The biggest mistake Western experts make when reading Iran is this:
They are trying to understand this country only in terms of missile range, air defense systems, embargo, economic fragility and proxy powers.
However, if you try to read Iran only in terms of military capacity, you will see the state in front of you, but you will not see the mentality that sustains it.
Because it is not enough to look at Tehran to understand Iran.
You'll look at Qom.
You will look at Karbala.
You will look at the culture of mourning. And most importantly, you look at the “40th day” in Shiite memory.
In Iran, sometimes it is not the bullet that starts a revolution.
The mourning that took place 40 days after that bullet spilled out onto the streets.
In the Shia world, the 40th day is not just mourning, it is political mobilization.
In Shia terminology, the 40th day of mourning is not an ordinary religious ritual.
This is the threshold where grief is reorganized, mourning becomes collective and social anger flows back into the streets.
The memory of Karbala is not just a narrated tragedy in the Shia world;
is a constantly reproduced political consciousness.
Those who do not understand this cannot understand the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
The process of civil disobedience that began in 1977 entered a completely different phase in 1978. The use of weapons by SAVAK at a demonstration, causing casualties, fueled anger against the regime.
But it was not just about death.
The real issue was that those deaths were embedded in the Shia culture of mourning, generating new waves of rebellion in a 40-day cycle.
[1]
The first funerals were held. There was mourning.
The street was thought to be silent.
But Shiite memory will not shut up.
When the 40th day came, that mourning took to the streets again.
Each death became the legitimization of the next demonstration.
Each funeral became a call for the next wave.
The streets of Iran were animated not only by anger but also by a calendar of mourning.[1]
This is what Western analysts failed to see.
The Iranian Revolution was fueled not by the streets, but by the mourning calendar.
In August 1978, the ABADAN cinema arson further massified social anger. With each repressive move, the regime actually prepared the ground for the next 40th day.
The Shah's regime thought it had dispersed the crowds in the streets,
was in fact creating a new ring of mourning in Shia memory.
And finally, by 1979, the Shah had not only lost political power.
It lost its social legitimacy in the face of the huge wave of religious symbolism.
Anyone who tries to explain it only in terms of police brutality, economic crisis, foreign pressure or modern theories of revolution is missing the point.
Because it is one of the elements that set the rhythm of the Iranian revolution,
It was the 40-day reproduction mechanism of the Shiite mourning culture.[1]
Velayat-e Faqih: In Iran, the state is not only a government but also an organization of faith.
There is another big wall in front of anyone who wants to understand Iran: Thinking that Velayat-e Faqih is only a constitutional office.
However, this structure is not a simple “clerical administration”.
In the Shiite faith world, the idea of a fully legitimate political order until the 12th Imam, the missing Imam, Imam Mahdi, appears has historically been problematic. This is why the clergy in the classical Shiite tradition did not directly demand a state for a long time.
But in the last century this has been broken.
“Ali Shariati translated Shiite memory into revolutionary-social language; Khomeini transformed this energy into a model of institutional sovereignty, making Velayat-e Faqih a regime doctrine.” [2]
In other words: An authority of jurists to maintain the state until the coming of Imam Mahdi, in preparation for his arrival.
That is why the system in Iran is not just a regime.
This is an eschatological model of the state.
The state is coded as an organism that must be preserved not only to govern the present but also to prepare for the coming of the Mahdi.
Without understanding this, you cannot understand the loyalty, sacrifice and patience in Iran and why the regime does not fall apart easily in times of crisis.
After Khamenei, the real message will not be delivered at the funeral, but on the 40th day.
With the passing of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the first reflex of Western societies and politicians again looked at the Islamic Republic of Iran:
Who will be the successor?
What will the Revolutionary Guards do?
How will the internal cliques split or will they split?
How will economic markets react?
These are all important.
But the most crucial and critical question for Iran in the coming days will be: How will the 40th day go?
Because in Shia collective memory, the 40th day is not just a commemoration.
It is purification.
It is a test of loyalty.
It is a declaration of whether the regime is alive or not.
It is the reassertion of social will.
In Iran, sometimes the death of a leader takes on its true political meaning not on the first day, but on the 40th day.
Anyone who does not understand this is again misreading Iran.
The fight between the Shah and Qom was not a religion-state fight from the beginning!
Another memorization is this: As if the Shah's regime and the Ulema of Qom were absolute enemies from the beginning.
No, no, no.
In the pre-Valayat-e Faqih period, there was no absolute rupture between the Qom madrasa and the Shah's regime. There were even periods when religious circles gave tacit support to the Shah against communist movements such as the TUDEH.
So the relationship between the monarchy in Tehran and the ulema in Qom was not a “war to the death” from the beginning.
When was the real break?
When religious authority ceased to be a directing authority for society and began to claim direct political sovereignty.
So the heart of the matter is in the same place: The real fight between the Shah and the mullahs is the birth of the office of Velayat-e Faqih.
Iran's map is not just geography, it is sectarian memory.
Anyone who reads Iran only with a map of its borders is incomplete.
This country does not make its decisions based solely on military ranges.
The sect acts through memory, history, belonging and sacred narrative.
Hence the fierceness of the resistance in Shiite areas after the invasion of Iraq,
The sectarian character of the Houthis in Yemen,
Oman across the Strait of Hormuz, however, has a predominantly Ibadi religious-political tradition: ”Ibadism is not a branch of Shiism, but a historically distinct line of Islamic sectarianism outside the main Sunni-Shia divide" despite the Iranian regime's millimetric sensitivity towards Oman,
It is no coincidence that the influence established in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq is not only geopolitical, but also interwoven with the geography of faith.
In addition, in the historical origins of the region, one should not ignore the links to Iran in the Karmati tradition of the 8th-9th and 10th centuries in the western part of the Gulf, i.e. the south of Iraq (Kufa region), Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirate (UAE), Qatar, eastern Saudi Arabia (Al-Hassa and Qatif region), the Gulf coast of Iran (especially the Hormuzgan line) and Oman. (The Karmati tradition is a radical movement that emerged from the early Isma'ili-Batinite background, based on the idea of imamate and hidden truth, aiming to overthrow the existing order and establish an alternative egalitarian-revolutionary order, thus leaving both a very influential and a very traumatic mark on Islamic history).[3]
Carmathism is not the same as Shiite revolutionary memory.
But it is an early and radical outburst of the same historical nerve.
It is one of the first harsh examples of how Karbala can become not just a tear, but a political energy that destroys regimes.[4]
In other words, some people think that Shiism is only about mourning, whereas the Qarmatians have engraved in history that mourning sometimes leads to revolution.
For Iran, some fronts are not only military fronts.
Some of them are also historical memory fronts.[5]
47 Years of Uninterrupted Crisis: This regime was hardened not by comfort but, let us not forget, by fire.
Passing by Iran since 1979:
Revolution,
Iran-Iraq War,
Gulf crises,
Internal demonstrations,
Afghanistan intervention,
The invasion of Iraq,
Hezbollah-Israel war,
Syrian civil war,
Embargoes,
Assassinations,
Proxy conflicts,
Cyber attacks,
Economic siege,
Do you know what that means?
We are talking about a state structure that has been experiencing uninterrupted crisis for nearly 47 years.
In a system that's been through fire for so long:
develops a fight reflex,
the state mind hardens,
society adapts to the embargo,
elites learn to live with crisis,
a culture of resistance instead of comfort.
Anyone who only reads Iran as “a country that will collapse under sanctions”,
He fails to see that sanctions have also produced a culture of resilience in Iran.
The West's greatest blindness: They think Iran is a state, but they miss the fact that it is also a regime of memory.
The fundamental mistake of Western experts is this:
Iran only;
missile stockpile,
air defense,
foreign exchange reserves,
regime cliques,
proxy powers,
through oil exports.
But what they don't see is this:
Iran is not just a state.
It is also a regime of memory kept alive through mourning, and western experts still underestimate this, or are unable to read the regime in historical depth, analyze the dynamics of the region and come up with strategies and plans.
In this regime:
Karbala is not just history, it is political fuel.
The 40th day is not only a commemoration, but also a social mobilization.
Velayat-e Faqih is not only a constitutional authority, it is a center for the production of theological legitimacy.
Martyrdom is not just death, it is a narrative translated into political energy.
And that's why war in Iran is not only a military event.
It is also told as a continuation of sacred history.
The Last Word;
If you want to understand Iran, before you look at the missile launchers in Tehran
He should look at the mourning language of Karbala.
One cannot read Tehran without understanding Qom.
One cannot read the street without understanding the mourning.
The regime cannot be solved without understanding Velayat-e Faqih.
And no major rupture in Iran can be properly analyzed without understanding the 40th day.
The 40-day mourning cycle: This is the regime's most powerful political weapon.
Every major death (leader, general, martyr) is reproduced through the narrative of Karbala. Mourning organizes collective anger; on the 40th day, the streets either consolidate the regime or create a new rupture.
Because in Iran sometimes revolutions are not started by tanks.
Funerals start.
And the 40th day of those funerals changed history.
Therefore, the 40th day after Khamenei (approximately April 9-10, 2026) is not just a commemoration; it is a test of the regime's survival.
If the narrative of Karbala fills the streets again, if Mojtaba consolidates Khamenei's leadership as “Hussein's proxy”, the regime will harden.
But if the mourning spills out of control and the opposition uses the same memory to their advantage... then the cycle of 1978 repeats.
You cannot understand Iran, the Shiite resistance and today's war without understanding Karbala. Because in this geography, sometimes history is more powerful than missiles. Funerals start, and on the 40th day, history changes.
In Iran, power lies not only in the ballot box or in the barracks, but in the color of the mourning in the streets and by whom that mourning is managed.
“It is a fact that the Iranian Revolution was fueled not only by street anger but also by the 40-day rhythm of Shiite mourning culture.”
What happens in Iran or what happens after the 40 days of mourning will determine the fate of the war and the future of Iran.
Mustafa BÖĞÜRCÜ
Security Expert
Istanbul, March 15, 2026
Footnotes / Bibliography...
[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Iranian Revolution (1979)” - emphasizes that after the deaths in the 1978 protests, the 40th day commemorations in the Shiite tradition triggered new protests, and this cycle magnified the revolution.
“Encyclopedia Britannica”
https://www.britannica.com/event/Iranian-Revolution?
[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica, “What is velāyat-e faqīh?” and “Ruhollah Khomeini” - explains that Velayat-e Faqih is based on the Twelve Imam Shi'ite idea of the faqih ruling society during the period of ghaybah; Khomeini transformed it into a theory of the state in the 1970s and made it a founding principle of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“Encyclopedia Britannica”
https://www.britannica.com/question/What-is-velayat-e-faqih?
[3] Standard reference literature for the Qarmatians: Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Qarmatians / Qarmatians (Qarmatians)” and early Ismaili literature.
Farhad Daftary, The Ismaʿilis: Their History and Doctrines
Heinz Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (related chapters).
[4] Farhad Daftary, The Ismāilis: Their History and Doctrines, Cambridge University Press.
[5] HeinzBritannica
Empire of the Mahdi, Brill.