Iran’s next test: Life after the Supreme Leader

On Thursday, Feb. 1, 1979, an Iran Air plane touched down in Tehran. On board was an elderly man in a black turban, wrapped in a silence as dense as his cloak, accompanied by 120 journalists. Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini was not returning to a homeland; he was stepping forward, with unhurried certainty, to write history.

When the French journalist Peter Jennings asked him mid-flight what he feels after 15 years in exile, Khomeini replied with a chill: “Nothing.”

In my view, the answer was not emotional numbness. It was the expression of a man for whom the personal had ceased to be a reference, perhaps because it had dissolved entirely into the doctrinal and political project of his lifetime.

But what turns a cleric trained in the seminaries of Najaf and Qom into the leader of a revolution that toppled one of the region’s oldest monarchies? How does a marginal juristic concept—Vilayat-e Faqih/guardianship of the jurist—become a governing system for a country that is now home for 90 million people?

How does legitimacy emerge from a symbolic field like religion? And how does it harden into coercive political structures? These are questions that belong to the sociology of religious power.

Why Khomeini?

Khomeini cannot be understood apart from the Iran of the shah. In the 1950s and 1960s, Iran was undergoing what might be called a violent modernization. The Iranian philosopher and critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad described it as Gharbzadegi/Westoxication, or cultural alienation to the West.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi drove his country forcefully toward secularization, backed by the brutal SAVAK security apparatus and fueled by oil wealth that revived the economy, but kept its levers in the exclusive hands of the Shah. The result was a sharp confrontation with the religious establishment.

What this trajectory produced was not the modern society the shah had envisioned, but an exceedingly fragile social structure: a traditional bourgeoisie that felt modernization threatened its economic existence; clerics who saw their symbolic authority eroding under the pressure of Westernization; and waves of displaced peasants who flooded the cities, only to find themselves in the poverty belts surrounding a glittering Tehran—lost between an urban identity that would not absorb them and a countryside they could not return to.

The bazaaris tripartite social bloc, the seminary networks and the urban marginalized, needed a discourse and a face. Khomeini became both.

The American sociologist Theda Skocpol did not consider the Iranian Revolution a “religious revolution” in the literal sense. Rather, she saw it as a social revolution whose economic and political motives Khomeini translated, with exceptional success, into a religious language capable of mobilizing vast sectors of the population.

But Skocpol adds an important caveat: political Islam was not an inevitable outcome of those conditions. Alternative scenarios, leftist and nationalist, were possible. Yet their fragility, when confronted with the institutional networks of the religious seminaries, combined with Khomeini’s charisma and organizational capacity, tipped the balance.

Her most striking conclusion was an unusual admission: unlike earlier major historical revolutions, the Iranian Revolution was a revolution “made deliberately.” It involved intentional urban civic mobilization, clear ideological leadership and mass organization that altered the course of history without the need for prior peasant uprisings or external wars.

In 1970, while lecturing in Najaf, Khomeini delivered a series of talks later compiled into one of the most controversial politico-juristic texts in modern Islamic history: “Islamic Government: Guardianship of the Jurist.”

The thesis was as bold as it was unsettling to many of his contemporaries. In the absence of the infallible, hidden Imam, full authority—political, judicial and legislative, not merely advisory—would pass to the qualified jurist.

From a sociological perspective, what Khomeini achieved was to operationalize Max Weber’s concept of charisma within an institutional framework. Weber argued that charismatic authority is inherently fragile because it is tied to an individual. For it to endure, it must undergo what he called routinization.

The problem, then, was clear: how do you replace a leader whose authority is, by definition, exceptional and non-hereditary? The answer lay in crafting rules, legal or juristic, that transfer sacred legitimacy from the individual leader to the office itself. Obedience thus shifts from the person to the institution.

Khomeini executed this transformation with remarkable precision. He anchored personal charisma within the juristic institution through the doctrine of Vilayat-e Faqih, then embedded that institution within the constitution through bodies such as the Guardian Council and the position of the Supreme Leader.

In doing so, he ensured that the revolution would not die with its founder. It became a constitutional structure capable of reproducing itself.

What is striking, however, is that many senior Shiite authorities openly rejected this doctrine—from Abu al-Qasim Al-Khoei to, later, Ali Al-Sistani. The dominant Shiite juristic tradition had long leaned toward distancing itself from political power, not seizing it.

This suggests that Khomeini did not retrieve an established Islamic position. He constructed a new juristic order and presented it as the sole, complete Islamic truth.

In the language of sociology, Khomeini had effectively “invented a tradition.”

The other face of the sacred

No objective reading can ignore the heavy cost of this new narrative of power.

Once Khomeini consolidated authority, the revolution began to devour its own. Leftists who had fought alongside Islamists suddenly found themselves accused of waging war against God. The People’s Mojahedin Organization (MEK) was brutally repressed. Kurdish regions were met with military campaigns.

In the 1980s, Iranian prisons witnessed massacres whose files remain largely sealed. Khomeini himself issued the orders that led to what became known as the 1988 executions.

Khomeini was convinced that jihad against “corruptors on earth” was not an ideological luxury but a religious duty—one that sanctified violence.

This position aligns with what sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer calls “sacred terror”: when a religious framework reclassifies violence from crime into an act of worship. In such a system, the moral constraints that typically restrain violence in secular contexts lose relevance, because the ultimate reference shifts from human law to divine command.

This does not mean that religion is inherently violent. It means that when religion is transformed into a totalizing political ideology, it becomes as capable of producing violence as any totalitarian secular ideology.

When Khomeini died in June 1989, the central question emerged: could the revolution survive its founder?

The answer was yes—but not without profound transformation. The succession of Ali Khamenei was anything but smooth. It was, however, proof that the system of Vilayat-e faqih had succeeded on its own terms: the jurist had become replaceable, because authority resided in the office, not the individual.

An heir without charisma

In June 1989, as Iran was still mourning Khomeini, the Assembly of Experts faced a decision that would shape the future of the Islamic Republic within hours.

The name that emerged surprised even seasoned observers: Ali Khamenei, then president. His juristic rank did not exceed that of Hujjat Al-Islam—a mid-level position in the Shiite clerical hierarchy, far below the rank of Marja theoretically required for the role of supreme leader.

The solution was as simple as it was controversial: his rank was elevated to Ayatollah almost simultaneously with his appointment.

Khamenei lacked both the charisma of his predecessor and the senior religious authority that commanded unquestioned spiritual obedience.

Yet over three decades, his rule proved more intricate than mere reliance on bureaucracy. He developed a hybrid form of authority—combining institutional legitimacy with a gradually reconstructed charisma, built not through personal magnetism but through control over the production of official religious discourse.

When Khamenei assumed power, he faced an almost impossible equation: to fill a symbolic void he had not been prepared for, within a religious establishment that did not recognize him as a supreme authority, and among a population that still saw in Khomeini an irreplaceable sacred shadow.

He responded with a set of calculated strategies. The first was what might be called monopolizing Khomeini’s discourse. Rather than presenting himself as a distinct or independent figure, Khamenei invested heavily in portraying himself as the faithful guardian and exclusive interpreter of Khomeini’s legacy. This strategy granted him borrowed legitimacy—allowing him to compensate for the absence of intrinsic authority by positioning himself as the sole arbiter of what the Imam truly intended.

The second strategy was war—more precisely, its memory. Although the eight-year war with Iraq had ended before he assumed leadership, its memory remained deeply embedded in the national consciousness. Khamenei skillfully reactivated this memory, transforming the narrative of the “sacred defense” into a permanent framework.

He cast the Iran-Iraq war as one of the most rational moments in the country’s history, and used it to frame every major political decision—from the nuclear file to intervention in Syria to the ongoing confrontation with the USA and Israel—as part of an existential defensive war.

In this framing, opposition becomes not dissent, but weakness—or even betrayal. The effect is to normalize exceptional authority, embedding the state in a permanent condition of emergency.

The third, and most profound, strategy was the restructuring of the religious field itself. Over decades, Khamenei worked to promote loyal clerics within the seminaries, cut off funding to independent authorities, and establish parallel religious institutions under state control.

The social outcome of this process is what can be described as the bureaucratization of religion: the subordination of the religious sphere to the logic of the modern state, rather than allowing it to operate according to its own internal dynamics.

Politically, Khamenei compensated for his lack of mass charisma by shifting the center of gravity of power in Iran away from the traditional religious establishment—whose absolute loyalty he did not trust—and toward the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This shift did not stop at the security sphere. It extended deep into the economy.

Through institutions such as Khatam Al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the Revolutionary Guard transformed into a sprawling economic empire, swallowing up infrastructure contracts, ports, telecommunications and oil sectors.

In effect, Khamenei succeeded in reshaping the republic from a “populist theocratic state” into a “deep security-military state” cloaked in religious legitimacy.

In a report by the International Institute for Iranian Studies titled “Iranians and the Politicization of the Shiite Clergy,” a junior cleric, when asked who chooses the supreme jurist, gave a stark answer: “The Kalashnikov.”

Externally, Khamenei reengineered Iran’s geopolitical doctrine. He replaced Khomeini’s romantic vision of exporting the Islamic revolution with a pragmatic security strategy known as forward defense.

Tehran recognized the limits of its conventional military capabilities in the face of Western and Israeli technological superiority. It therefore relied on building a complex network of non-state actors—proxies and militias across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen—primarily through the Quds Force.

The objective was no longer the spread of Shiism as an end in itself, but the creation of strategic deterrence arms and the outsourcing of conflict beyond Iran’s borders, keeping battles far from the core while securing the regime’s survival in Tehran.

The strategic mind behind the clerical mask

One of the most persistent errors in analyzing Khamenei is reducing him to a cleric driven purely by doctrine.

A closer reading of his decisions over three decades suggests something else entirely: a first-rate strategic politician who deploys religious language with great skill, yet operates within pragmatic calculations centered on regime survival, regional influence and internal balance of power.

One example is enough. In the 2005 presidential election, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to prominence, initially appearing aligned against reformist currents. But as his popularity grew and his reading of national-religious discourse gained a degree of independence, he quickly found himself in open confrontation with Khamenei.

The same pattern repeated with Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Anyone who crossed a certain threshold of autonomy—regardless of ideological orientation—ultimately collided with Khamenei.

The constant in his rule is not ideology, but this: no one is allowed to become a potential rival.

This pattern can be described as authoritarian singularity—a model fundamentally different from traditional dictatorship based on direct rule.

Khamenei does not always govern directly. Instead, he shapes the political field so that no force can grow strong enough to threaten the centrality of his position. He also plays the role of ultimate arbiter in internal conflicts.

This “arbitral” position grants him a power that often exceeds that of direct rule, because it renders him indispensable to all competing factions.

Regional expansion and permanent emergency

For Arab readers in particular, analyzing Khamenei is essential because his influence does not stop at Iran’s borders.

The regional strategy he has shaped—through support for Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and various Palestinian factions—embodies what Joseph Nye described as a combination of soft and hard power.

It leverages religious discourse and an identity of resistance to build transnational networks of influence, while simultaneously providing real military and security support that makes these networks effective actors on the ground.

The paradox is that this expansion produces contradictory outcomes.

In Lebanon and Iraq, it has partially succeeded in establishing a durable strategic presence, though not without ongoing risks, including potential threats to Hezbollah’s position.

At the same time, it has deepened sectarian polarization, creating openings for rival regional powers to contain Iranian influence. This dynamic has played out clearly in decades of Saudi and Emirati counter-mobilization.

The result is a strange equilibrium: Khamenei’s regional reach reinforces a narrative of perpetual threat, which in turn legitimizes internal restrictions and sustains a state of “sacred emergency.”

From jurist state to Guard republic

In the end, it can be said that if Khomeini founded the legitimacy of the Iranian system on the radiance of revolutionary charisma and the invention of Vilayat-e Faqih, transforming religion into a total mobilizing ideology, Khamenei has reengineered that legitimacy around hard bureaucracy, security control and regional deterrence.

The Iranian system today no longer survives on spiritual attraction. It endures through its ability to manage contradictions, sustain a condition of “sacred emergency” and turn regional geography into forward lines of defense.

The open question left by the sociology of Iranian power today—as we inevitably approach the end of the Khomeini–Khamenei era, father and son—is this:

Can this hybrid structure survive its internal contradictions in the absence of the “ultimate arbiter”?(*)

Can the system reproduce a new supreme leader through bureaucratic mechanisms for a second time in a way that satisfies USAand Israel? Or will the cloak and turban fall away, leaving this structure exposed in a direct confrontation with an Iranian society exhausted by sacred slogans, international isolation and suffocating economic crises?

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(*)As of the time of writing, Mojtaba Khamenei has not formally emerged.