When the state saturates inherited words with the memory of its violence, those words become unreliable as public idioms of grief and resistance. Part I traced that damage at the level of inherited idioms; Part II follows its rerouting into the body, through which grief is carried and made public.
Wenn der Staat lang überlieferten Begriffen durch seine Gewalt eine andere Erinnerung einschreibt, verlieren diese Worte ihre Eignung als öffentliche Ausdrucksformen der Trauer und des Widerstands. Teil I hat diesen Verlust auf der Ebene der Ausdrucksformen nachgezeichnet; Teil II verfolgt die Umleitung in die Körper, durch die Trauer transportiert und öffentlich gemacht wird.
At the funerals of protesters killed by the state during the January 2026 uprising, mourners gathered at gravesides and turned to bodily gesture: they danced, clapped, ululated, and played music in a space where sorrow and Qur’anic recitation were expected. The street had already made the body the primary ground of confrontation, as protesters advanced against armed forces with nothing but their bodies. At the graveside, it became the medium through which grief was carried when inherited idioms had failed and public mourning had to proceed under threat and surveillance. In March 2026, on the last Thursday of the Iranian year, mourners gathered at Sepehr Shokri’s graveside to commemorate Sepehr, who had been killed during the January 2026 protests. Facing threats of further violence from state forces, his mother cried out: “You have weapons; my son only had a chest. He came forward with his chest alone.” Her subsequent declaration—“we have nothing left to lose”—names a condition in which state violence and absolute dispossession leave the bare body as the final ground of confrontation. Arman Gorjian’s father names a related dispossession at his son’s graveside: “We have reached absolute poverty. We doubt your Islam… I had seen dance ceremonies, but I had never seen a mother dance at the grave of her dead child.” His phrasing links two shifts: the dispossession of inherited idioms, as the state’s Islam no longer functions as a credible language of resistance, and the emergence of an unprecedented bodily grammar of grief. For both parents, what remains is not joy but a condition of absolute poverty. In one scene, the poverty appears as the body stripped to exposure; in the other, as language stripped of credibility.
Taha Soleimani’s funeral shows what this “absolute poverty” sounds like when language itself gives out. Taha Soleimani had been missing for twenty days after his arrest. When his family finally received his body, it bore the marks of torture. He was dead. His uncle begins to speak—“my nephew was lost”—but as he tries to continue, to name what has happened, he runs out of words. He falls into a thick, suffocating silence. He raises his hands and asks those around him to clap. They begin at once, together, as if the cue were already familiar. The clapping breaks the silence and gives it a pulse. Grief becomes collective without a slogan. Rhythm here is not joy but kinetic testimony.
Taha Soleimani’s funeral
Several commentators have read the dancing and clapping at the funerals of protesters killed by the state as soog-e shad or joyous mourning. Nahid Siamdoust, for instance, frames them as an extension of the “affective politics of joy” she traces in Iran’s alternative public sphere. In her reading, because women’s public dancing in streets and buses previously formed “joyous counterpublics,” the funeral dances must arise from that same genealogy. But this commits a category error: it treats resemblance in gesture as proof of shared intent. A dance on a bus and a mother’s movement at her child’s grave may resemble one another in form, but they are not the same act. One is an elective claim to visibility; the other is an embodied testimony unfolding in a space saturated by loss and surveillance. The “joy” frame rests on an assumption of expressive abundance—a sudden, self-assertive break into visibility—yet these funerary gestures emerge not from surplus but from scarcity and devastation.
If Taha Soleimani’s funeral shows how rhythm fills the space where language breaks down, Arshia Barari’s shows the bodily cost of that shift. His mother dances and suddenly collapses, a gesture grief alone might produce, but one that carries more weight here. The body is being asked to bear more than grief alone: catastrophic loss, refusal of the state’s script, and the burden of making that refusal publicly legible. The collapse registers a limit, a point at which the body, made into a medium, can no longer bear all that is being asked of it.
Arshia Barari’s funeral
This embodied shift is at times strategic. At the chehelom (fortieth-day commemoration) of Sepehr Shokri, a family member asked the crowd to stop chanting political slogans. The threat was clear: if the chanting continued, security forces would return and smash the gravestone. In place of slogans, he redirected grief into sound, urging mourners to clap and perform kel zadan, the high-pitched ululation often reserved for weddings. Rhythm here is a rerouting produced under coercion, a way to keep mourning public without handing the state material it can seize and punish.
These funeral gestures do not replace older idioms of mourning. In a widely circulated clip, at the chehelom of Ilya Ojaqlou, his mother dances and then, mid-motion, breaks into matam-like self-striking, an embodied form of Shi’i mourning lament. Her body buckles and others rush to hold her up. The abrupt pivot shows that dance and matam can coexist in the same body, in the same moment, blocking any easy reading of the dance as joy. In another viral video from the chehelom commemoration of Hesam Asivand in Lali, Khuzestan, mourners perform sineh-zani, the rhythmic chest-striking associated with Shiʿi mourning for Hossein, for Hesam. As a male relative strikes his chest with increasing intensity, his body lurches and sways until he nearly collapses, and another mourner steps in to hold him. Mourning for Hossein and mourning for the present dead converge here at the level of gesture. Karbala returns here as an embodied grammar of grief: the hand no longer keeps time with a distant sacred story alone, but registers the pain of a contemporary crime. In repurposing sineh-zani for those killed by the state, mourners turn a sacred repertoire long claimed by the establishment against the establishment itself.


At Rostam Mobarakabadi’s chehelom. Screenshots by author.
At Rostam Mobarakabadi’s February 2026 chehelom, the graveside becomes a site where disparate idioms of mourning are recomposed into a vernacular ritual language. Rostam’s mother holds his portrait high, her steady posture giving the image a public bearing. Together, body and photograph testify to her son’s life ended by state violence. Beside her, a female relative keeps time with a gesture that sits in the tense middle ground between dast zadan (clapping) and matam, weighted by a downward beat that echoes sineh-zani without becoming it. She claps with a heavy, percussive force, a pulse drawn inward toward the heart rather than outward in celebration. The murdered son’s name is Rostam, invoking the hero of the Shahnameh, and the anthem sung at the graveside calls up Kaveh the Blacksmith against Zahhak, the tyrant of Persian epic. The scene does not belong to a single tradition; it is a vernacular synthesis in which Shiʿi cadence, dance, and the Shahnameh’s mythic register layer without resolving their tension. By casting the street as a “trench” and the present ruler as Zahhak, the lyrics draw on an epic vocabulary of revolt to name injustice and commemorate the dead without returning to the state’s idiom.
Taken at face value, testamentary requests for music, dancing, and joy can mislead. Mehrzad Nazari, killed during the January 2026 protests, wrote in his will that his family should abstain from crying, mourning rituals, Qur’an recitation, and prayer, and instead play music and remain joyful. Before his execution during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, Majid Reza Rahnavard similarly asked that his funeral be marked not by sorrow but by dancing and happiness. The “joyous mourning” reading folds such requests too quickly into a narrative of affective rupture. The problem is methodological: by taking these requests at face value, Siamdoust’s reading approaches these funerals through a prior thesis—an “affective politics of joy”—so that the archive of funerary videos can only confirm what the framework has already rendered legible. The result is an erasure: by gathering these heterogeneous practices into a single story of “joyous” renewal, the framework obscures the coercion, devastation, and “absolute poverty” that pressure these bodies into motion.
What recurs across these scenes is not a single logic of rupture and refounding but a pressured recomposition. The Lur tradition of dancing at funerals is itself a mourning custom, not a joy tradition. Nor do these scenes resolve into the “authentic Persian culture” against state-imposed Islamic culture that the framework assumes: sineh-zani returns as an embodied Shiʿi repertoire, and Rostam Mobarakabadi’s chehelom layers Shiʿi cadence, Shahnameh epic, embodied gesture, and protest poetics without privileging any single tradition. Under duress, regional mourning customs, inherited sacred repertoires, and embodied improvisation are brought into proximity by loss, generating fragments of new political idioms assembled unevenly. If anything links these disparate acts, it is the condition named by Arman Gorjian’s father: “absolute poverty,” in which mourning and refusal must work with whatever remains.
But the body is not grief’s only medium. Part III turns to the vernacular infrastructures through which grief travels sideways into regional mother tongues and vernacular repertoires, where belonging is rebuilt under pressure.
Mina Khanlarzadeh is a historian and visiting faculty member at Deep Springs College in California. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her research focuses on modern intellectual and cultural history and the history of science, with a particular focus on the Middle East. In 2025 she was a Value of the Past Fellow at ZfL Berlin.
Title image: Grieving figures dance, embrace the dead, cut their hair, and play music in acts of embodied mourning. Illustration by Farinaz Soleimani, January 2026.
All images in this contribution are shared here with consent of the creators.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Leibniz-Fellows (25. März 2026). The Morgue Is Karbala, Mourning in Each Other’s Skin. Part II: The Kinetic Testimony. Value of the Past. Abgerufen am 16. April 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15y0r
