“Death to the dictator … death to Khamenei” were among the chants heard in the broad streets of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, during the popular protests that have swept the country in recent days.
Mashhad is unlike other Iranian cities. Here, the story does not begin with politics alone, but with sanctity. The city defines itself first as a religious shrine and then as a provincial capital or an urban center. The presence of the shrine of Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Ridha—known as Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite imam—has made Mashhad a city governed by a different logic, one that rests on a delicate balance among religion, power and the economy.
That distinctiveness has made protests in Mashhad more complicated. The city, long presented as a model of piety and loyalty, cannot easily be reconciled with images of public anger. Any breach of that model is viewed as a symbolic failure for the regime.
Bahnnam Ben Taleblu, a researcher at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Alhurra that Mashhad is “a city that cannot be ignored in any political reading of the protests”—not only because it is Iran’s second-largest city, but also because it is the birthplace of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the hometown of former President Ebrahim Raisi, who had been seen as a potential successor to the supreme leader. Mashhad is also a major religious center in the Shiite world, he said.
In the wide streets surrounding the shrine, black and white turbans mingle with street vendors and pilgrims arriving from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon, as well as from Gulf countries. But behind this spiritual tableau, one of Iran’s most tightly controlled cities—security-wise and ideologically—is run with strict discipline.
Even so, contrary to the stereotypical image the state has long promoted of Mashhad as a conservative and loyal city, it has seen massive crowds in recent protest waves in neighborhoods such as Vakilabad. Demonstrations stretched for long distances and coincided with strikes in the Reza Bazaar near the shrine. Ben Taleblu described the shrine complex as the world’s largest Islamic edifice by area. He said the chants heard in Mashhad against the supreme leader and against the regime as a whole show that “the revolution the regime claimed to represent has ended—socially and ideologically.”
As streets burned in Tehran, Karaj and Shiraz, Mashhad appeared less noisy in the broader picture. But that relative quiet was not evidence of satisfaction, Ben Taleblu argued. Rather, it reflected a tight security grip and a religious particularity that made any protest immediately construed as a direct threat to the regime—and to its religious legitimacy at the same time.
Videos circulating on social media and received from opposition movements show lines of cars and protesters on a highway at the city’s outskirts, with smoke rising and flames visible here and there—an indication, he said, that public anger was not confined to specific neighborhoods but had become a general grievance.
Despite Mashhad’s religious status, Ben Taleblu said the state’s security approach does not differ in any meaningful way from its methods in Tehran or Shiraz. The security grip, as he described it, is the same in all cities, and sanctity no longer offers real protection—neither for the city nor for its residents.
Even proximity to the Imam Reza shrine did not prevent protests in its vicinity, nor did it stop strikes in economic institutions linked to it—what Ben Taleblu described as further evidence of the regime’s ideological bankruptcy and of Iran’s social transformation.
Mashhad is often viewed as conservative, but the label obscures deeper complexities. Conservatism here is not only a social preference, but also the product of continuous surveillance and a dense religious presence in public space. Women wear full hijab at a higher rate than in other cities, and nightlife is almost nonexistent—not only because of laws, but also because of a broader culture that rewards conformity and punishes difference.
In Mashhad, security does not take chances. Cameras, unannounced checkpoints and a visible intelligence presence are especially pronounced during seasons of mass pilgrimages. Mashhad, in this account, is managed with a logic of preemption: preventing events before they occur, not responding to them after the fact.
Protest in Mashhad, he added, is not measured only by the number of participants, but by its political symbolism. When demonstrations break out in a city presented as the regime’s “spiritual capital,” the message carries greater weight. Ben Taleblu said this reveals the depth of the rupture between the ruling elite and society—even in cities from which that elite itself emerged.
He noted that Mashhad has not been a marginal city in the history of protests. It was the spark of the December 2017 protests, which shifted demands from economic reform to a broad political confrontation with the regime.
Today’s protests have erupted against the backdrop of growing economic concerns and anger over the collapse of currency value and the deterioration of standards of living. They quickly moved to espouse political demands that challenge the regime itself.
The protests in Mashhad, he said, did not merely break the security calm; they also shattered the stereotype. The scale of participation—reaching hundreds of thousands, and perhaps more—reflects, in Ben Taleblu’s view, broad representation across social groups, not an elite or marginal movement.
Video clips also showed the burning of state flags and images of its symbols, even in sensitive areas such as near the shrine and its museums. Ben Taleblu added that what unifies these protests—in Mashhad as in other Iranian cities—is their secular and nationalist character in opposition to an authoritarian Islamic system, which he said helps explain their geographic and social reach.
“The regime has poured money to the city and invested in certain areas in Mashhad, but that does not mean the people of Mashhad support the things into which the regime pours money and national resources,” Ben Taleblu said. “To understand society, it is better to go beyond a single city and see that the fabric of the national uprising shares many similarities, despite urban and rural divides, center and periphery, wealth and poverty. At its core, it is secular and nationalist against an Islamic and authoritarian regime. That is truly what ties together and unifies different people from different demographic and geographic backgrounds and social classes.”
If protest can erupt in the supreme leader’s birthplace, the message, Ben Taleblu said, extends beyond Mashhad to other religious cities such as Qom: that the regime is utterly ideologically bankrupt, and that religion is no longer a sufficient shield to protect it from street anger.
