Following the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Shiite protesters in Karachi, Pakistan, and Baghdad, Iraq, stormed U.S. diplomatic missions and fought pitched battles with security forces. But if these were the most violent popular responses, they were not the only ones. Around the world, many others rallied in support of the ayatollah as well. In the ensuing weeks, protests occurred in places such as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Jakarta, Indonesia; New Delhi, India; Indian-controlled Kashmir; and Istanbul, Turkey. Alongside placards decrying Israel and the United States, some protesters carried portraits of Khamenei.

Tehran’s backing of Shiite groups such as Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon is well known. But the Iranian regime has also courted the wider Muslim world, portraying itself as single-handedly challenging Western hegemony. In doing so, it has had some success winning support across sectarian lines.

This sympathy isn’t unconditional: Iran’s repression at home and its role in conflicts in the Middle East have led to widespread anger in the region. Yet when Tehran confronts Israel or the United States, it reinforces its reputation among a sizable segment of the world’s Muslims, who want to believe they are part of a global community that can take care of its own. For these international supporters, Iran has waged a long war on their behalf, and it has now won by forcing the United States and Israel into a cease-fire.

Iran’s anti-imperialist branding has been a hallmark of its foreign policy since the 1979 revolution. At the time, most Arab states were ruled by pro-Western leaders, and some, such as Egypt, were moving toward peace with Israel. In Tehran, revolutionary leaders overthrew a U.S.-backed monarchy before taking Americans hostage and broadcasting their open disdain for Washington.

The ripples were immediately felt around the globe. In Washington, for instance, Muhammad al-Asi, a Michigan-born Arab American, tried to take over the Islamic Center, the iconic mosque on Embassy Row opened in 1957 and run by a group of ambassadors from across the Islamic world. Asi, an early and outspoken admirer of the Iranian Revolution, was elected by the congregation to lead them but never allowed to do so. He complained that the mosque’s allegedly Saudi-backed imam refused to relinquish power and was “putting us to sleep with sermons that were detached from the reality of the Muslim world.” A SWAT team forced him out in 1983, and for the next several decades, Asi and his supporters held their own Friday prayers on the sidewalk outside the mosque.

They were not the only congregation in the area to look to Iran for inspiration: In southeast Washington, the late Abdul Alim Musa regularly praised the country as he preached a fusion of Black power and anti-Zionism. His outspoken support for Iran won him appearances on Iranian state-owned channel PressTV and invitations to global conferences in Tehran.

Iran’s revolutionary clerics borrowed heavily from Sunni political thinkers. These included people such as Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, a pan-Islamic political movement that continues to play a major role in politics in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini had met Maududi during the Hajj in 1963, and though Maududi died just after the Iranian Revolution, his successor flew to Tehran within weeks of the shah’s overthrow to see for himself how things were.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, an academic and Muslim student leader at the time, also visited Tehran in those days, as did Muslim Brotherhood representatives from regional Arab countries. Khomeini had studied Brotherhood figures such as Sayyid Qutb, translating his works into Persian and encouraging Iranians to study them.

Rached Ghannouchi, who would go on to form Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, credited the Iranian Revolution for initially helping him draw out an Islamic theology of liberation. “We saw in the Iranian revolution a turbaned shaykh commanding the revolution of the oppressed against a despotic agent of imperialism and against a rotten capitalist class,” Ghannouchi later wrote.

Wilayat al-Faqih—Khomeini’s ideology that put clerics in charge—had its critics, even among fellow Shiite Muslims. But for others who wanted to see Islam play a more political role, it proved attractive. In Malaysia, the opposition Muslim Islamic Party modeled its leadership structure on the Iranian cleric-led government. At a time when the role of religion in public life was declining across the Islamic world, Iran was resisting. As Khomeini famously said: “Islam is politics or it is nothing.”

Governments, understandably, were worried. In Turkey, the climate of revolutionary foment unleashed by the Iranian Revolution contributed to the military’s decision to carry out a coup in 1980. That same year in Pakistan, Iran’s other neighbor, the military ruler Zia ul-Haq, a Sunni, agreed to exempt the country’s Shiites from a mandatory charity-collection law following massive protests and a public warning from Khomeini.

In the ensuing decades, Saudi Arabia poured money into Pakistan to push a sectarian narrative that painted Shiites as infidels. Iran, for its part, has backed violent extremist groups in the country’s Shiite community, such as Sipah-e-Muhammad.

Yet its biggest impact might be on the Sunni Jamaat-e-Islami, which has largely steered clear of violent sectarian conflict. Its members are largely white-collar professionals who take elections seriously, button their shirts up no matter how hot it is, and frown on burning flags at protests. Inspired by what Iran achieved, Jamaat-e-Islami has toiled for a democratically achieved transformation that would then put Islamic scholars into a co-equal branch of a constitutional government.

To spread its reach beyond the bookish Islamists in a movement such as Jamaat-e-Islami, however, the Iranian regime learned to capitalize on the Muslim world’s hot-button issues. In 1989, Khomeini responded to global protests against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses by calling on Muslims to kill the author. Four years later, a mob in Sivas, Turkey, burned down a hotel that was hosting the man who had translated the book into Turkish.

Shortly after the revolution, Khomeini had called for a global show of solidarity with Palestine, dubbed Quds Day, or Jerusalem Day. In response, rallies began to be held not only in Muslim majority countries, when governments allowed it, but also in places such as London, Paris, and Washington. In Pakistan, an Quds Day protest is still the rare occasion that brings together everyone from Sunni madrassa students to Shiite clerics and political leaders from across the spectrum.

In 1997, an Quds Day rally in an Ankara suburb prompted the Turkish military to roll out tanks in the streets and force the resignation of Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan. Erbakan—whose Welfare Party included members who eventually spun off the country’s ruling Justice and Development Party—had pushed to move Turkey away from NATO and Europe. He included Iran in his “Developing Eight” group, an alliance intended to boost economic cooperation between Muslim countries. In Turkey today, Erbakan’s direct political successor, the Saadet Party, continues to advocate for such a pivot.

Each year since 1987, Tehran has also brought together political and religious leaders from the Muslim world for its International Islamic Unity Conference. It often ends up being a venue for railing against Israel and the United States. Meanwhile, the Saudi-backed Muslim World League hosts its own Islamic Unity Conference in Mecca, which is decidedly less political.

Last year, PressTV’s coverage of the Tehran conference offered a montage of attendees calling on Muslims to unite against Israel. “With the aggression against Gaza, this is a time to be united for the Muslim ummah,” said Farid Ahmad Paracha, the vice chair of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami, using an Arabic term for “community.”

“If the Islamic world were truly united, they would never have dared to do such a thing” said Serafettin Kilic, a Turkish lawmaker with the Saadet Party.

Such summits provided these parties—which struggle to win power in their countries—with a venue to discuss the issues that put them at odds with their own governments. Notably, Iran has also cultivated these parties’ political support on concrete geopolitical files. In the first few years of the Syrian war, for example, Turkey’s Saadet leaders visited Bashar al-Assad and joined summits in Iran to broker a political solution. As Turkey’s government threw its support behind the revolution, Saadet maintained a deep distrust of the Syrian opposition. The chaos and carnage of a revolution, Saadet leaders said, would just end up distracting from the struggle against Israel.

In Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami rarely spoke out at all about the Syrian revolution. While small numbers of jihadis from Pakistan did join Syria’s rebels, most of the country’s Sunnis held fast to the belief that the war was a U.S.-backed plot to destabilize the Muslim world. For Iran’s fans, the world was black and white: one side was Israel and the United States, and on the other was Iran. It was clear who they should be supporting.

In the Arab world itself, though, Iran’s machinations did not go unnoticed. The Iranian regime had gained some popularity in 2006 after Hezbollah forced Israel into a cease-fire, but by 2013, a large segment of the Arab world wanted it out of the region. Polling by Zogby and Pew showed that Iran’s policies in places such as Syria were viewed negatively in nearly every regional country.

The late Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi put it plainly in 2013. “When Hezbollah was fighting against Israel, I defended it. I stood against Saudi scholars … who warned us against Hezbollah. … I believed things as they seemed to be. I wanted to unite all Muslims,” he said. “Those I defended went and killed their brothers in Syria. We thought they were our brothers, but apparently they are not. Those who are fighting against the Syrian people call themselves the Party of God, but they are the Party of Satan.”

Beyond Syria, a host of other issues pitted governments and populations against Iran. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia fought a proxy war with the Iran-backed Houthi movement. Saudi leaders, like their counterparts in Bahrain, were especially concerned about pro-democracy movements involving their sizable Shiite populations, which they believed were Iranian-backed. Riyadh’s problems with Iran grew after 2016, when protesters stormed its embassy in Tehran in response to the execution of Nimr al-Nimr, a Saudi Shiite cleric who called for democratic reforms.

The war in Gaza, however, gave Iran a shot at winning back the Arab world. Within weeks of the war, Khamenei had popularity ratings in Tunisia, a bellwether for the region, that matched or beat Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed. By 2025, a sizable portion of the public in Tunisia, Iraq, Palestine, Morocco, and Jordan viewed Iran’s foreign policy favorably.

Iran’s war with Israel and the United States appears likely to deepen the divide between its strained relations with regional states and its popularity among a subset of anti-Israel, anti-American citizens in the Middle East and beyond. The Persian Gulf’s rulers might be angry with Iran, but for many of Iran’s longtime fans, this war is an inflection point in a shared, decades-old battle against the West.

For admirers in places such as Turkey, Pakistan, or Malaysia, who did not rethink their support because of wars in Syria, Yemen, or Iraq, Tehran’s attacks on its neighbors or closure of the Strait of Hormuz will not pose an ideological problem. Even as Iran lobbed missiles at Turkey, Qatar, and Oman, its true believers insisted that it was just trying to defend itself in an existential battle. For them, the recent cease-fire is proof that Iran has won, with profound geopolitical consequences that are just around the corner.

“U.S. hegemony is over—its intellectual, political, and military might is over,” Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami chief said in a message congratulating Iran after the cease-fire was announced. Whether or not this is true, the Iranian regime, through its very existence, will continue to act as a symbol for those in the Muslin world who want it to be.