The empty chair at Khomeini's shrine, 37 years on
Thirty-seven years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's death, Iran's state-linked media marked the anniversary on 3 June 2026 with a stark piece of stagecraft: an empty chair at the speaker's position inside the Khomeini shrine in southern Tehran, draped in a portrait of the founder of the Islamic Republic. Tasnim News, the outlet linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Al-Alam, the state broadcaster's Arabic-facing channel, both carried video of the vacant seat on their Telegram channels in the early hours of 4 June 2026, framing the moment as the continuation of a mourning practice that has acquired the weight of state ritual. (Tasnim, 4 June 2026; Al-Alam, 4 June 2026.)
The annual commemoration is, on the face of it, an obituary read once a year. In practice, it is a recurring test of ideological continuity. Khomeini's portrait, multiplied on Iranian currency, banners, and ceremonial objects since 1979, is the central visual referent of the Islamic Republic's claim to legitimacy. The empty chair is a small but legible signal: that the founder's authority remains, in the language of the state, unbroken. What that authority still means in practice — and to whom — is a question Iran has argued over since the revolution itself.
The empty chair, 37 years on
The visual record Monexus is working from is narrow: two short videos, distributed by Tasnim and Al-Alam on their Telegram channels, showing the same staged scene. An upholstered chair sits where a speaker would normally stand, a printed portrait of Khomeini mounted on a stand behind it, the rest of the frame filled with the muted palette of the shrine. The two posts are timestamped roughly half an hour apart — Al-Alam at 05:31 UTC, Tasnim at 04:56 UTC — and they are written in the same ceremonial register, with Tasnim's caption adding the explicit designation "Imam Shahid" (the martyred imam), a formulation that has become the standard framing in Iranian official discourse for Khomeini since the early years of the Republic.
That such a small piece of staging warrants coverage by two of the country's largest state-linked outlets is, in itself, a clue to the function the ritual performs. Anniversaries in the Islamic Republic are not private. They are produced, distributed, and consumed through the state-aligned media apparatus, and the framing is uniform: the founder is the unbroken reference point, the institution he left behind is the legitimate heir, and the date is an opportunity to restate the claim. State-linked outlets do not, in this context, function as independent witnesses; they function as co-producers of the event they cover.
Khomeini's contested ledger
Khomeini was born in Khomein, in central Iran, around the turn of the twentieth century, and died on 3 June 1989 in Tehran. He spent the last years of the Pahlavi monarchy in exile, much of it in Najaf in Iraq, and from 1978 in Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, from where he directed the loose coalition of clergy, bazaar merchants, and liberal nationalists that brought the 1979 revolution to its conclusion. He returned to Tehran in February 1979 and presided over the establishment of the Islamic Republic, a theocratic state in which the office of Supreme Leader — held by Khomeini himself until his death and since then by Ali Khamenei — is the locus of ultimate authority.
His legacy, even within Iran, is not uncontested. Inside the Islamic Republic's own discourse, Khomeini is treated as the unimpeachable founder; outside it, and among dissident Iranians at home and abroad, the ledger is more complicated. He issued the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, an order that continues to draw international condemnation and that the Iranian state has, at various moments, refused to disavow. His government took the American embassy hostage in November 1979 and held 52 diplomats for 444 days, a move that broke US–Iranian relations for a generation. He presided over the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988, an episode that international human-rights organisations have classified as crimes against humanity and that remains a fault line in Iranian political memory.
What is less often observed is that Khomeini was also, by the standards of revolutionary clergy, an innovator. The doctrine of velayat-e faqih — the governance of the jurist — was his central contribution to Shia political thought, and the 1979 constitution codified it as the operating logic of the state. The system that bears his imprint has outlasted the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, and the immediate revolutionary generation in Cuba and Nicaragua. That durability is the empirical claim implicit in every anniversary commemoration, including this one — and it is a claim that holds up, in narrow institutional terms, even as the moral balance sheet remains disputed.
Anniversary as state architecture
The structural frame is straightforward. The Islamic Republic's claim to legitimacy is not dynastic and not, in any conventional sense, electoral; it is ideological. Its anniversaries, its public art, and its most-circulated texts are therefore not ornamental but constitutive. The empty chair is, in this reading, less a piece of mourning than a piece of state architecture — a reminder, addressed as much to Iranians as to a restive regional neighbourhood, that the founder's chair remains, in the state's own telling, occupied in spirit if not in body. The present holder, Khamenei, has been Supreme Leader since 1989 and is now in his late eighties; questions of succession, which the constitution handles through an appointed Assembly of Experts, are the kind of long-run question the annual ritual is designed, in part, to push off the table.
The commemoration also performs a parallel function outward. Iran's regional posture — the networks of allied non-state actors, the long confrontation with Israel and the United States, the recurring stand-offs over the country's nuclear programme — is presented in official discourse as a continuation of the founder's project. The annual ritual is one of the periodic occasions on which that narrative is restated in the most concentrated, least contested form available, and the symbolism is calibrated accordingly. The portrait at the speaker's stand is not just Khomeini; it is the doctrine, the institution, and the claim.
What the sources do not measure
The two state-media dispatches that anchor this piece are the visual record of an event. They are not a measure of public mood. On the contested question of Khomeini's legacy, the state and its critics continue to disagree, and the disagreement is itself part of the story. What the available material does not say — and what an honest accounting of any Iranian state ritual has to acknowledge — is how the anniversary registers with the generation of Iranians who came of age after 1989 and who have organised some of the largest protests in the Republic's history, in 2009, in 2019, and again in 2022. The empty chair is a piece of state theatre. The audience that matters is the one off-camera.
This obituary of an anniversary leans on the two state-media dispatches of the empty chair at the Khomeini shrine, supplemented by the established biographical record. Monexus has framed it as a piece of contemporary statecraft, not of hagiography.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/tasnimnews_en
- https://t.me/alalamfa
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini