stressing the banality of pleasure and laughter, Iran has long ceased being known as a communally upbeat society.

In the latest edition of its breakdown of urban household expenditures by category published in 2019, the Statistical Center of Iran estimated that leisure and entertainment accounted for a mere 2.9% of the routine spending of an average family per month. As they spend 48.2% on housing and 12.5% on the recurring costs of transportation and communication, what Iranians pay for fun activities such as going to concerts and movies is close to nothing.

Many scholars argue that the formalized prevalence of sorrow is not an exclusively Iranian phenomenon, even if its most extreme form can be found in post-1979 Iran. In Catholic and evangelical nations, also, it is not an anomaly for governments to seek recourse to catastrophizing the past to achieve specific goals in the future.

Younes Saramifar, an assistant professor of humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, believes that it would be misguided to accept broad generalizations about how “Western” nations deal with grief.

“The never-again debate and Holocaust memorialization in Germany, celebration of the colonial past in France, and so many war museums and memorial sites in the United States are good examples that the so-called Western cultures also dwell on the past and keep it alive in the present,” he said.

Still, there is a consensus that few governments stamp out occasions of jubilation, such as ancestral festivals, just to ensure that their preferred version of unity and sovereignty triumphs. When the Islamists swept aside Iran’s secular monarchy, they drew plaudits from some of the world’s distinguished thinkers, who speculated that the revolution was a miraculous upending of the global order in favor of spirituality.

But once Ruhollah Khomeini’s spiritual behemoth was in full swing, a debate ensued about whether Nowruz, the most important national feast, was relevant or if it should be discarded because it wasn’t sufficiently religious, smacked of paganism or represented pre-Islamic mythology.

For millions of Iranians whose most delightful childhood memories are intertwined with the simple yet colorful celebrations of Nowruz, the theocracy’s systematic efforts to smear and sideline the New Year festival have often bred bitterness and disaffection.

“I feel the same resentment about the denigration of Nowruz and even more so with the holidays of Chaharshanbe Suri and Sizdah Be-dar, which are closer to the kids’ hearts,” said Ahmad Sadri, a sociologist and James P. Gorter chair of Islamic world studies at Lake Forest College in Illinois.

Chaharshanbe Suri is a festival of fire celebrating the eve of the last Wednesday of the year. Its origins are Zoroastrian, and it was first celebrated around 1000 BCE. Families get together on Tuesday evening and jump over bonfires they set up using leaves, rice stalks and brushwood. The purpose of the event is to dispose of the unfavorable feelings of the outgoing year and ward off bad luck.

On the 13th day of spring, Iranians travel to gardens, forests, beaches and parks, usually in large numbers and with the extended family, to honor Sizdah Be-dar. This is also one of the rituals connected to the Nowruz firmament, wherein households reaffirm their ties to nature ahead of the New Year and at the end of the two-week holidays.

The Islamic Republic began efforts to marginalize both merry occasions by renaming them. In the official calendar and government jargon, Chaharshanbe Suri is referred to as “the last Wednesday of the year” and Sizdah Be-dar is called the “day of nature.” Erasing a name can be the prelude to erasing the reality it stands for.

Iran’s ancient heritage and the miscellany of celebrations encapsulating that identity weren’t destined to constantly duel with the new reality that emerged after the Muslim conquest of Persia in 654 CE. Iranians might not have voluntarily accepted Islam at first, but a compromise crystallized over time, and people found they could accommodate national values with religion.

But with the advent of the Islamic Republic, that understanding vanished, and the forceful imposition of political Islam on every dimension of daily life has ripped society apart. Patriotic Iranians fantasizing about the nation’s lost glory resent that the clerics’ version of Islam was thrust upon festive celebrations such as Nowruz. The ayatollah’s devotees claim they didn’t like the debauchery and laxity that these occasions represented.

Azar Nafisi, the critically acclaimed author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” and winner of the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, told New Lines that Iran today is the scene of an ongoing confrontation between two strands of thinking. One camp cherishes death to justify its rule, and the other adores life and fights the mentality of fatalism.

“Unlike the Islamic regime’s worship of misery, victimhood and death, this other viewpoint adopted by the majority of Iranian people is rooted in celebration of life and beauty,” Nafisi said. “Nowruz, Tirgan and other Iranian festivities are based on these concepts. For 45 years, Iranians have celebrated life through celebrating freedom.”

By taking a stand on public displays of joy, Shiite clerics invoke rationality to suggest Islam supports any tradition that’s anchored in science and logic but rejects superstition. This framing effectively places a ban on all forms of nonreligious merriment. Yet, the criterion of scientific credibility has never served as a metric to evaluate the principles the clerics promote as truisms, including rites that are entirely made-up.

“The funny thing is that the fanatics on TV denounce these in the name of superstition,” Sadri told New Lines. “That is rich coming from people who have innovated the entire millennial tradition of Shia Islam to suit their purposes.”

“These are the same people who oppose dancing and music, but in their secret celebrations of Eid al-Zahra, or what was called by the ordinary folks Omar Koshan [Persian for Killing of Omar], engage in all of that and even more than that,” he added.

Observed by some Shiite Muslims in Iran, Omar Koshan is an annual feast that begins on the ninth day of Rabi al-Awwal, the third month of the Islamic calendar, ending 18 days later, and marks the assassination of the second Islamic caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab. Shiites believe the succession rights after the death of the Prophet Muhammad were unjustly taken away from Imam Ali, which is why some of them, to the chagrin of their Sunni brethren, celebrate the killing of Muhammad’s companion Umar by a Sassanid Persian slave in 644 CE.

Because the preeminence of grief has been so deeply hardwired into the psychology of Iranian society that neither the practitioners of religious traditions nor critical observers question its necessity, even the extremities of dramatization are accepted as normal.

Public self-flagellation continues to be a near-sacred element of the long spells of annual mourning on the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala, when Imam Hussein was killed and eternalized in the Shiite eschatology as a martyr. In some Iranian cities and villages, these acts of self-harm have become so gruesome that, aside from beating themselves using matchets and daggers, spawning literal bloodbaths in public squares, some parents cause minor injuries on their children’s foreheads to evince the depth of their religious agony.

A number of Shiite clerics have rejected the practice, known in Arabic as “tatbir,” insisting that it is harmful both physically and emotionally. But most others have either condoned it, implicitly given it a green light or at most ruled that it should be halted temporarily.

Iran’s popular culture has come to venerate bereavement and value depression, not as a mental health challenge but as an attitude to life, leaving little room for joviality. Over five decades, the sanctity of mourning, the imperative of introversion and the centrality of pondering upon death have been instilled in people. The masses have been trained to dismiss smiles and eulogize tears.

It’s not just the ruling clerics who proliferate the mindset of tragedy. Average families have also internalized these values. When there’s a birthday or wedding party going on in a residential building, it’s highly likely that a neighbor will call the police to complain. However, if a mourning ceremony or a religious occasion takes place in the same location, nobody will complain. If the mourning hymns and songs played through the speakers are too loud, they are to be tolerated as “acceptable” noises. But the sound of music and dancing is unacceptable. I have witnessed some of these examples myself in Iran.

Conventional wisdom suggests that this emphasis on bereavement has generated a wave of bad luck that has been plunging the country into extended stretches of failure, directly and indirectly. Nations that are known to be cheerful don’t have to live through involuntary distress foisted on them by their statesmen. In Iran, public spaces are meant to be venues of gloom, and citizens aren’t supposed to abuse their private freedoms and go beyond what is considered acceptable when having fun.

“Everywhere one looks, he or she sees billboards, murals, posters, street signs, media images, and other objects that display revolutionary, religious, and wartime leaders and martyrs,” said Eric Lob, associate professor of political science at Florida International University. “In the process, the state has produced and perpetuated a public space of piety, commitment, struggle, sacrifice and martyrdom.”

Lob cited the example of six young Iranians who received suspended prison sentences of up to a year in 2014 for posting a video of themselves dancing to the Pharrell Williams song “Happy” on the rooftops of Tehran. Before the police ordered its removal from YouTube, the video racked up more than 200,000 views in four days. Even then-President Hassan Rouhani criticized the crackdown on its producers.

Misagh Parsa, author of the 2016 book “Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed,” argues that it is unsurprising to see spates of economic suffering and repression draining countries where a penchant for negativity dominates.

“It’s very logical to argue and hypothesize that such practices increase the risk of anger, depression and helplessness,” Parsa said. “Instead of increasing productivity and economic development, state preoccupation with otherworldly concerns risks pursuing inappropriate economic policies and undermining development and growth.”

According to Parsa, the theocratic regime’s fixation on shoring up the prerogatives of the clergy, inhibiting upward mobility and curtailing economic opportunities for the middle class has turned Iran into one of the nations with the highest levels of out-migration. This is compounded by the unfavorable footprint of the psyche of grief peddled by the government.

When President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash on May 19, a date that happens to coincide with the birthday of the eighth Shiite Imam Reza, the state canceled all celebrations of the religious occasion. The birthday of the only Shiite imam with a shrine in Iran has usually been the most important festivity on the state calendar. The unprecedented suspension of the much-anticipated celebratory events highlighted again that in the revolutionary lifestyle, collective happiness is not only subordinate to bereavement, but religious rituals with festive undertones are as well.

And yet with all the state has done to villainize the quest for exultation and render misery a treasured ideal, not every observer is convinced that the Islamic Republic is solely responsible for this pervasive sadness.

The leading role of lamentation in Iran’s popular culture and the significance of death in shaping the average Iranian’s worldview after 1979 have been investigated from time to time. But there is little that sheds light on how this predominant ideological stream has brought about cycles of unfortunate events that would not have happened if Iran were a society where positive vibes were championed.

In 2011, researchers at Columbia University, Stanford University and partner Indian institutions found that settings evoke certain emotions and that such associations can explain the public’s perception of those places. This phenomenon of human-to-human contagion, which they called emotional residue, is responsible for visitors to the Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland reporting feelings of tightness in their chests, shaking of their hands and depression.

In a setting like Iran, impaired by global isolation and self-defeating policies, the effects of emotional residue can be detected more easily. When the nation’s economic, social and political dilemmas are spiced up with a deliberate attempt to inflict dejection, it is likely that as a geographical entity, it absorbs the features of the group mood it has been trained to cultivate.

“[The] fundamentalist, orthopractic, religio-political foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran leads it into situations domestically and internationally which generate, cause, sustain and perpetuate the cycle of misery, institutionalize glumness and a condition of antagonism,” said Jamsheed Choksy, distinguished professor of the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University.

“Strip away joy, color, banter and normative humane interactions, replace them with black, censorship and interactions directed toward a dark, constantly penitent view of the world rather than seeing society as one of knowledge, poetry and international interactions with which ancient and medieval Iranians were so renowned, and you get the modern Iranian state,” he told New Lines.

Despite an overriding discourse centered on mortality salience, which the Islamic Republic has co-opted to further its terror management agenda, Iranians have not always complied with the official diktat. They have found ways to make their dynamism known and leveraged their social capital to effect change when possible.

“We should remember that people have agency and the ability to resist the theocracy, and the Woman, Life, Freedom protests is a good example of their refusal to accept engineering by the state,” said the Amsterdam-based scholar Saramifar.

Dwelling on past tragedies is of course symptomatic of Shiite theology. The same way the victimhood sparked by the Holocaust continues to haunt the Jewish people, Shiites have come to internalize their historical subjugation, epitomized by the martyrdom of their third imam, as the beginning of a streak of injustices that still overshadow them.

But in Iran, the culture of bereavement no longer serves a religious purpose, and the project of social control and political repression is more urgent. The caveat is that those involved in the enterprise are facing a crisis of legitimacy.

“For centuries, the Shiite establishment promoted these ideas, and many who faced difficulties in their lives embraced them, crying not only for victims of a suspicious tale but also for their own difficulties,” said Kamran Talattof, professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Arizona.

“However, this ideological enterprise is now bankrupt, with the regime resorting to force, coercion and suppression to maintain control. Furthermore, the involvement of preachers in corruption and the killing of Iranians has led people to doubt not only the messengers but also the message itself,” Talattof told New Lines.

One needs to go a long way to prove that it is owing to these excesses that Iranians are compromising their religiosity. Some polls have made similar insinuations about the nation’s race to secularization, but their findings are contested. Yet this is what Talattof echoes: “If a worldview survey were conducted in Iran today, it would not be surprising to find that it might be one of the most atheist nations in the world.”

To be sure, there are a couple of studies that indicate that elements of religiosity among Iranians are being undermined. These surveys need to be expanded to present a fuller picture. But as a starting point, they are solid barometers of the pulse of a misunderstood nation.

In a 2018 Pew Research Center poll, 78% of Iranian Muslims stated that religion was “very important in their lives,” whereas higher numbers in other Muslim-majority countries agreed with the same declaration, including 94% of the respondents in Pakistan, 92% in Afghanistan, 83% in Iraq and 81% in Bangladesh. The poll was part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project.

The same research demonstrated that Iranians’ rate of worship attendance was also markedly lower than that of other Muslim nations. While only 38% of Iranians in the 2018 poll said they attended worship services “at least once weekly,” an overwhelming 72% of Indonesians, 62% of Egyptians, 59% of Pakistanis and 44% of Turks reported going to mosque for prayers during the same interval.

The results of the World Values Survey 2017-2022, commissioned by the Stockholm-headquartered nonprofit World Values Survey Association, also point to a brewing, potentially momentous shift in Iranians’ attitude to religious observance. In the survey’s ranking of 64 countries based on their degrees of religiosity, Iran came in 16th after such nations as Indonesia, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan and Malaysia, as well as non-Muslim states like Armenia, Nicaragua, Colombia and Greece.

The relationship between the state prioritizing bereavement and the Iranian public’s decoupling itself from religious principles is speculative, as mourning represents only one facet of the exercise of faith. But the broader phenomenon of Iran’s shift away from monotheism and theism that Talattof refers to has empirical foundations.

The claim that the active promotion of grief through an obsession with tragic ruminations has exhausted the Iranians is not credible to those tasked with officiating sadness. Some of them, especially the younger clerics seeking to appeal to millennial audiences on social media, acknowledge that investment in bereavement has been disproportionate to that in marking happy occasions, including religious celebrations. But even in making this admission, they insist that divine bereavement is a prerequisite for the spiritual nourishment of the society, guaranteeing that people are sufficiently pious, enlightened and deep-thinking. Deep thought isn’t necessarily supposed to produce innovative, creative citizens.

The fact that in recent years Iranian seminarians have opposed the novel products of technology has implications for the credibility of their espousal of thoughtfulness and knowledge. Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi had ruled in a controversial 2013 fatwa that video calls, which had emerged in the country for the first time, rolled out by 3G communication operators, were not permissible. He had argued that they would produce corruption and that their disadvantages outweighed their benefits, if any.

I talked to Hossein Ebrahimi, a cleric living in the pilgrimage city of Mashhad who has a large social media following. In the run-up to the June 28 presidential election, he was actively campaigning for the conservative front-runner, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the former mayor of Tehran and Parliament speaker.

“As a student of religious sciences who has been involved in these activities for more than 20 years,” he said, “I believe there is a deviation in our country, and we are dealing with certain shortcomings when it comes to religious merriment and halal happiness.

“Designations have been given to certain time periods for religious celebration, but their quality, neither in terms of expanse nor in terms of formatting, matches that of the periods of religious mourning.”

Ebrahimi went on to explain that what he called deep happiness is Islam’s priority. “Deep happiness means assisting someone to solve their problems and unknot the entanglements of their life. This is what Islam is looking to achieve.”

“Aside from that, it is of course important to bring a smile to someone’s face,” he said, “but then, there are brakes and red lines as far as the religious literature is concerned.”

Precise figures on how much the Iranian government spends on promotional activities for mourning events, including printed materials, street advertising, books and multimedia products, have rarely been made public. These payouts are recurring expenses, and an entire media and PR industry has grown around pitching society into constant bleakness.

The most illustrative case is the unrestrained budget earmarked for publicity related to the memorials to Soleimani and his four anniversaries after 2020. Countless billboards, posters, banners, exterior wraps for buses and covers for street furniture were printed in a short time, enveloping Iranian cities in black. All materials featured portraits of the general gazing sternly at onlookers.

Despite a lack of transparency, some figures can be gleaned from the few resources available. According to the semiofficial ISNA news agency, 1,202 books about him have been published since Soleimani’s death, with titles containing different variations of his name. Predictably, most of these books have been printed using generous government subsidies that aren’t allocated to independent publishers or authors.

According to official and municipal figures, in Qods, a city in Tehran province, the municipality printed 16,000 posters, which were to be distributed in the immediate aftermath of Soleimani’s assassination. In the city of Mashhad, 5,000 taxis were covered with images of the commander, funded by the mayor. On the first anniversary of the attack that killed Soleimani, the same northeastern city printed and distributed 70,000 posters featuring his image.

In the city of Boukan, with a population of 194,000, the local branch of the Islamic Development Organization printed 2,000 posters after the commander’s killing. In 2021, one mosque in the city of Shiraz disseminated 1,000 posters to mark his first death anniversary.

It’s reasonable to extrapolate that in aggregate millions of dollars of public funds have been spent to honor a lost military figure, and the promotional materials churned out make up merely one manifestation of a multipronged propaganda effort. This approach to commemoration is fundamentally different from how the U.S. “fallen heroes” of the Vietnam War are honored or from the remembrances of those killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example.

Sadri maintains that it is an overgeneralization to say that Iran stands out in its exceptional ritualization of death: “The Serbs still ruminate over their devastating 1389 defeat in the Battle of Kosovo. Once, I attended an elaborate ceremony in Greece lamenting the anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to Mehmet II in 1453.”

“The Americans still dwell on their 1836 defeat by the Mexican army under General Antonio Santa Anna,” Sadri said. “They don’t try to forget, but ‘Remember the Alamo.’

“And now, we have the ‘Remember 9/11’ slogan as well,” Sadri said.

This is not an uncommon view. Kevan Harris, associate professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles, agrees that sowing grief and tragedy is not unique to Iranian political iconography.

“The dictatorship in Brazil during the 1970s, as did the Soviet Union in the 1960s, claimed that collective joy is dangerous and licentious, a product of Western corruption,” Harris told New Lines.

“These moods predate 1979 in Iranian letters and cultural production, as much as satire or melodrama predated 1979, as well. Iran’s favorite Robert de Niro is wracked with Catholic guilt and pathologizes his life,” Harris said.

Many academics I talked to were careful about making assessments that portray Iranian society as homogeneous and ignore its rapid evolutions. And they were mindful not to single it out as the only country where weaponizing religion holds sway. The nuances, however, cannot be glossed over when dissecting the uniquely politicized “death-conscious culture” in post-1979 Iran.

When the Islamic Republic elegizes its elite or the revered Shiite saints, it does so while imposing an atmosphere of tragedy, deepened by unease. This has not only helped forge an unimpeachable cult of personality around figures like Soleimani — who are expected to go down in history as sacrosanct icons of the Islamic Republic — but also fostered submission among an otherwise restive population, which the establishment requires.

“If you look at every holiday or every event that the Islamic regime celebrates, it oftentimes is someone’s martyrdom, someone’s death or someone’s killing,” said award-winning journalist Tara Kangarlou.

“In the very rare cases when they celebrate the birthday of an imam, it still is not joyous and still aligns with religious behavior that is not necessarily jubilant. By taking away joy and happiness, they’ve infused the society with their version of life, which is their way of theocracy in this case,” she told New Lines.

In her book “The Heartbeat of Iran: Real Voices of a Country and Its People,” Kangarlou explores the theme of grief and touches on the government’s tendency to routinely bad-mouth Nowruz. She says even without finding a correlation between the state-sponsored culture of misery and the mental health crises gripping Iran, it is possible to make reasonable observations about society’s emotional health.

“When a society is robbed of joy and constantly fed a narrative of sacrifice, martyrdom and death, where death is celebrated rather than hope, success, dreams and aspirations, if you have a child growing up amid all this, by the time he or she is in teen or college days, it’s only natural that this would have an impact on their well-being,” she said.

It is not easy to solely blame this culture of bereavement, meticulously conserved by the government, on the unfortunate incidents that happen at an alarmingly rapid pace in Iran. But from the standpoint of the average citizen, most of these misfortunes are exclusive to Iran, and in few other places in the world is it possible to see so many successive tribulations surfacing.

People ask, why can’t Iran be a country like Finland or Denmark, where people are just happy? Why are the clerics so fearful of our happiness? Why is it that basic acts such as dancing, couples holding hands or friends socializing in parks have become chronic fault lines warranting intervention from the security apparatus? Why is life so complicated here?

Despite general agreement among the scholars with whom I spoke that the government has institutionalized a culture of mourning, most were cautious about making a direct link between this and the dire state of the economy, health indicators and security. One university professor acknowledged that this is a compelling argument. But right now, she said, it would be premature to draw a conclusion.

Under Raisi, the nation’s most hard-line president, war seemed possible on several occasions. Iran’s sovereignty was breached for the first time when the Pakistani army attacked Sistan and Baluchistan province in January. Then in April Israel targeted military sites near the city of Isfahan in response to the Islamic Republic’s missile and drone operation against the Jewish state.

It is logical to presume that an administration that has magnified social tensions through a violent crackdown on women, marketed mourning as one of the few cultural endeavors it invests in and waged a blitzkrieg against displays of public joy would eventually reap a dismal socioeconomic environment punctuated by rare political crises.

The 2023 edition of the Legatum Prosperity Index, released by the London-based think tank Legatum Institute, has ranked 167 countries on 12 measures of prosperity. Adjusted for countries’ scores in the pillar of personal freedom, which also includes social tolerance, Iran is 165th. In the 2024 Chandler Good Government Index, which assesses countries according to the strength of their institutions, global reputation, rule of law and “helping people rise,” Iran ranks 107 out of 113.

Iran’s status quo doesn’t have many parallels, either in its neighborhood or among countries of similar size and demographics. For decades, its economy has been crushed under punitive sanctions, but because there has been no immediate humanitarian crisis, the plight of its people hasn’t been at the heart of a global debate. Corruption is so endemic that people yearn to identify executives who are not implicated in fiendish embezzlement scandals.

Its intransigent government, detested at home and criticized internationally for its ongoing nuclear adventurism, still has a large base of conservative supporters that not only resist civil society’s efforts for change but also function as the auxiliaries of suppression against their own fellow citizens. This set of conditions can occur anywhere. There are nations that have continually dealt with complexities that bear close resemblance to the realities of Iran, including Lebanon, Cuba, Venezuela and Libya. However, in none of these countries has the government taken the mantle of grief and promoted it with such vigor.

This state of emotional disintegration is arguably an emblem of Iranian society. The reason, perhaps, is the uncontested rule of the culture of bereavement. And the outcome is a vicious cycle of misery.

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