Tehran’s Grand Mosalla Mosque, where the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was held in state earlier this month, is an extraordinary building. In a country filled with exquisitely tiled, millennium-old houses of worship, this one is a plain, brutalist product of the 1979 revolution whose sole virtue is its size. With a main prayer hall that spans multiple World Cup soccer fields, it is a still-unfinished monument to the sheer scale of religious fervor that Iran’s supreme leader sought to institutionalize.
When I went to Friday prayers in the mosque a decade ago, it was clear Khamenei had failed. Attendance was sparse. When the cleric leading the service began punching the air to chant “Death to America! Death to Israel! Death to the Infidel!” the response was mechanical and insincere. As an American infidel, I didn’t take part. My neighbor asked where I was from and brightened visibly when I told him. “Ah, I like America,” he said, citing its freedoms.
Last week’s ceremonies unfolded in the same place but a different world. There are far too many mourners for the indoor prayer hall and the sense is of defiance and fury. The “Death to America!” chants are vengeful and heartfelt. When I visited, the 2015 nuclear deal was still in effect and many Iranians had hoped the days of their nation’s zero-sum confrontation with Washington were over. Now the countries have been at war and the regime is trying to revive the legitimizing myth that lost its power in Khamenei’s later years and left him ruling by violence alone. The war has made a cruel, despised and out-of-touch old man into a martyr.
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