Mehrzad Boroujerdi writes:

The 13th-century Persian poet Saadi once offered a prescient warning: “He who would not practice statecraft with his foe will not be able to maintain his rule.” It is a maxim Ayatollah Ali Khamenei chose not to heed. “The enemy” was among the most frequently invoked terms in the lexicon of Iran’s late supreme leader — most often directed at the United States and, at times, Israel. In the end, those very adversaries brought his 37-year rule to a close.

Many Iranians, both inside the country and across the diaspora, have celebrated his death. The passing of the Middle East’s longest-serving autocrat has generated a wave of euphoria and renewed speculation about regime change. In a political culture where hope springs eternal, some now interpret his demise as the down payment on a democratic transition.

But this optimism is premature. The end of a ruler does not automatically signify the end of a regime. It marks the beginning of uncertainty — and uncertainty, in Iran’s case, may prove more destabilizing than either triumph or defeat.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has demonstrated remarkable institutional resilience. Born of a mass revolution, it fused ideological commitment with organizational depth. The theocratic-authoritarian hybrid regime has shown considerable elasticity over 47 years. Although Khamenei functioned as its spinal cord — mediating factional rivalries, arbitrating elite disputes and preventing the rise of serious challengers — the Islamic republic was never a “one-bullet state.” Its stability did not depend solely on one man.

To understand Khamenei’s role, and what the Islamic republic loses with his death, one must understand what it took for him to become Khamenei.

In his adolescence, Khamenei — who would retain a lifelong interest in poetry and literature — developed an affinity for the works of Kahlil Gibran, whose popularity in Iran reached its zenith in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in modernist and romantic literary circles. The period between the abdication of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1941 and the 1953 coup that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and returned Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to power was a period of relative political openness, ideological contestation and an expansion of print culture. By the 1950s, literary modernism had become the dominant idiom among urban intellectuals in Iran. Khamenei translated “A Tear and a Smile,” a collection of poems, parables and stories by the Lebanese-American author, first published in Arabic in 1914.

A decade later, Khamenei had moved on to rendering the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the principal theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, translating the Egyptian thinker’s “In the Shade of the Quran” and “Islam: The Religion of the Future” into Persian. This intellectual shift — from literary modernism to Islamist revolutionary thought — mirrored broader currents within Iran’s intellectual milieu, where nativist, Islamist and Third Worldist discourses were gaining traction and reshaping the contours of political imagination. (I examine these dynamics in my book “Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism.”)

Coming from this background, Khamenei was not, at the outset, an unequivocal champion of the doctrine of absolute “velayat-e faqih” or “guardianship of the jurist,” a Twelver Shiite political-legal doctrine first systematically articulated by Khomeini in around 1970 that vests governing authority in a qualified Islamic jurist (faqih) during the occultation of the Twelfth Imam — and which became the constitutional foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In January 1988, while serving as president, Khamenei delivered a Friday sermon in which he advanced a narrower reading of Islamic governance, arguing that the state’s authority to impose binding conditions must operate within the framework of established Islamic rulings. This interpretation of velayat-e faqih triggered a public rupture between him and Khomeini.

Khomeini responded with an unusually sharp rebuke, insisting that the Iranian state — grounded in absolute guardianship — possessed authority that could override even primary religious obligations, including the pilgrimage, when required by state interests. The exchange clarified the hierarchy: absolute guardianship was not merely supervisory but could supersede subsidiary rulings. Within days, Khamenei acceded to Khomeini’s interpretation.

Thirteen months later, in February 1989, he was publicly upbraided again. After Khamenei suggested in a Friday sermon that Salman Rushdie’s repentance might create grounds for clemency, Khomeini issued an immediate and categorical denial, declaring that repentance would not void the death sentence.

The irony is striking. Twice reprimanded for circumscribing the scope of supreme authority, Khamenei would, after ascending to the leadership in June 1989, preside over — and further consolidate — the very doctrine whose expansive logic he had once appeared to question. In August 2000, when a reformist-dominated parliament was attempting to amend the press law, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei exercised his authority as supreme leader to block the bill from being debated, effectively stopping the proposed media reforms. By intervening directly and overriding the legislature’s agenda, he demonstrated his commitment to the expansive powers of the absolute supreme leader, powers that had taken him decades to make his own. [Continue reading…]