Since the official announcement of the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, numerous spontaneous instances of celebration and sarcasm have been expressed by Persian – and Arabic-speaking users and outlets in the Middle East and abroad. However, in the meantime, outlets loyal or belonging to the Islamic Republic regime have been notedly attempting to endow Raisi’s death with a mystical dimension and grant religious meaning to his passing.
The death of Raisi was announced this morning at the Imam Reza Holy Shrine in Mashhad, where crowds could be heard crying and grieving following the news of the crash. During the announcement, Raisi was described as a president who both began and ended his term officially on the same date, May 20th, which is also the birth date of the Imam buried in the shrine, a significant religious leader in Shi’a Islam.
Imam Ali Reza (Ali Al-Rida in Arabic) was the eighth Imam of the Shi’a sect of Islam who lived around the 8th-9th centuries. According to Shi’a Islam, the Imam is a holy leader with prophetic and superhuman qualities, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and his successor Ali, who is supposed to lead the entire Islamic nation. According to some traditions, Imam Reza was poisoned by the Sunni Caliph Al-Mamoun.
Raisi was given the title “servant of the Reza shrine” during his lifetime due to his serving and maintaining of the shrine. As part of the narrative building of Raisi as a martyr related to Imam Reza, many photographs of the late President wearing ordinary clothes and cleaning the holy site began circulating virally to show his piety.
The connection made between the traditional Shi’i religious leader and Iranian President Raisi is further propagated by the viral hashtag #Servant_of_Reza, alongside others such as “the martyr of servitude.” These are meant to further cement the mystical and mythological aura surrounding the president’s death.
More on the religious aspect of his death, as a eulogy for Raisi, the official account of the former Iranian president quoted uranic verses lauding and commending Ibrahim, the Islamic prophet corresponding with the Biblical Abraham, which read “Peace be upon Ibrahim; Thus do We reward the doers of good; He is one of our faithful servants,” adding a black flag as a sign of mourning.
Other pictures of Raisi holding a Quran book on the stage of the UN General Assembly also circulated widely to portray his devotion, in addition to caricatures supposedly depicting Raisi’s arrival in heaven and encounter with Iranian and Shi’i iconic leaders such as Qassem Soleimani, Khomeini, and Imam Ali.
Implying Israeli and Azeri involvement
Other regime supporters started to point accusing fingers at Israel and sometimes Azerbaijan, where Raisi visited prior to his death, or the West as a whole. Already yesterday, Amr Abd Al-Sater Mahmoud, a presenter on Saudi 24 channel and a former member of parliament in Iraq, claimed that “(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu shot down Raisi’s helicopter and burned everyone who was there with him.” Mahmoud, who describes himself as an expert on international affairs, also linked the helicopter crash to the visit of US Defense National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to Israel, and even to tensions between Netanyahu and Minister Benny Gantz.
Ahmed Ghadiri, an Iranian writer and journalist, also deemed Israel and Azerbaijan accountable for the death of Raisi, commenting: “The crash of the helicopter carrying government officials makes the accident a strong possibility of assassination and sabotage, and the crash of the president’s personal helicopter among the three helicopters makes the mentioned possibility almost certain. That is when there was a meeting with the Zionist regime of Azerbaijan before the incident.”
One user named “Ansar Allah [the Houthi movement] in Persian” quoted the so-called “axis of resistance” adding: “if the Zionist regime was involved in this incident – the entire region will burn.”
In the same context, another conspiratorial user added: “Do you believe it was just an accident? Even though Aliyev (President of Azerbaijan) and the Republic of Azerbaijan are Zionists? The dirty nature of Israel, Zionism, and the West has become clear through their recent crimes. That’s suspicious, sir. Suspicious.”
Likewise, a blogger named Agha Ebrahim declared: “After about 6 hours of monitoring the virtual space in today’s timeline, and checking Zionist accounts, I declare: Today’s incident was definitely done with the intention of assassinating Mr. Raisi, and Ilham Aliyev cooperated with the Zionists in this incident. God knows when the security system will announce this.”