Beyond numbers

JOURNALISTS are trained to count people. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand. A million. We are much less comfortable asking why they came.

When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral filled the streets, much of the international coverage did exactly what modern journalism is designed to do. It measured the crowds, analysed the succession, scrutinised the optics for signs of regime strength or weakness, and assessed what the spectacle meant for Iran’s relations with the United States, Israel and the Gulf. These were all important questions. But they were not the only ones.

Present in much of the reporting, but rarely central, was a different kind of inquiry: what does a funeral like this mean to the people who attend it? What role does ritual play in a society where religion, politics and history have long been intertwined? Can public mourning express grief, faith, social obligation and political allegiance all at once? And are newsrooms equipped to recognise that complexity, or do they instinctively translate every public ritual into a story about power?

This is not an argument about Ayatollah Khamenei’s legacy, nor an attempt to separate the Islamic Republic from its record. Nor is it to pretend the context away. Khamenei was assassinated in the opening strikes of a war that has not ended. The state timed his funeral to coincide it with Muharram and staged it for mobilisation. The political frame was legitimate. It was just not sufficient.

Belief, memory and ritual are harder to measure.

Mine is a question about journalism itself. Modern reporting excels at explaining conflict, diplomacy and strategy. It is far less adept at explaining ritual. Yet for much of the world, ritual is not peripheral to politics. It is one of the ways politics is lived, remembered and understood. We know journalism can do this when it chooses to.

When Queen Elizabeth II died, readers were guided through the rituals: why the coffin lay in state, why people queued for hours to file past it. When popes die, coverage explains the ancient choreography of mourning. No editor thinks it sufficient to report who is next in line. The ritual is treated not as spectacle but as meaning. The difference is not that one funeral receives sympathetic coverage and another does not. It is that different societies are granted different interpretive frameworks.

But when the subject is Iran, the first question is often what the event reveals about the state. Coverage of the ayatollah’s funeral understandably examined Iran’s political future, the question of succession and the way the authorities used the ceremony to project strength. The Washington Post, for example, described the funeral as a “highly scripted show of public mourning and fury”, while also reporting on the scale of the crowds and the political messaging surrounding them. The Wall Street Journal focused on how Iran was using Khamenei’s legacy and funeral symbolism to mobilise support and project influence over 200 million Shia Muslims.

Those are legitimate questions. But when political analysis becomes the dominant frame, something disappears: the human meaning of participation. To understand why millions gather is not to endorse the life of the person being buried. A person in that crowd may be expressing loyalty to a government, grief for a religious figure, attachment to a national story, or all of these. A crowd is not a referendum. The challenge for journalism is not to accept official narratives uncritically but to avoid replacing one simplification with another.

What would the alternative look like? A reporter in the procession route asks the woman holding a photograph why she came. Who notes that Muharram gri­ef has its own grammar. Who lets a mou­­-rner’s answer sit on the page without translating it into a verdict on the reg­ime. It is the same discipline extended to the queues outside Westminster Hall: curiosity first, judgement later, and the honesty to admit when we cannot know.

Breaking news, by its nature, rewards what can be counted and verified. Crowd estimates, diplomatic reactions and succession plans fit neatly into that framework. Belief, memory and ritual do not. They are harder to measure, more resistant to certainty and less easily compressed into a headline. Yet they are no less real. The frame travels with the wires. The same agency copy, with the same crowd counts and the same reading of regime strength, ran in hundreds of outlets across every continent, whatever their politics, including this one. That is journalism’s blind spot.

The crowds were counted. The succession was analysed. The optics were read. Everything measurable was measured. The question is whether we still know how to report what cannot be counted, or whether we have decided, without ever saying so, that some societies do not merit the asking.

The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2026

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