New Delhi, July 3 -- six days, two nations, two of Islam's holiest cities, a six-hundred-kilometer procession through Iran before burial at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad on July 9. Iranian officials said they expected 15 to 20 million mourners in Tehran alone. To stage that number, the Basij visited shops with warnings, municipal employers cancelled leave, and the state prepared 50 million loaves of bread for distribution along the route. The turnout the regime anticipated required coercion to assemble.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. His presence was not a diplomatic accident. Sharif was the co-signatory of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding on June 17 and the most visible international architect of the framework unde...