In the first light of February 28, 2026, the sky above Tehran turned the colour of old brass. The missiles came without warning -- as missiles always do -- striking the compound where a man who had embodied Iran for 37 years sat at his work. By the time the sun fully rose, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was gone, killed alongside his daughter, his grandson, his top military advisors, and the defense minister. On Truth Social, President Donald Trump posted words that he believed would close a chapter: "One of the most evil people in history" was dead, and justice had been served.
But history does not close its chapters so easily.
In the scent of tear gas and cordite hanging over the Grand Bazaar -- the same air my Op-Ed captured a couple of months ago -- a shopkeeper shuttered his stall. His currency had collapsed long before these missiles fell. His protest, like so many before, was a spark that could have become a wildfire. But now, something else was happening. The wildfire had found a different fuel.
The empire of the lens had whirred to life, preparing its narratives. Yet this time, the lens would struggle to focus.
The empire of the lens and the assassination's frame
My January piece, "The empire of the lens," diagnosed the Western media's condition: They operate on the rhythm of election cycles, reducing Iran's epic to a two-dimensional thriller, blind to the longue durée in which this civilization thinks and breathes. The assassination of Khamenei was meant to be the ultimate act of narrative control -- the removal of the central figure, the decapitation that ends the story.
But the empire of the lens forgot something fundamental: In Shia political culture, the killing of a supreme leader by foreign forces is not processed through the grid of geopolitics. It is filtered through the Ashura narrative -- the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at Karbala. What the Pentagon calculated as leadership decapitation is being recast, in the hearts of millions, as sacred sacrifice.
This is not propaganda. This is theology. This is the deep structure of a faith that has spent 14 centuries transforming defeat into victory, death into enduring presence.
Hamid Dabashi: The nation that outlasts the state
The Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi, writing from his exile in New York, has spent decades teaching the world to see his homeland clearly. In Iran: A People Interrupted, he argued that Iran possesses its own authentic "anti-colonial modernity" -- a vision of modern life developed organically over two centuries, not a failed imitation of the West.
The West has long misunderstood Iran through false binaries: Traditional versus modern, religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western. The reality, Dabashi insists, is far more complex, and far more authentically Iranian.
In Iran: The Rebirth of a Nation, he drew a distinction that now carries unbearable weight: The difference between "Iran as a nation" (mellat) and "Iran as a state" (dowlat). The nation possesses a deep civilizational identity that transcends and outlasts any particular ruling regime. The state may lose its leader. The state may even collapse. But the nation -- with its memory stretching from Cyrus to Khomeini, from Ferdowsi to Forough Farrokhzad -- endures.
When the missiles struck Khamenei's compound, they struck the head of the state. The nation was wounded, yes -- but it was not killed. And in the days since, as mourners have filled the streets, the nation has been making itself visible in ways that no algorithm can amplify and no narrative can control.
Dabashi, in June 2025, joined other Iranian opposition thinkers in signing a public statement that now reads like prophecy: Disagreement with the regime does not mean remaining silent in the face of bloody foreign aggression.
They called for unity and common sense, warning against allowing crisis to become catastrophe. This is the position of a true intellectual: Critical of the Islamic Republic's domestic failures, yet unflinching in opposition to imperialist war.
Aleksandr Dugin: The metaphysics of Eurasian wrath
From Moscow, another voice has been watching, and its timbre is fury.
Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian philosopher often mistakenly called "Putin's brain” in western media, had once seen Donald Trump as the beginning of the end of Western liberalism -- a disruptor who would shatter the globalist consensus and pave the way for a multipolar world of spiritually rooted civilizations. In March 2025, as Trump returned to power, Dugin published The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers, framing MAGA as a global civilizational uprising.
Then Trump bombed Iran. "King has made himself no-king just in a week," Dugin posted grimly, dismissing Trump as a "deplorable narcissist blackmailed by the regular Deep State staff." For Dugin, this was not a political miscalculation. It was a civilizational crime.
In Dugin's geopolitical vision, the world is divided not between left and right, but between rootless, decadent Atlanticism (America and Europe) and spiritually rooted Eurasianism (Russia, Iran, China, India). This is a metaphysical war between modernity and tradition, liberalism and destiny.
Iran is central to this vision -- a theocratic anti-Western civilization-state, a partner in resisting the liberal empire. For Trump to strike it was, in Dugin's language, to prove that even in MAGA robes, the American emperor still does what American emperors have always done.
Academic scholarship has traced Dugin's reception in the Muslim world with care. In Iran, he resonates not merely as a geopolitical strategist but as a "metaphysical interlocutor aligned with Shi'i messianism and traditionalist philosophy."
When Dugin looks at Khamenei's assassination, he sees the birth pangs of a new world order. The old Atlanticist hegemony is dying, but it is lashing out with desperate violence. Khamenei's blood becomes the seed of a new Eurasian solidarity, and his martyrdom hastens the apocalyptic confrontation that will end with the triumph of tradition over modernity, spirit over matter.
The unfinished battle of Karbala
This is where the analysis must deepen, and must turn from geopolitics to theology, from the strategies of states to the structures of belief that have sustained a faith through centuries of defeat and diaspora.
The assassination of Ali Khamenei during Ramadan, near the anniversary of Imam Ali's martyrdom, has activated a template 14 centuries old. In the Shia imagination, the battle of Karbala is not a past event locked in 680 CE. It is a present reality, a recurring drama in which the forces of truth (haqq) eternally confront the forces of falsehood (batil). The maxim attributed to Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq -- "Every land is Karbala, every day is Ashura" -- is not poetry. It is doctrine.
Imam Hussein himself, on the road to Karbala, spoke of his death in terms that echo across the centuries. He compared himself to Prophet Yahya (John the Baptist), who was wrongfully killed by the tyrant of his age, his head brought as a gift to an adulterer. And he predicted that his blood would not be forgotten or forgiven until the rise of Imam Mahdi.
The Shia hadiths predict that the reappearance of Imam Mahdi will be heralded by specific signs: The prevalence of evil, tyranny filling the earth, attacks upon the faithful, violent upheavals. The world is filling with injustice. The faithful are suffering. The cry for justice grows louder.
In this light, the US-Israeli war of aggression takes on a different meaning. The strategic objective was decapitation -- removing the leader to collapse the system. But in Shia political culture, as strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney has noted, the killing of a supreme leader by foreign forces is immediately filtered through the Ashura narrative. What might otherwise have been a leadership decapitation is recast as sacred sacrifice.
What comes next: Scenarios and shadows
The assassination of a Supreme Leader -- the first since the Islamic Republic's founding -- opens possibilities that even the attackers may not fully control.
Scholars and analysts have sketched three broad trajectories. The first is a managed succession. Iran has long prepared for this moment; candidates such as Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, Hojjat-ol-Eslam Mohsen Qomi, and Ayatollah Mohsen Araki have been whispered as potential successors. A leadership council might temporarily govern, sharing power to ensure stability. In this scenario, the Islamic Republic continues, wounded but intact.
The second scenario is military intervention. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has grown immensely powerful through decades of regional conflict and internal repression. Khamenei's death could be the moment the Guard moves from kingmaker to king, imposing a military-led system that might relax some social restrictions but maintain the hard edge of anti-Western policy.
The third scenario is collapse -- the outcome Washington and Tel Aviv openly desire. But collapse, as history teaches, rarely brings the clean transition that planners imagine. The 1979 revolution did not bring peace; it brought years of internal violence, tribal insurgencies, and ethnic unrest. If the Islamic Republic falls, the first beneficiaries may not be the exiled prince in Washington or the liberal democrats in London, but armed groups among the Kurds, the Baluch, and other minorities whose grievances predate the revolution and will survive it.
And collapse would not isolate Iran's chaos within its borders. The Gulf states, focused on economic transformation and technological leapfrogging, would find their ambitions hostage to a destabilized neighbour. The "Middle East Silicon Valley" that Saudi Arabia and the UAE envision would be delayed by years, perhaps decades.
The Global South awakens
There is, however, another story being written -- one that transcends the binaries of Washington's war plans and Tehran's succession struggles.
In July 2025, delegates from 50 countries gathered in Caracas to launch the "Journalists' Alliance for Communication of the Global South." More than 220 communicators, journalists, researchers, and influencers came together to challenge what they called the "hegemony of large media consortiums" and the digital platforms that distort popular struggles and perpetuate colonial narratives.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil spoke words that resonate now with terrible clarity: "In the face of the resurgence and domination of media imperialism, our voices have to be increasingly stronger, more intense." South African delegate Ayanda Hollow stressed the importance of digital sovereignty -- arguing that without their own digital platforms, Africa and the wider Global South cannot achieve fully independent media.
An Iranian journalist, Sahar Emami, was honoured at the forum -- a woman who had continued broadcasting live just moments after an Israeli airstrike targeted the Iranian state broadcasting headquarters, becoming a symbol of resistance for Iran and its allies.
She spoke of the urgent need for unified global voices, stating that defending truth and standing up for justice require collective effort. "Only through unity and a common voice," she said, "can we strike a blow against the structures of colonialism".
This is the deeper struggle: The fight for informational sovereignty, for the right of peoples to tell their own stories, to be subjects of their own epics rather than objects of the empire's lens.
The stories that endure
The Persian epic, the Shahnameh, opens with a meditation on the difference between good and evil. It then proceeds to tell stories -- stories of kings and heroes, of betrayal and redemption, of a civilization finding itself through narrative across millennia.
The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is now part of that story. The empire of the lens wants to frame it as an ending. The missiles were meant to close a chapter.
But the plateau does not work that way. The plateau thinks in centuries. It has absorbed and outlasted Assyrians, Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Britons, and Americans. It has turned conquerors into converts, invaders into ingredients in an ongoing civilization.
Khamenei is dead. The state is wounded. The succession is uncertain. The empire of the lens is preparing its narratives, its obituaries, its frames. But in Qom, the seminaries are praying. In Najaf, the shrine of Imam Ali is filling with mourners. In Karbala, the preparations for Arba'een continue.
The empire of the lens, like all empires, will crumble to dust. The stories of the plateau, however complex and contested, will continue to be told by those who live them.
Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His email address is zk@krishikaaj.com. Views expressed are the writer’s own.