New Delhi, July 10 -- MASHHAD - The streets of Mashhad were not big enough. The governor of Iran's second city had said he expected 15 million people to arrive for the burial of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and by Thursday the city had filled beyond what its ordinarily manageable crowds could hold. People had come from across Iran, by road and by rail, to the city that houses the Shrine of Imam Reza - Iran's most sacred place of worship and the site where Khamenei asked to be interred.

The choice of the shrine was deliberate and carried a weight that secular diplomatic language struggles to convey. Imam Reza is the eighth of the twelve Imams in the Twelver Shia tradition, and his shrine in Mashhad draws tens of millions of pilgrims annually. ...