Families across Iran will commemorate the end of the traditional Iranian Islamic 40-day mourning period this week for loved ones killed at the peak of a bloody crackdown on nationwide protests demanding an end to authoritarian clerical rule.
How families mark the 40th-day memorials for the thousands killed from Jan. 8to Jan. 10 will test both the success of the crackdown and the ability of government opponents to find new ways to defy the leadership.
Fortieth-day memorials have played a pivotal role in the country’s modern history. They were a launchpad for the protests that eventually overthrew Iran’s shah in the 1979 revolution.
This week may not be such as dramatic a turning point, but dissidents are already using the occasion as a way to voice their defiance. Some have been transforming what was once a somber, religious funeral rite into boisterous, celebratory affairs, staking out these moments to starkly reject the Islamic Republic and its austere rule.
“They’ve reinvented this with a revolutionary rage,” said Arash Azizi, a historian of Iran. “It is an attempt by Iranians to take back their country and rediscover their nationalism.”
While some mourners plan to gather at cemeteries, others are avoiding burial and religious sites altogether, renting event halls in a rejection of Islamic traditions and an attempt to avoid the authorities’ attention.
Security forces have tried to intimidate some families into avoiding public memorials, according to rights groups and the relatives of several slain protesters interviewed by The New York Times.
For generations, 40th-day commemorations for the dead have been at the heart of Iran’s mourning culture — one of the final rituals of farewell before returning to the rhythms of daily life.
Such memorials for slain protesters provided the momentum that drove the protests against Iran’s monarchy in 1978. Security forces quashing unrest at these memorials then killed more protesters — triggering a cycle of 40th-day ceremonies and protests.
A year later, the shah had fled, ushering in the Islamic Republic that has ruled the country ever since.
The memorials are profoundly symbolic occasions that most Iranians observe, and the authorities appear keen to control them. One way to do that is to make the rituals their own.
On Monday, the Iranian authorities announced plans for official mourning ceremonies in the capital, Tehran, and the northern city of Mashhad.
“The incidents of January were a loss for all of us, and we mourn all those who lost their lives,” Iran’s vice president, Mohamad Reza Aref, said in a statement posted on social media. “I invite everyone to attend the 40th-day memorial ceremonies across the country.”
The government argues that its crackdown was in response to unrest fomented by “terrorists” backed by Israel and the United States, leading to more than 3,000 deaths. But the U.S.-based rights group HRANA says more than 7,000 protesters were killed over three weeks of unrest — the vast majority of them from Jan. 8 to 10. Many Iran experts now consider that three-day period the bloodiest in the country’s modern history.
Officials banned public 40th-day memorials for Robina Aminian, a 23-year-old fashion student. She was shot in the head while protesting in Tehran, according to her aunt, Hali Nouri, who lives in Europe.
For more than a month, Ms. Nouri said, plainclothes police were stationed at either end of the alleyway where the Aminian family resides.
She said mourners were coordinating with each other to gather gradually throughout Tuesday at the cemeteries where their loved ones are buried, in the hopes that the authorities will not notice the crowds assembling.
“My sister says, ‘Even if they shoot bullets, I will go for her 40th day,’” Ms. Nouri told The Times.
Many of Ms. Aminian’s relatives and friends, the aunt said, are also determined to attend.
There are other signs of defiance across Iran.
At several universities, students have repeatedly attempted to hold sit-ins, according to student websites. Iran’s Central Bar Association called on lawyers to take cases of detained protesters pro bono. At Iran’s state-backed Fajr International Film Festival last week, local news media reported that many actors, producers and filmmakers refused to accept awards or even attend.
And for days, videos show, Iranians have taken to their rooftops in the cover of darkness to chant for the toppling of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“What has shocked me is that, despite the fact we’re not seeing large-scale protests, the base line level of social resistance remains enormously high,” said, Farzan Sabet, an analyst on Iran and Middle East politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.
This does not mean momentum toward new protests is building, he said.
“What I think everyone is waiting for is whether the other shoe will drop — that is, whether a U.S. strike will happen or not.”
The severity of Iran’s crackdown is also partly a reaction to threats beyond its borders. President Trump has massed warships in Persian Gulf waters as Washington prepares to hold another round of tenuous talks with Tehran in Geneva this week over reining in Iranian nuclear and military capabilities.
With neither side able to even agree on what they are negotiating over, the risk of another regional war looms.
“Almost everyone is waiting for Trump’s promises to be carried out,” said Masoud, an accountant in Mashhad who did not want to be identified by his full name for fear of repercussions. “The people have done everything they could.”
Some Iranians said they were trying to hold 40th-day commemorations that skirt the authorities’ restrictions.
Michael Askari, the relative of three family members who he said were shot and killed in their car near protests west of Tehran, said his surviving loved ones had signed a pledge not to chant political slogans. They were also barred from going to the gravesite after the 40th-day memorial ceremony.
But in the customs of his family’s city, Sonqor, in western Iran, people go to the gravesite the day after the 40th-day memorials.
“We will have to see whether it will be possible,” he said.
Like the families of several slain protesters who spoke to The Times, Mr. Askari’s family decided to hold its ceremony at an events hall instead of a mosque. The choice is notable, both as an attempt to evade the authorities’ attention and as part of a broader shift from more somber Islamic funerary rites.
Instead of tearful rituals of mourning, families of those killed at protests have been filmed dancing, blaring folk songs and clapping over people’s graves — customs anathema to a once- lugubrious affair. The trend is seen as a way of defying traditionally somber religious customs that many Iranians now associate with the Islamic Republic’s austere rule.
Video of the 40th-day ceremony for Raja Balooli-Pour, a student at the University of Tehran, shows mourners playing folk tunes instead of the customary recitations of Quranic verse. In the video, verified by The Times, women perform the traditional kel, a high-pitched ululation most Iranians traditionally reserve for weddings.
Reimagining mourning rituals has been a part of Iran’s culture at least since the revolution, said Mr. Azizi, the historian, when Islamic revolutionaries transformed 40th-day ceremonies from somber affairs to “rabble-rousing occasions.”
After an uprising in 2022 calling for greater personal freedoms denied under the Islamic Republic’s restrictive rule, protesters’ funerals began shifting fromreligious traditions.
Today’s protesters have taken the reinvention further by turning mourning into celebration.
“Their sadness is defiant,” Mr. Azizi said. “They are saying that the battle is not over, that they have not given up and that they will stand up to the regime again.”
Sanam Mahoozi and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.
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