Ali Khamenei Was a Monster. The US Made Him a Martyr

Tehran’s Grand Mosalla Mosque, where the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was held in state this weekend, is an extraordinary building. In a country filled with exquisitely tiled, millennium-old houses of worship, this one is a plain, brutalist product of the 1979 revolution whose sole virtue is its size. With a main prayer hall that spans multiple World Cup soccer fields, it is a still unfinished monument to the sheer scale of religious fervor that Iran’s supreme leader sought to institutionalize.