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Iran: A Nation Inscribed Anew in Joyful Mourning

By Nahid Siamdoust

February 17th, 2026

These days in Iran people are marking the 40th day after the passing of the thousands who were killed in the January 2026 protests, an Islamic tradition that symbolizes the closure of the mourning period. Reports and videos from the country show hundreds of people gathered, clapping in honor of the dead and singing the national anthem, in unconventional ceremonies that are more akin to political events than personal commemorations. In spirit, they mirror the unusual funerals held weeks ago.

In the midst of profound grief and suffering following the state murder of thousands of mostly young Iranians in the January 2026 uprising, many families mourned in radically altered rituals that signaled a refusal of long-standing traditions. Instead of customary Shia rituals of Quranic recitation by professional qāris, lamentations by eulogists, and the open and often dramatic expression of audible crying by those closest to the departed, viral videos on social media showed mourners engaging in visually joyous acts of singing, clapping, and dancing, sometimes coupled with political chants. Although the bodies enacted these scenes, the gravity and agony of death were visible on the faces. These were willful performances that required the suspension of the familiar comfort of ritual.

There were several early videos that went viral. One shows a mother dancing with deep anguish to a song at her son’s grave, presumably her son’s favorite, while a large crowd of mostly male mourners sings along. In another video we see a strangely exuberant scene at a funeral, with a pop song pumping and people cheering with arms raised in the air and dancing. This random Mazandarani song about heartbreak has itself now become a sort of protest song at other funerals. In yet other videos, we see people releasing pigeons or balloons in the air in honor of the deceased, celebrating elaborate black weddings for those killed, or singing Iran’s unofficial national anthem “Ey Irān.”

A group of people dressed in black, holding flowers in the air.

A screenshot of an Instagram reel with the description: “Hero (Jāvidnām, literally, whose name will remain eternal) Mehrzad Nazari asked in his last Insta story that people should play music and dance at this funeral”. Posted by @majidakbhari.official, screenshotted by the author on 17.02.2026.

All of these presented unprecedented and unorthodox acts at Iranian funerals and quickly became national spectacles as they circulated on social media. In what follows, I offer a historical and sociological explanation for the radically altered mourning ceremonies we have witnessed.

First, it’s important to understand that these practices arise from an affective politics of joy that Iranians have for years developed in their alternative public sphere. In private spaces and on social media, they have enacted a world that is in contradistinction to what one might call the Islamic Republic’s politics of mourning.[1] During these funerals for people who were on the streets demonstrating against the reigning state, we witnessed the agentive eruption of this sensory and embodied political subjectivity, one that disavows the state’s Islamic narrative. In rejecting long entrenched traditions of collective mourning, these Iranians are enacting a new articulation of national identity, one that refuses to trade in the same language of the Islamic Republic.

For nearly 50 years, the Iranian state has rooted its legitimacy in particular interpretations of Islam. At its inception, the Islamic Republic imposed a culture of mourning with both religious and political exigencies in many spheres of life. State-affiliated foundations and organizations heavily funded mourning commemorations, the morality committees policed bodies and considered dark colors – especially in women’s clothing – as the only acceptable “revolutionary” attire, state media broadcast a preponderance of sad eulogies and music, and religious and political authorities expressed dismay at the celebration of joyous Persian holidays. With time, the state eased some of these restrictions but never relented on its Islamic ideology.

Moreover, the revolutionary figurehead Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself accorded crying and mourning a political status.

A large segment of the Iranian population was religious and engaged in Shia rites before 1979 but with the revolution, Khomeini highlighted the political potential of crying in his speeches and elevated the nature of these religious commemorations above and beyond religion and reframed them as anti-Imperialist communal experiences that were central to the survival of the newly born Islamic nation. Many of these communal traditions are commemorations of the death or martyrdom of imams and other sanctities and involve Islamic eulogy recitations and collective crying.

He said Iran should be a nation of crying. In one speech, the charismatic leader told the worshipping crowd:

It is not so that you should imagine crying is crying. No, it’s not crying. It’s a political, psychological, social issue […] it saves the essence of our religion […] All over the country there should be mourning gatherings, all should be mourning, and all should be crying.[2]

In the recent funeral ceremonies, we see people who disavow communal crying as language, but also as narrative. In refusing to mourn, they refuse to bend to the state’s enforcement of death on their loved ones and their families. Instead, they insist on giving meaning to the lives of those lost. These deaths shall not portend an end but new beginnings. This framing is reflected in some of the slogans at these funerals, such as “Mā edāmeh dārim” (We will continue) and “In gol-e par-par shodeh, hedyeh be mihan shodeh” (This broken flower is a gift to the nation). These are similar in spirit to the Kurdish epitaph engraved on the tombstone of the woman whose death ignited the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, namely, “Shahid nāmere” (A martyr doesn’t die).

A man and a woman dance in front of a group, all dressed in black.
A screenshot of an Instagram reel with the description: “The father and mother’s mourning dance at the 40th day ceremony of their son Ilia Ojaqloo” [the 17-year old was killed in the city of Zanjan]. Posted by @tavaana, screenshotted by the author on 17.02.2026.

Her senseless death was to give sense to a whole new world.

The young age of most of those killed further fuels these mourning celebrations. There is still no complete verified data of the thousands that were killed, but the credible press association Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA) has verified 7005 deaths, with a majority aged between mid-teens to early thirties.[3]

These were youths who still had their lives ahead of them, birthdays, graduations, and weddings. Most funerals held anywhere are usually for older people. In contrast, the flood of young people killed in this uprising visually manifested one of the claims of the protests, namely that this state robbed its people of a future. In celebrating birthdays and weddings at these funerals, the mourners turn these ceremonies into deeply political events, shifting the focus from the loss of life to the loss of potential futurities.

And they refuse to show defeat against the state by crying. Instead, they celebrate.

These are ceremonies for the nation’s heroes, not sad affairs.

In most of the videos, it is women who are leading these new rites. They are serving up defiant declarations against the state, initiating the dances and songs, and giving solace to those who cannot bear the moment. In the organically moving and swaying crowds surrounding the grave, their bodies have come to represent the body politic. Women have been at the forefront of many of Iran’s overt political campaigns. But they have also been at the forefront of a more enigmatic movement that has functioned on the level of the body and affect.

For years now, viral videos have circulated in Iranian social media spaces of women breaking into dance in streets and on buses and trains, usually to the music of buskers, disrupting the state’s control of public space. Drawing on Asef Bayat’s notions of “quiet encroachment” and “non-movement” and Michel de Certeau’s “everyday practices,” I have argued that through continuing ordinary life practices prevalent in Iranian culture, such as the presence of music and dance in social gatherings, Iranians have maintained an affective sociality and an embodied ethics that by extension afford political agency.[4]

Women have filled social media platforms with their songs and dance memes – women’s solo singing and public dance are still forbidden by the state – and in effect normalized a joyous, secular, women-centered world that is counter to the Islamic Republic’s imposed regulations.

These posts engaging millions with the comments together produced a language that asserts that these scenes represent “authentic” Persian culture vs. the state-imposed Islamic culture. People draw associations between the joyful and pre-Islamic, pre-revolutionary, or Pahlavi culture, and a disassociation of the joyful with Islamic Republic culture. At the core, these performative practices create narratives that “other” the restrictive Islamic state as not “truly Iranian,” a potent political claim.

These two political strands – explicit and affective – converged and erupted in the country’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising that demanded political liberation through bodily autonomy. This narrative is now on full display at funerals, where people sing the unofficial national anthem as they celebrate their dead.

Two other recent events likely contributed to these stunning funeral celebrations.

There were the dying words of a young protestor by the name of Majidreza Rahnavard. The 23-year-old was one of the first people to be executed in the course of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022, convicted of “enmity against God.”[5] In a widely circulated video filmed right before his execution in Mashhad, an official – perhaps his executioner – interviews a blindfolded Rahnavard:

Two little girls hold a portrait of a young man, men dressed in black dance in the background.

A screenshot of an Instagram reel with the description: “Cake dance for the groom that perished”. Posted by @azadeh_a_azari, screenshotted by the author on 17.02.2026.

Executioner: What did you write in your will?
Rahnavard: Where they should bury me. I don’t want them to cry at my grave.
Executioner: You don’t want them to read you the Qoran, or say the ritual prayer for you. What else?
Rahnavard: I don’t want them to do the ritual prayer. I want them to celebrate. To play joyful music.[6]

This very dialogue that the state-commissioned executioner filmed as evidence for Rahnavard’s depravity has been turned on its head now to speak to his heroic leadership of a new path.

Although the political and semantic context is important for understanding these joyous mourning ceremonies, there are also ethnic and minority customs that impact these phenomena. Not unlike other cultures in the region that have traditions for celebrating a young man’s wedding at his funeral, such as among Palestinians, so do some of the ethnic minorities in Iran. Prominent among them are the Lurs, who dance at the funeral of young people, or celebrate “black weddings.”

In fact, the very first video that I encountered of a mother dancing for her son was from the town of Izeh, which is majority Lur. In this night scene that seemed astounding because of its novelty, a mother dances defiantly in front of the car that carries her son’s corpse.[7] In another scene from Izeh, we see a large group of women dressed in black streaming down an alleyway dacing with colorful handkerchiefs raised in the air. This custom seems to be most pronounced among Iran’s Lurs, but among some ethnic Arabs in the south and Kurds in the west of the country there are also traditions of playing musical instruments and performing dances.

In these customs that mark the transitional phase of human experience between life and death, a liminal period during which according to Victor Turner, hierarchies are suspended and deep connectedness happens, participants have fundamentally rewritten this rite of passage.[8] During these experientially powerful moments, often marked by joy, awe, vulnerability, and solidarity, they have infused the funerals with a state-altering meaning, undoing the hold of traditional Shia customs that bind their culture to that of the Islamic Republic. They have untethered their most intimate moments of honoring the dead from a religious culture that the state has championed. In doing so, ritual participants emerge transformed as a collective, no longer beholden to customs that have driven group cohesion for centuries. Stunningly, it’s as of the people we see in these videos are moving viscerally as a collective body politic, driven to this point by a common resolution. These are moments of communitas, renewing social bonds through new visions. They are radical acts of departure, of embarking into a new imaginary, a new world.

A group of women dressed in black dances while holding colorful handkerchiefs.

A screenshot of an Instagram reel showing a mourning dance in Izeh, Luristan. Posted by @abolfazl.khodabakhshi17, screenshotted by the author on 17.02.2026. 

In watching these videos, we can even sense the experience of novelty etched on the faces of participants. These are liminal moments of betwixt and between, unrehearsed. There is the older grandmother who looks perplexed and exasperated as people dance around her, the uncle who demands with rage that people clap for his slain nephew, the father who shouts “remember, don’t talk about death, just joy and life,”[9] and the mother who dances with all the world’s sorrow on her shoulders, all engaged in a transitional euphoria willed to rewrite the meaning and identity of their community.

Importantly, these mourning dances or joyful mournings create communal experiences that refute Khomeini’s vision for the nation. If his crying publics were affectively rooted in Shia traditions revived in the country’s anti-Imperialist revolution, these dances draw on pop music and joyous affects. This language harnesses people’s struggles for the most ordinary and yet meaningful human endeavor, namely the pursuit of life and happiness.

The body has become an important site of action precisely because Islamic Iran has enacted women’s political subjugation through the stigmatization of their bodies. As women, their repression is a heightened form of the kind of restrictions to which the rest of the population is subject, where even deeply intimate matters such as dress and public comportment are subject to punishment. As the state has increasingly repressed and shut down political speech, the body has taken on the work of expressing dissent. Although mourners have engaged in chanting slogans, most of the political work in these funeral ceremonies is carried out by clapping hands and dancing bodies.

To quote Judith Butler, “How does the unspeakable population speak and make its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require in order to persist? It is not only that we need to live in order to act, but that we have to act, and act politically, in order to secure the conditions of existence.”[10]

We might never know for certain whether the mourning dances were inspired by Rahnavard’s final words, or the early viral videos of dancing funerals by Lurs, or were simply an organic and visceral eruption of the language that the joyous counterpublics have for many years sustained in the alternative public sphere. What we do know is that they have marked, with their radical and communal nature, a profound break with the Islamic Republic.

This is a departure that goes beyond politics. It’s a disavowal rooted in bodies that refuse an entrenched religious culture. In transforming their communal rites, they have opened space for a diverse set of oppositional, spontaneous, and unscripted practices, articulating these moments as the beginnings of a people inscribing itself anew.


Notes

[1] See my chapter “The Politics of Performing Joy in Public” in The Making of Iranian Modernity: Studies in Honor of Houchang E. Chehabi. 2025. Roham Alvandi, Afshin Marashi, David Motadel (Eds.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025.

[2] Ruhollah Khomeini, Sahifeh-ye Nur, vol. 10, p. 217.

[3] See Human Rights Activists News Agency’s report, 12 February 2026: https://www.en-hrana.org/day-47-of-the-protests-intensified-communication-restrictions-and-ongoing-arrests/.

[4] See Siamdoust, “The Politics of Performing Joy in Public.”

[5] See “Majidreza Rahnavard: Iran carries out second execution over protests,” BBC News, 12 December 2022; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63939428.

[6] See weareiranianstudents post on 14 December 2025; https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSQRMvWDGmz/.

[7] This video was retroactively attributed to the January 2026 protests but the young man by the name of Esma’il Qoreyshvandi died before the protests and this scene of the mother dancing predates the protests by about a week; https://factnameh.com/fa/fact-checks/2026-01-05-iran-esmail-gharishvandi-izeh-fake.

[8] See Victor W. Turner. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co.

[9] See Instagram post by @amplify_iran on 17 Feb 2026; https://www.instagram.com/p/DU3hPXbDct6/?img_index=3&igsh=OTZkbzdjYmtqdGly.

[10] Butler, Judith. 2016. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 58.


About the Author


Nahid Siamdoust is currently Assistant Professor of Media and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford 2017), co-editor of Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society (Harvard 2026), and has published in Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. Previously, she was an Iran correspondent for Time Magazine and a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera International. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR. In 2023, she launched the podcast series “Woman, Life, Freedom: All in on Iran,” now renamed “IranCast,” with interviews on new books about Iran. She’s delivered a TEDx Talk titled “Dance for Life.” In the academic years 2026–28, Nahid is a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, jointly hosted by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.


Citation: Nahid Siamdoust, Iran: A Nation Inscribed Anew in Joyful Mourning, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 26.02.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/64535


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (February 26, 2026). Iran: A Nation Inscribed Anew in Joyful Mourning. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved March 9, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15roh


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