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Ayatullah Ali Khamenei: The Supreme Leader Who Is Really Running Iran
Observers with a working knowledge of Iranian politics have largely been able to shrug off President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s bluster and bullying, knowing the diminutive President must still answer to a far more powerful figure: Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since 1989, the shadowy cleric – a former president himself – has sat at the apex of Iran’s complex hierarchy as the final word in all political and religious matters. The massive protests roiling Tehran in the aftermath of the June 12 elections have underlined both the vast sweep of Khamenei’s powers and, perhaps, its limitations. After hailing Ahmadinejad’s “divine victory,” Khamenei backpedaled by ordering the country’s Guardian Council to investigate the results – a decree that some took as an implicit capitulation to factions sympathetic to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s challenger. In his two decades at the helm of the Islamic Republic, Khamenei’s present challenge – to guide Iran through this stretch of turbulence while the world watches transfixed – may be his toughest yet.
Fast Facts:
• Khamenei, 69, was born in Meshhad to a family of religious scholars. Began advanced religious training in Qom while still a teenager, and shortly thereafter became a protege of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini
• In 1963, took part in street protests against the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran. After the uprising was quashed, Khomeini was exiled, and between 1964 and 1978 his protege continued to espouse dissident views in his absence, mobilizing protests and demonstrations and maintaining close ties to his exiled mentor. Khamenei was imprisoned multiple times and, in 1975, was internally exiled to a remote region in southeastern Iran
• In 1979, after the Islamic Revolution ousted the Shah, Khamenei became one of the Ayatullah’s primary lieutenants
• Briefly served as Minister of Defense in 1980. Also supervised Iran’s influential Revolutionary Guards
• Was the target of an assassination attempt in June 1981. While speaking at a rally in Tehran, suffered severe injuries to his right hand and arm when a bomb hidden in a nearby tape-recorder exploded
• Was elected President of Iran in 1981 and reelected in 1985. During his two terms, was a key player in guiding policy for the Iran-Iraq war – working with Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the primary challenger in this month’s election
• Became Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989. In the view of most experts, his appointment – by Iran’s Assembly of Experts – is attributable to the strength of his relationship with Khomeini rather than his religious credentials, which, among the upper echelon of Iran’s clergy, are viewed as comparatively weak
• According to a confidant who spoke to TIME in 2006, Khamenei hikes in jeans, sports a watch and plays the tar, a stringed instrument popular in Iran; this embrace of some of the trappings of modernity separates him from many of his fellow hard-line clerics
• Named to the TIME 100 in 2007
• Has bristled at the notion of engaging with the United States, even after President Barack Obama signaled his Administration’s desire to adopt a more conciliatory stance toward the Islamic Republic
Quotes by:
“I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings, and truly a minor seminarian.”
- Speaking during his first address as Supreme Leader, in June 1989
“They say, ‘We have extended a hand toward Iran.’ What kind of hand is this? If the extended hand is covered with a velvet glove but underneath it, the hand is made of cast iron, this does not have a good meaning at all.”
- Responding to President Obama’s video message in a speech before a crowd of tens of thousands in the northeastern city of Mashhad. (Time.com, March 21, 2009)
“The Iranian nation needs nuclear energy for life, not weapons.”
- Insisting that Iran’s commitment to uranium enrichment was born out of a desire to harness nuclear technology for peaceful purposes; he has repeatedly stressed this point, noting that the use of nuclear weapons would violate Islamic law (CNN, March 21, 2007)
“The Iranian people’s hatred for America is profound.”
- In a speech on Iranian state TV. (Middle East Media Research Institute, Oct. 30, 2008)
Quotes about: :
“Khamenei likes to project the image of a magnanimous grandfather, selflessly staying above the fray to guide the country in a virtuous direction … in reality he is notoriously thin-skinned. Criticism of the Leader is one of the few remaining redlines in Iranian politics, almost a guarantee of a prison sentence.”
- Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a March 2008 report
“Khamenei would always come and say, ‘Shut up; what I say goes.’ Everyone would say, ‘O.K., it is the word of the leader.’ Now the myth that there is a leader up there whose power is unquestionable is broken.”
- Azar Nafisi, the author of two memoirs about life in Iran, on how Khamenei’s decree that the election results be reviewed – which he issued shortly after praising Ahmadinejad’s “divine victory” – has undermined his claim to absolute authority. (New York Times, June 16, 2009)
“An unusual sort of dictator. He has a down-to-earth image and calm demeanor that sit uneasily with the praise he often heaps upon Iran’s militants. His austere lifestyle stands in jarring contrast to the corruption and ostentatious wealth of many other Iranian leaders.”
- On Khamenei’s disposition. (Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2007)
PART TWO:
Despite the convulsions in Tehran’s streets in the aftermath of a disputed presidential election, Iranians — and the smart folks in Washington — know that Iran’s presidency is not the seat of executive power. Unelected mullahs hold veto power over the decisions of the elected government, and their Supreme Leader, currently Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, must approve all political policies and make the key foreign policy and security decisions. No one can run for president without the approval of the clerics, and they routinely narrow the field to those deemed acceptable within the parameters of the Islamic Revolution.
Still, the presidency is far from unimportant. It is a critical part of the “managed democracy” that the ruling clerics have used to govern Iran for the last three decades. Khamenei himself is a former President. The job is important enough to have brought millions of Iranians to the polls on Friday, and thousands into the streets afterwards — both supporters of the apparent loser, reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and members of the radical volunteer paramilitary forces who support the reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (See pictures of Iran’s controversial and violent election)
Yet Khamenei has now done something extraordinary to the regime’s democratic apparatus. Even though Iran’s Electoral Commission allows three days to hear challenges before presenting results to Khamenei for approval, the Supreme Leader rushed to put his seal of approval on the outcome, and warned all political factions to refrain from challenging it. His imposition of the result, just hours after the polls closed, stunned the country as doubts about the legitimacy of vote were voiced widely both inside and outside Iran.
The very way Iran is ruled is now in convulsion. Since the revolution of 1979 brought on the Islamic Republic, Iran has been governed by a power structure that combines unelected clerics with an elected legislature and presidency. Under the revolution’s principle of velayat e-faqi or “guardianship of the jurisprudent,” ultimate political authority rests in the hands of the Shi’ite clergy, first among them the Supreme Leader, chosen by an unelected Assembly of Experts. Still, the regime always sought to affirm its legitimacy through holding elections for parliament and the president.
Despite clerical restrictions, the country’s democratic institutions have been capable of surprising and rebuking the conservative mullahs — as occurred in 1997, when reformist Mohammed Khatami won the presidency by a landslide. But if Khatami’s failed reformist tenure highlighted the limits of the power of Iran’s presidency, the Supreme Leader has also traditionally sought consensus within the regime. While Khamenei has clearly favored those, like Ahmadinejad, who most closely reflect his own views, he has tried to protect the cohesion of the Islamic Republic’s system by seeking to balance the influence of competing factions within its political establishment.
The system actually allows the Supreme Leader to present different faces to the world. While he has strongly backed Ahmadinejad, for example, Khamenei also for a time designated one of the president’s key pragmatist critics, Ali Larijani, as the point man in negotiations with the West over Iran’s nuclear program.
The democratic element of Iran’s system has functioned as an important safety valve for clerical rule by creating a managed channel for the release of popular frustrations. But now the Supreme Leader appears to have thrown his weight solidly behind what many are charging is a carefully staged putsch by Ahmadinejad. “The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran’s Islamic revolution,” Columbia University Iran expert and former National Security Council official Gary Sick wrote in a web posting. “All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran’s leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power.”
Not only was a questionable election result likely to prompt street protests and provide ammunition to hawks in the West, it also affirmed a challenge to much of the Islamic Revolution’s established political class. Ahmadinejad branded the entire revolutionary establishment as feckless and corrupt, prompting appeals to Khamenei from former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Assembly of Experts, who was one of Ahmadinejad’s chief targets. But he and others got little sympathy for their complaints that the president’s attacks undermined the legitimacy of the revolution itself. Some tartly pointed out that since Khamenei himself was president from 1981 to 1989, Ahmadinejad’s claim that his is the first Iranian administration that was not corrupt was a slap at the Supreme Leader.
Khamenei’s backing of the disputed election results has surprised many in Iran, precisely because it is directed against a substantial segment of the revolution’s political establishment. Just as Mao Zedong, in China’s Cultural Revolution, unleashed a campaign of terror carried out by poorer young people against what he decried as the more liberal, “bourgeois” elements of the communist party, so does Ahmadinejad claim to be waging a class war, with the backing of the poor and the security forces, against a corrupt political elite brought to power by the revolution. And he clearly has Khamenei’s backing.
Some analysts believe Khamenei is motivated by a desire to prevent Iran from normalizing its relationship with the West, fearing that removing the external “threat” against which it was constructed will fatally undermine the Iranian political system. Ahmadinejad’s critics charged during the campaign that his provocative antics had undermined Iran’s standing in the world, but he certainly functions to restrain any movement toward rapprochement, keeping in place the fear of the “Great Satan” that has been an organizing principle of Iran’s authoritarian clerical regime.
Not that Iran won’t seek agreements with U.S. on areas of conflict that could lead to confrontation. Khamenei may believe that his regime’s best hope of survival is keeping his country on a war-footing against an external enemy, but an actual war would be disastrous for the regime. And ensuring the survival of the regime has been Khamenei’s guiding principle. His response to the election, however, suggests that he’s ready to break the mold of three decades of governance in the Islamic Republic. Whatever comes next, the events of the June 12 presidential election will be remembered as a turning point in Iran’s revolutionary history; a moment when Ayatullah Ali Khamenei rolled the dice.
Reporting by Tony Karon and Alex Altman for Time Magazine. For more news and information, click the link below for Time. Time is one of the nation’s leading magazines.
Please contribute your thoughts below.
Ayatullah Ali Khamenei: Iran’s Supreme Leader – Yahoo! News.
I truly think it is time for the so-called “leaders” of Islam to get their collective heads out of their smelly asses and run the country as the masses want, not necessarily as these sorry individuals want.
Who the hell died and left you in charge?
A single individual who hasn’t a clue what the populace is in need of needs to really take a gun to his own head and give the rest of the world a break.
Remove that silly towel from you head, take a shower and use it to dry yourself.
The only people that have a towel on their heads are women, right after they shower.
You, who wear towels on your heads are just women in disguise.
Oh yeah, Armajihad, or whatever he calls himself is gay. You didn’t know that?
Look closely at those pig eyes of his and you’ll learn a lot.
That’s right: Pig-Eyes Amejehaid (or whatever).
What a stupid clown you guys have.