When Iranian pop singer Morteza Pashaei, 30, succumbed to cancer mid-November, thousands of people attended his funeral, which was hailed as the biggest gathering of Iranians since the 2009 post-election protests.
The New York Times’ Tehran correspondent, Thomas Erdbrink, wrote that “the authorities were caught off guard” by the number of mourners for Pashaei’s fuenral. In an article in Iranian newspaper Shargh Daily, Sadra Mohaghegh wrote that Pashaei’s death sparked debate and analysis online among journalists and academics all asking the same question, “How could a singer we hardly knew be this popular?”
