SRINAGAR: Black flags hung from the windows of old Srinagar on Saturday morning. Portraits of a bearded cleric were carried by crowds through the narrow lanes of the streets and pouring into Lal Chowk with slogans in anger and mourning.
The man being mourned was Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He had visited the Valley just once, more than four decades ago, for a few days. And yet thousands poured onto the streets of Srinagar, and other parts of the Valley.
Iran confirmed in the early hours of Sunday that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had died, killed when his secure compound in Tehran was struck during joint military operations carried out by Israel and the United States. He was 86.
For Kashmiri Shias, who regard him as a spiritual leader, the news landed as a personal catastrophe. Sunni Muslims joined in protest too.
"He has been brutally killed by the US and Israel," a protester said. "We are all saddened by this incident." Peoples Democratic Party president Mehbooba Mufti, described the moment as "a deeply tragic and shameful point in history." Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the Valley's chief religious cleric and hereditary head of the Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema, called on people to observe a complete strike the following day, saying that "the people of Jammu and Kashmir collectively condemn this brutality."
That Sunnis and Shias would grieve together in the streets, is itself a testament to a history most outsiders do not know. The history of the Iran and Kashmiri connection goes back to decades and centuries.
Old timers, however, recollected a moment in 1980 when Khamenei, then a lesser-known Iranian cleric visited Kashmir and addressed a gathering at Jamia Masjid on the invitation of then Mirwaiz Molvi Mohammad Farooq, the present Mirwaiz’s father.
That moment is etched in Kashmir’s political and spiritual memory.
It was a Friday, during the early autumn, when Khamenei walked into Srinagar's Jamia Masjid, addressed the gathering for about 15-20 minutes and made a lasting impression.
The late Qalbi Hussain Rizvi Kashmiri, a prominent Kashmiri Shia scholar, activist, and narrator of historical events, who passed away in 2015 was present for that visit and left behind detailed recollections. His account, preserved in his memoirs, is the most intimate known record available of Khamenei's journey to Kashmir.
The atmosphere in the Valley at the time was electric. The Iranian Revolution had triumphed barely a year before, in February 1979, sending shock waves across the Muslim world. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had overthrown the Shah of Iran and proclaimed an Islamic Republic, was the most electrifying political-religious figure of the era.
His emissaries and close associates travelling the globe were received as heralds of a new age of Muslim defiance and dignity. Among those travelling was Khamenei — at that point a rising figure in the revolutionary hierarchy, but known as one of Khomeini's most trusted lieutenants.
"Khamenei visited Kashmir in late 1980 or early 1981," Rizvi recalled. "One week in advance, I was already thrilled and so busy making arrangements for welcoming Ayatollah Khamenei that I totally forgot to officially take a few days off, since I was an employee, so I missed a few working days without asking for a leave."
On the eve of Khamenei's expected arrival, Rizvi and his companions rented a taxi, mounted a loudspeaker on its roof, and drove through the city of Srinagar, microphone in hand, announcing to anyone who would hear that a great man was coming the next day. When Khamenei's plane landed, the airport was overwhelmed.
Shias arrived on buses, taxis, pickups and trucks — whatever conveyance could be found. The road from the airport to the city was lined with people.
But the most consequential moment of the visit was when Khamenei walked into the Jamia Masjid — the grand Friday Mosque of Srinagar, the historic seat of the Mirwaiz, or chief preacher of Kashmir — and stood before its congregation as a Shia cleric in a Sunni house of worship.
The sectarian division in Kashmir at the time was severe. "Up until that day, intense discord existed among Shias and Sunnis to the extent that if a Shia visited a Sunni Mosque, they would cleanse the mosque, saying that a heretic had entered and thus defiled the mosque," Rizvi wrote.
Khamenei joined the Friday prayers, standing before Mirwaiz Maulawi Farooq — the elder Mirwaiz, who would be assassinated a decade later — and delivered a speech that lasted fifteen minutes. In terms of sheer length, it was nothing. In terms of consequence, it was seismic.
His speech was translated by Shaheed Aga Syed Muhammad Hussain.
"After the Iranian cleric's speech," Rizvi recorded, "it was common for Shias to pray at Sunni mosques and pray before Sunni prayer leaders with no fear. Sunnis would pray at Shia mosques, too. This unity was an outcome of that 15-minute speech made by Ayatollah Khamenei."
Khamenei also visited the residence of Ayatollah Syed Yusuf Mosavi, then the foremost Shia religious figure in Kashmir, a man whose family connections to the Iranian revolutionary leadership ran deep, and whose grandson, Syed Zafar Mehdi, would later write about the visit in moving terms.
The visit cemented a bond that had been building since 1979 and that has never entirely loosened since. In the decades that followed, streets in certain quarters of Srinagar were adorned with life-size portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei on different occasions. Social and cultural organisations were named after Iranian revolutionary martyrs. The anniversary of the Islamic Revolution was often marked in Kashmir with rallies. Any attack on Iran would spark protests in Kashmir and Kargil (Ladakh), which is a Shia Muslim majority.
The emotional and religious connection has always coexisted with a more complicated political reality. Iran's stance on Kashmir has never been straightforward, oscillating between moral solidarity and diplomatic pragmatism balancing both India and Pakistan.
Secular, Pahlavi-era Iran had been a firm backer of Pakistan in its disputes with India, including on Kashmir. The 1979 revolution fundamentally altered that calculus. Khomeini's Iran sought to position itself as the champion of oppressed Muslims everywhere, regardless of which nation-state they inhabited, or which country was their oppressor.
As early as 1965, before the revolution, Khomeini had explicitly linked Kashmir to Palestine. In a speech in Najaf, Iraq, he called on Muslims worldwide to set aside differences and stand together: if the Islamic world were truly united, he said, "then Jews would not covet Palestine, then Hindus would not covet Kashmir."
Khamenei, as Supreme Leader from 1989, repeatedly invoked Kashmir in sermons and speeches. In 1990, as violence erupted in the Valley, he declared: "Kashmir is a contemporary example. Muslims there speak out their rights. Anyone who is informed of what Kashmir has gone through knows what the Muslims of Kashmir express is nothing but truth and justice. Those who silence them have an unjust cause." In 2017, on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, he named Kashmir alongside Yemen and Bahrain as wounds on the body of the Muslim world, calling on Muslims to "openly support" people in all three.
Yet Iran has also consistently avoided endorsing Pakistan's position on Kashmir. In 1994, Rafsanjani's Iran blocked a resolution at the UN Commission on Human Rights that would have condemned India over Kashmir, a favour New Delhi cannot ever be forgotten.
On the other hand, Khamenei's periodic sharp statements on Kashmir saw the Islamic Republic as the global defender of oppressed Muslims. The more measured diplomatic posture of Iranian presidents serves another pragmatic interest in maintaining lucrative ties with India, the second-largest buyer of Iranian oil before US sanctions tightened.
As recently as 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Tehran, Khamenei spoke warmly of the historic cultural background between the two countries. A year later, he was again naming Kashmir as a wound left by British colonialism. In 2019, in the immediate aftermath of India's revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's special status, Khamenei’s statement calling on the Indian government to adopt a just policy toward Kashmiris was resented by India.
Beyond politics, the connection between Kashmir and Iran is rooted in something older and more intimate, a shared religious and spiritual world that has been woven over seven centuries.
The districts of Budgam and parts of Srinagar are home to a significant Shia population that looks directly to the Iranian institution of supreme religious authority for guidance on all matters of faith and daily life.
For these communities, Khamenei was not a foreign political leader. He was the Wali-e-Faqeeh - the supreme guardian and source of emulation, whose rulings on everything from prayer to commerce to marriage carried binding religious authority. His death is, in this sense, an orphaning.
But the Islamic connection between Kashmir and Iran predates Shia Islam's prominence in the Valley. Islam itself came to Kashmir substantially through Iranian Sufi saints. Syed Sharafuddin Bulbul Shah arrived in the 14th century. Mir Syed Ali Hamadani — Shah-i-Hamdan, the King of Hamadan — came from Persia with 700 followers in 1372, many of them craftsmen who would transform the Valley's material culture. Mir Syed Shamsuddin Araqi followed in the 15th century.
The appeal of Khomeini's revolution in 1979 cut across sectarian lines in ways that surprised many observers.
Both Shias and Sunnis in Kashmir credited the revolution with reinvigorating their sense of resistance against occupation and oppression. The revolution's core message — that the powerless could defeat the powerful through faith, sacrifice and unity — resonated in a valley that had known little except conquest and control.
Separatist groups have used the Islamic Revolution as an organising framework ever since, and the biggest public rallies to mark its anniversary outside Iran itself are held in Indian-administered Kashmir.
The connection between Kashmir and Iran runs so deep that the great poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, himself born in what is now Pakistan, popularised the sobriquet Iran-e-Sagheer — Little Iran — for Kashmir. It is a name that captures something real.
Persian was the court language of Kashmir until the late 19th century, when the Dogra rulers replaced it with Urdu. Family names common across the Valley — Hamdani, Kashani, Sabzwari, Kirmani — are the names of Iranian cities, carried by descendants of the Iranian settlers and scholars who came and stayed.
The mausoleums of Iranian-origin poets who died in Kashmir stand in the Mazar-e-Shora graveyard by Dalgate in Srinagar. The ceilings of historic mosques, including the Shah Hamdan Mosque, built in honour of the great Sufi saint from Hamadan, display Persian artistic traditions that have not been replicated since.
Most visibly, the papier-mâché craft for which Kashmir is world-famous traces its lineage directly to Persia. The art arrived with Hamadani's followers in the 14th century and was further developed under Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin in the 15th, who brought artisans from Persia and Central Asia.
The craft was originally known in Kashmir by its Persian name: Kar-i-Qalamdani, meaning the work of the pen-case. Its traditional motifs — arabesque, paisley (the Persian badami or almond design), the gul-i-hazara or thousand-flower pattern — are Persian. Its traditional colours, sometimes called sufiyana rang or Sufi colours, are Persian and Central Asian in inspiration. Even the exquisite painted ceilings of historic Srinagar mosques reflect this aesthetic inheritance.
In recent decades, the connection has found new expression in education. Iran has become a significant destination for Kashmiri students, particularly for medical studies. Tehran University of Medical Sciences has had more than 150 Kashmiri students enrolled at a time. Hundreds more study at seminaries in Qom, the Iranian city that is the second-largest centre of Shia Islamic learning in the world, after Najaf in Iraq.
When violence or instability has threatened these students, the Indian government has periodically had to organise evacuations, a logistical reality that itself speaks to the depth of the human bond.
Another remarkable thread in this tapestry involves Khamenei’s predecessor — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, whose ancestral connection to Kashmir has been claimed, debated, and never quite disproved.
The story begins in the letters exchanged between Khomeini, during his years of exile in Najaf in the 1960s and 1970s, and Ayatollah Syed Yusuf Mosavi of Budgam in Kashmir. The two men corresponded regularly on matters of theology, politics, and the Muslim condition. Syed Yusuf's son Fazlullah, a student at the seminary in Najaf, served as the messenger. In one of his letters, Syed Yusuf invited Khomeini to come to Kashmir if he needed refuge, assuring him of safety and hospitality.
According to the book Tajalliyat, written by Syed Yusuf's son Syed Baqir Mosavi of Budgam, when a French journalist in 1978 asked Khomeini, then in exile outside Paris at Neauphle-le-Château, where he would go if France revoked his asylum, he replied: "I would prefer going to Kashmir, as I have received an invitation from Aga Syed Yusuf during my time of exile in Iraq." The answer was not purely tactical; it reflected, according to Baqir's account, a personal attachment.
In a subsequent letter, Khomeini mentioned, almost in passing, that he would have loved to visit Kashmir because "it was also his ancestral land." This remark unleashed a genealogical controversy. According to a statement by Khomeini's elder brother, Syed Morteza Pasandideh, their grandfather, Syed Ahmad, had left what is described as Lucknow or Kashmir in the mid-19th century on pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf. In Najaf, Syed Ahmad met a prominent citizen of the Iranian town of Khomeyn, accepted his invitation, settled there, married his host's daughter, and never returned east.
When Syed Yusuf wrote to Khomeini asking him to elaborate on these roots, Khomeini confirmed: "It is the popular belief here that his ancestor who migrated from Kashmir to Khomeyn was a man named Syed Ahmed and was sometimes called Syed Hindi, as one would call a man from Hindustan. He came to Najaf from India or, then, Kashmir. From Najaf, he went to Khomeyn and settled there." He asked whether any Syed Ahmed had left Kashmir more than a century earlier and lost contact with his family.
According to Baqir's account, one of his own ancestors had a brother named Syed Ahmed who had indeed departed for Najaf through Lucknow and was thereafter declared mafqood-ul-khabar — a legal term for one who is lost and from whom no information can be obtained. The coincidence is striking.
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