What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next
Early Sunday morning, on a state-controlled television station, a bearded news anchor wept as he announced that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been “martyred,” at the age of eighty-six, on the first day of the war with the U.S. and Israel. Three times, between heaving sobs, the anchor shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” before reading the news from a white piece of paper. His hand shook. The U.S. reportedly provided the intelligence on Khamenei’s movements; Israeli fighter jets conducted the precision strike. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel had destroyed “the compound of the tyrant Khamenei” which included the top political and military offices of Iranian leaders. In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump heralded, “one of the most evil people in History is dead.” He called it “Justice” for people and countries worldwide who had been victims of “Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS.”
In 1987, I had a working breakfast with Khamenei, then the President of Iran, when he came to speak at the U.N., on his only trip to the U.S. or the West. With oversized glasses, a long graying beard, and a black turban, he struck me then as unworldly, naïvely arrogant about theocratic rule, and defensively furious at America for past interventions in Iran. At one point, a member of the Revolutionary Guard came over to cut up Khamenei’s breakfast meat. Khamenei had lost the use of his right arm after a small bomb hidden in a tape recorder, planted by an opposition group, went off as he was giving a sermon seven years earlier.
Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, as the son of a mid-ranking cleric of modest means. From a young age, he was educated in seminaries, first in Iran and then in Najaf, Iraq, at the center of Shiite learning. He became a follower of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—and an opponent of the monarchy—after he returned to Iran. He was arrested six times. When I visited the Ebrat Museum, which was formerly an intelligence prison run by the Shah’s U.S.-trained secret police, SAVAK, I saw a wax figure of Khamenei in what had been his cell. After the 1979 Revolution, Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, appointed Khamenei to lead Friday prayers, an influential position. After one President was impeached and another killed in a terrorist attack, Khamenei was elected President in 1981. In 1989, two years after we met, he was catapulted into the Islamic Republic’s top job following Khomeini’s abrupt death. Khamenei held ultimate power over political, military, judicial and economic policy for nearly four decades. It was one of the longest contemporary reigns in the world. But at the end of his life, he was secluded or hidden underground so much that Iranians nicknamed him Moushe-Ali, or Ali the Mouse.
Iran has moved quickly to start the succession process. On Sunday, a new three-man leadership council began work on the transition. “We will continue with all our strength along the path set by Imam Khomeini” who led the revolution in 1979, President Masoud Pezeshkian said, in a prerecorded message aired on state television. The council includes Pezeshkian, the judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, one of the eighty-eight members of the popularly elected Assembly of Experts, which is empowered to select the next Supreme Leader. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, who had just days earlier held indirect talks with U.S. officials in Geneva, told Al Jazeera that a new leader would be announced in “one day or two.”
Khamenei’s death triggered a profound but bifurcated reaction inside Iran. News and videos on social media showed Iranians cheering, honking horns, and dancing in the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate his death—all actions unthinkable days earlier, amid the government’s ongoing and ruthless crackdown on protesters. But other pictures showed tens of thousands gathering in the capital in sorrow. They struck their hands hard against their chests—a Shiite custom known as matam, or latm—to express intense grief and solidarity. The practice dates to the seventh century, when Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the son of the founder of Shiism, died in Karbala. Beating chests also signals ongoing belief in Shiite principles.
The disparate responses to Khamenei’s assassination reflect foundational questions about Iran’s future. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian political factions have argued—ferociously and sometimes fatally—about whether the Islamic Republic is foremost Islamic or primarily a republic. Is God’s law, or Sharia, as embodied in the Quran, the basis of the regime’s rule, with the Supreme Leader having the last word? Or is man’s law, as outlined in Iran’s constitution, the basis of government, with elected leaders in the Presidency and parliament shaping the country’s policy? For almost half a century, these questions have pitted so-called principlists against various groups of reformists or centrists. In 1981, Khomeini warned the quarrelling political factions to stop “biting one another like scorpions.”
The Iranian people, too, have fought over these questions. Since 2009 and more intensely since 2017, nationwide protests have sporadically challenged Islamic rule. Many Iranians want either major political reform or an end to the Velayat-e Faqih—the rule of the Islamic jurist—altogether. Tens of thousands have died along the way. The regime has been fragile and fractured for years. The late Harvard historian Crane Brinton, in his classic “The Anatomy of a Revolution,” writes that the final stage of a revolution is “convalescence,” when a society becomes so exhausted that it seeks stability. In these early days, it’s still unclear what potential convalescence might look like—or what kind of stability the people seek.
What’s left of the Iranian regime is now even more vulnerable, as many top political and military leaders have been assassinated in the first two days of war. “Khamenei’s death creates a moment of genuine uncertainty, but it does not automatically translate into immediate regime collapse,” Hamidreza Azizi, an Iranian political scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, in Berlin, told me. “The Islamic Republic anticipated a day-after scenario for a long time and built overlapping institutions capable of maintaining continuity, particularly within the security and military establishment.” Khamenei’s bayt, a term used among Shiites to describe a cleric’s religious and political “house,” employed more than four thousand people; his affiliated institutions employed more than forty thousand. These are separate from the executive, legislative, parliamentary, and military branches, and from other civil-service jobs.
Iran’s military, the largest in the Middle East, is estimated to have more than six hundred thousand members on active duty. “The rapid activation of a transitional leadership structure and the continuation of military operations suggest that authority in Iran has already shifted toward collective decision-making bodies and security actors able to operate under crisis conditions,” Azizi said. “In the near term, this makes systemic survival more likely than sudden political transformation, especially while the country remains engaged in active conflict.”
Iran’s political future becomes far more complicated in the longer term, Azizi noted. Khamenei functioned “as the ultimate mediator among competing factions. Without that arbiter, succession becomes a negotiation among élites taking place under wartime pressure,” he said. One possible scenario is “consolidation around a more security-dominated leadership.” Another is “gradual erosion if prolonged conflict weakens state control,” although, Azizi continued, that “would not necessarily be a clean transition.” And the transition might not play out only in Tehran. The country has a decentralized landscape of security forces that “raises the risk that instability could produce fragmentation or localized violence rather than orderly regime change,” Azizi told me.
On Sunday, Patrick Clawson, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that “a wide spectrum of powerful figures will soon be jockeying for control even as they try to evade military strikes. Yet supposing the regime does manage to survive and designate a new Supreme Leader, no such individual will start out with the same deference given to Khamenei.” Some of the surviving leaders, notably among the Revolutionary Guard, he said, may feel that “they should run the show, with the next Supreme Leader playing a modest role.”
For the entire Middle East, the changes wrought by this new war and the convulsions precipitated by the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, underscore the failures of Iran’s strategy to transform itself and the region. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has sought to build an alliance that would protect its interests and influence other Shiite communities. “We shall export our revolution to the whole world, until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world,” Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, vowed. Graffiti on the former U.S. Embassy, which was stormed by students ten months after the Revolution, said, “God willing, this century will be the period of victory for the oppressed over the oppressors.”
Iran has certainly failed the oppressed within its own borders. Today, daily life in the country is rife with challenges. When I first went to Iran, in 1973, one dollar bought seventy rials. On the eve of this current war, a dollar bought 1.3 million rials. Basic food supplies are exorbitantly expensive. Water and electricity are in short supply. And, regionally, Iran’s “axis of resistance”—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen—has been seriously weakened, though far from eliminated. A striking feature of the first days of the war is that Tehran’s allies—founded, funded, and armed by the Islamic Republic—have not intervened on behalf of their sponsor.
Almost fifty years ago, Iran’s revolutionaries introduced a militant brand of Shiite Islam as a viable medium of political opposition and governance. Their ideology spilled across countries and continents and even reached other Islamic sects, including rival Sunnis. The extremism they pushed, in its many manifestations, has been considered a top security threat around the world. The fate of Iran—and its leadership—could ripple across the world once again, too. ♦