‘Khamenei believes that the future of the world is Islam’
The Ayatollah’s grip on power in the Islamic Republic seems as strong as ever 35 years on.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is one of the two figures whose machinations and choices will decide whether the Middle East erupts into war. The other is his 85-year-old nemesis in Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader who will rule on how Iran responds to further aggression in the spiralling round of tit-for-tat attacks.
Thirty-five years since Khamenei became Iran’s supreme leader, and 45 years after the formation of the Islamic Republic itself, his grip on power looks as strong as ever – due to his success in restructuring the Islamic theocracy, imposing his own will and crushing his enemies.
After the death of the Islamic Republic’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in June 1989, clerics in the Assembly of Experts chose Ali Khamenei as his replacement, even though he lacked the required rank. Handily, he was elevated overnight from the clerical rank ayatollah from that of Hojjat al-Islam.
Some observers suggested the Assembly had chosen a relatively inexperienced figure who they hoped to control from the shadows.
Doubts over the political skill of Khamenei soon vanished as he reformed this system to his own advantage, although he benefited from constitutional changes already put in train by his predecessor.
According to Kian Tajbakhsh, a former inmate of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison and now a political scientist at Columbia University in New York who took part in the 2009 uprising against Khamenei’s regime: “He is a very significant and important factor in the persistence and the continuing posture of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“He’s defied expectations because he followed a very charismatic leader… From what I can tell, he thinks carefully. He seems to be on top of the news. And he’s a real ideologue… it seems he really believes that the future of the world is Islam.”
From the start, Khamemei relied on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), whose compliance he bought by allowing its chiefs to sink their tendrils into a vast network of businesses, ranging from oil and gas projects to construction and telecommunication worth billions of dollars.
In return, the IRGC and related groups, including the thuggish Basij paramilitaries, have crushed protests against his regime, including the 1999 student movement, the reformist movement under President Muhammad Khatami (1997-2005), the 2009 Green Movement, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s attempts to empower himself (2012-13), but also the 2017 “bread” movement when protests broke out in more than 100 cities against power because of high prices.
Most recently, his regime – and his own authority – has survived nationwide protests sparked by the death of the young Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022 at the hands of the “morality police”, after she was detained for failing to wear a head scarf correctly.
The IRGC has also spread Tehran’s influence around the region, arming and training terrorist groups from Lebanon to Yemen. And it shares the world view of Khamenei’s Shia faction, one that has much in common with the extreme left in terms of its antiAmericanism – and hatred of Israel.
Khamenei has secured control of the judicial system, which is now completely beyond the control of the executive and legislative branches. Anyone challenging the theocratic power can expect draconian prison sentences.
By concentrating power in his own hands Khamenei has greatly diminished the power of the President, the parliament or other elected institutions.
Allan Hassaniyan, an Iranian Kurd academic at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, thinks it is a mistake to assume that Khamenei is making all the decisions himself.
“The IRGC is not just a listener, it is an important actor, in what’s happening, in the conflict with Israel, just as Khamenei is,” he says. “It’s so powerful economically, politically and militarily that the IRGC is the state itself. I don’t think it’s a one-way situation in which Khamenei says ‘go for it’ and the IRGC generals simply act on the order.” But he believes that the Supreme Leader and the IRGC leaders share the same philosophy and as such work in harmony.
Andreas Krieg, an Iran expert at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, says the IRGC “is the Iranian state” and that the “Supreme Leader is in command” of the organisation.
The regime’s raison d’être and that of the Ayatollah are one and the same, perpetuating an extremist vision of Shia Islam, which brooks no compromise with modern concepts of plurality or humans rights. It also explains its implacable hostility towards Israel.
But as the threat of a major military confrontation with Israel grows, Krieg thinks the West should realise that the Iranian regime are far more rational actors than they’re usually given credit for.
“They are, in fact, extremely rational,” he says. “They don’t act like the extremist Sunni Islamists. And they are acting much more rationally than Israel.”
But many Iranians who have suffered at the hand of Khamenei’s regime say neither its true nature nor the danger it poses should be underestimated.
Tajbakhsh says: “I think that Tehran sending drones to Russia for use in Ukraine should be a wake-up call to Europe about what this regime really is: indecent and utterly hostile to all liberal democracies. I am absolutely certain of this in Tehran, they’re thinking give us another 10 years.
“Keep our land bridge and air bridge to Lebanon… Hezbollah will then have in 10 to 15 years over a million missiles and probably a nuclear weapon from Iran. At that point, it’s game over for Israel.”
He is a very significant and important factor in the continuing posture of the Islamic Republic of Iran