The story: The family and friends of jailed Iranian dervish Behnam Mahjoubi say his body has been transferred from a hospital in Tehran to the southeastern city of Kerman for burial. Mahjoubi was serving time as a political prisoner after being arrested during a protest in Tehran back in 2017. His passing is once again turning the spotlight on the plight of Sufis in Iran—and the Islamic Republic’s mistreatment of political prisoners.

The coverage: Given the typical censorship exercised by official media outlets when it comes to political prisoners, Mahjoubi’s death Feb. 21 was largely ignored, receiving little coverage beyond an official statement from the Iranian judiciary’s office for prisons.

The statement was published by both conservative and Reformist news sources. Tasnim and Fars news agencies, both affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), quoted prison officials as saying that Mahjoubi died of poisoning caused by medicines he took without consulting the prison’s appointed doctors. The judiciary’s statement noted that Mahjoubi had received full medical attention throughout his imprisonment.

Social media platforms were, however, foaming with reactions and heated debates on the 33-year-old man’s death. His story began to gain particular attention last week, when activists reported his transfer to Tehran’s Loghman Hospital and suspicions grew that he might be already dead or have slipped into a coma.

During the whole week of conflicting news surrounding Mahjoubi’s fate, his mother was seen waiting in the hospital yard, in the hope of hearing about her son’s recovery. In her first reaction to his death, she promised that she would not rest easy and would never allow her son to be quickly buried before securing an investigation and an autopsy examination.

The case has also triggered a barrage of furious attacks from social media users, who wrote under the hashtag “they killed Behnam” in Persian.

“I will not forgive, I will not forget,” tweeted Ebrahim Allah-Bakhshi, a close friend of Mahjoubi and a former political prisoner himself. Others expressed harsh criticism at alleged mistreatment of political prisoners and reviewed similar cases in which inmates are believed to have died under torture or medical negligence at the hands of prison authorities.

The context/analysis: Mahjoubi was arrested along with scores of other dervishes back in 2018 at a rally in Tehran’s upscale Pasdaran neighborhood. The event was organized in protest against a police siege on the residence of their spiritual leader, late Nour-Ali Tabandeh. The initially peaceful event turned ugly, however, with security forces violently rounding up the dervishes and bundling them into the back of vans.

Four years on, an unspecified number of those dervishes remain in custody as stories of their plight keep surfacing. An audio file attributed to Mahjoubi was released in October in which he accuses his interrogators of different forms of abuse—including a forced intake of medicines.

The Iranian Gonabadi dervishes are followers of a branch of Sufism. They say that they are not advancing any political agenda and remain a purely peaceful entity focused on pursuit of their beliefs. But the Islamic Republic’s intelligence apparatus has long accused them of acting as a cult, every now and then raiding their gatherings and demolishing their houses of worship.

The future: In the fallout of Mahjoubi’s death, attention is once again expected to be focused on the plight of Sufi dervishes in Iran. Indeed, calls are already being made for the Islamic Republic to exercise some level of tolerance in its treatment of the group. The case has also brought to the fore the debate on the state of the country’s prison system, which is allegedly failing political inmates.

The appointment of Ebrahim Raisi in 2019 as judiciary chief had strengthened hopes for change among some campaigners for reform. The conservative cleric has long promised greater transparency.

Yet, Mahjoubi’s case seems to have only added to their disappointment. And the mother of the 33-year-old dervish is the most recent member of a community of Iranian parents-turned-activists after losing their children to alleged state repression. Their calls for the Islamic Republic to increase transparency and accountability are not likely to end any time soon.