After four months, Iran's own uncertainty is finally laid to rest in ceremony, just after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the first few hours of the war with Israel and the United States. The public segment of a six-day state funeral began Saturday at the vast prayer ground in Tehran where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was mourned in 1989. Organizers were spraying water on a crowd, which was wilting in the heat, as crowds filled the courtyard, beating their chests in the rhythmic mourning ritual common at Shiite funerals and chanting "Death to America, Death to Israel. The funeral march coincides with tit-for-tat strikes and a tenuous ceasefire that have left the broader war unresolved, and negotiators from Tehran and Washington had even suspended their diplomacy in Doha to allow for the burial.

It was no accident that the time was right. Iran chose July 4 the 250th anniversary of American independence to start the public goodbye, a symbol of defiant defying instead of grieving. The whole parade has been staged as a symbolic slap in the face to the American-Israeli effort to decapitate the nation's leadership with one blow. In a speech the day before at Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump did not even acknowledge the symbolism of the event, declaring instead that Iran was "dying to settle" and jesting that Washington had given them "a week off for a funeral," referring to the same man who was killed in the US-Israeli strikes that triggered the war on Feb. 28.

The actual funeral dance has been choreographed for maximum exposure. The coffin, which was covered with Imam Reza's black turban from the city of Khamenei, his hometown, was placed in a glass box next to caskets of those who had died alongside him, including a 14-month-old granddaughter. A journey through July 9 winds through almost every geography that constitutes Shiite political and religious power: a twenty-four-hour public viewing in Tehran, prayers and a formal procession over a ten-kilometer route from Imam Hossein Square to Azadi Square, a visit to the seminary city of Qom, a trip into Iraq where rites were performed in Najaf and Karbala, and finally interment at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad. Iranian authorities claim to foreign wire services that they are anticipating between fifteen and twenty million participants in Tehran alone in the first days, numbers designed to call to mind the number of people who flooded into the capital for Khomeini's funeral thirty-seven years ago. Tehran has been careful about announcing that the delegation also included representatives from China, India and Pakistan, as President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf met with them before the ceremonies.

However, the figures and the sense of unity behind them are disputed even within Iran. Even in the face of the official image, exile-run outlets have portrayed a very different picture behind the scenes, being able to report it because of the vastness of the Iranian diaspora and the difficulty Tehran has in curbing its activities. According to Iran International, municipal offices and government-affiliated companies, including the mobile phone network Hamrah-e Aval, have withdrawn leave and remote working, instead moving staff to the cemetery, while a principal in Tehran's Islamic education system complained of the lack of resources, even prayer carpets, to accommodate people coming from outside of town. One source told the outlet that it is an empty coffin funeral, which reflects the waning support of the regime. It is important because it follows months of unrest in Iran that rights monitors say the government has failed to control: Mass protests against inflation and a falling rial swept across the nation during December and January, spawning a lethal crackdown that rights observers estimate killed thousands, and complaints from that crackdown have seeped into the symbolism of the funeral itself, with mourners reportedly carrying portraits of protest victims in the ceremonial parades.

All of this is overlaid by the succession issue. Mojtaba, son of Khamenei, took over the leadership when his father was killed in the same attacks, but has not been seen in public since the outbreak of the war and will likely not make an appearance at the funeral at all, state media reports suggest, for security reasons. An almost behind-the-scenes leadership change at an already delicate moment for the state to assert confidence both to its own citizens and to external negotiators is an unusual situation for any government, much less one whose legitimacy rests on promises of continuity with a revolutionary regime that has lasted nearly fifty years.

The funeral's timing is now coming into direct contact with hard economic reality, not just symbolism, over the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway is home to nearly one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil and a large portion of global liquefied natural gas, with Iran's almost complete closure this year causing, according to the International Energy Agency, the largest disruption in supplies to the world's oil market in history. When the war was at its worst, the price of Brent crude broke the one hundred dollar a barrel barrier, pushing gas prices in some parts of California over six dollars a gallon, the price of jet fuel up close to ninety-five percent in North America and forcing Amazon, FedEx and the US Postal Service to charge fuel surcharges. Strategic stocks of diesel in Australia, which are around a month's supply, were also coming into play, and this was jeopardizing the food supply system. That disruption is the context to which markets are now tuning into Tehran's negotiators nearly as much as it is tuning into Tehran's mourners.

With commercial ships beginning to sail again through Hormuz after a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was reached between Washington and Tehran on June 18, prices have been able to reverse the bulk of that rally, with Brent now declining toward the high sixties and low seventies. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's crude shipments are back to about 90 percent of pre-war levels and exports by the United Arab Emirates have been raised back to more than 3.9 million bpd, partly through a stealthy rerouting of tankers through the strait and a backstopping pipeline that avoids the chokepoint. The sum of the daily flows through Hormuz has been delayed to more than ten million barrels per day. But analysts warn not to take that recovery as a sign of "return to normal. Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects has noted that insurance rates have also stayed high, and shippers are still not enthusiastic about returning vessels to a waterway where mines and the potential for renewed strikes are still a threat, despite some tankers having been previously trapped making their way. But commodity strategists at BNP Paribas and elsewhere say that Iran has won a lasting change in its leverage over the strait, whether or not the diplomacy succeeds, and Tehran will probably continue its attempts to maintain some informal control over ships using the strait even if a formal toll system that Gulf states and Western shippers have firmly rejected never comes to fruition. The next round of talks in Doha, brokered by Qatari and Pakistani officials, has also been postponed, again with the excuse of the funeral calendar, highlighting the extent to which Tehran's domestic political circus has become wrapped up in decisions that are priced into oil futures thousands of kilometers away.

Overlaid on the energy narrative is another concurrent legal/diplomatic thread that the funeral has yet to dampen. Belgium-based pro-Palestinian legal group the Hind Rajab Foundation on Saturday filed a new war crimes complaint in Italy against an Israeli soldier it says is currently in the country, as it has dozens of similar complaints against Israeli personnel traveling abroad in the past two years. While these lawsuits continue to flow across European courts, Israel has consistently denied any war crimes or genocide in Gaza, claiming that Hamas' use of civilians as human shields accounts for most of the civilian deaths, and, in any case, there is a slow-burning legal liability for Israeli citizens, separate from what happens between Washington and Tehran. Domestically, Israel is facing its own crisis of instability: a new Channel 12 poll hours before the funeral began showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underwater, with fifty-eight percent disapproving of both his performance and that of every senior minister polled, while a majority attributed the return of hostages from Gaza to Trump rather than to their own government.

The result of all this is not so much a news package as a snapshot of a area yet reeling from the shockwaves of a war that was declared in the summer of 1914 and that was never definitively settled. Iran seeks to turn a funeral into a affirmation of strength, and reports from the independent media within the country indicate that much of the crowd it will eventually quote as an indication of its loyal forces may be created by the government itself. Washington is also working on an economic reopening it desperately requires, but which is no less vital than Tehran's. In turn, markets are reflecting optimism for a return to normal flows in the strait, with a number of the analysts who monitor the water closely noting that it is assuming more than is warranted given the facts on the water. It's going to be a caravan of the coffin, from Tehran to Qom, to Najaf and then to Mashhad, and it's going to be gigantic in size, gigantic in terms of the crowds and gigantic in terms of the television cameras. But whether it signifies the quiet end of the crisis it arose from, or just a moment's breathing space before the next flashpoint over who can control one of the world's most significant waterways, no one can answer that question in the choreography of the funeral.The two charts above tell the tale: Brent's price, which oscillated around $70 per barrel leading up to the war, peaked at $108 during the blockade of the strait and has fallen back to $69 as shipping resumed, and the volume of oil that typically flows through the strait, accounting for about one-fifth of global seaborne oil the reason that a funeral in Tehran keeps cropping up in oil-trading terminals from Singapore to Houston.