Despite his public show of reticence, Khamenei and political leaders such as Rafsanjani, who backed his ascension, immediately undertook to buttress Khamenei’s public image and sell him to the skeptical population and senior clerical elites once elected. Although his religious scholarship was lacking, Khamenei possessed excellent skills as a micromanager and an individual who understood the levers of power in the complex Iranian political system.

Ayatollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989, leaving a leadership void at the top of the Islamic Republic. The amendments to the constitution, which diluted the qualifications for the supreme leadership, had not yet been ratified, but the situation's urgency required decisive action. The Assembly of Experts convened on June 4 to designate Khomeini’s successor.

From the moment he returned to Tehran on February 1, 1979, Khomeini’s frail appearance prompted speculation about his health, placing the question of succession into focus from the outset of the Islamic Revolution. In the spring of 1980, he suffered a minor heart attack, further heightening the urgency of tackling the issue of succession.

Ayatollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989. Khomeini’s health had been an issue since he assumed the Supreme Leadership and became more concerned after he suffered a heart attack in 1986. Throughout his final years, finding a suitable successor who could carry on his radicalism legacy and ensure the revolutionary regime's continued survival was one of his primary preoccupations. Khomeini’s unique charisma and religious stature enabled him to amass nearly absolute power and to prevent the bitter ideological factionalism among the clergy from derailing the ship of state.

As the Khomeinists maneuvered to increasingly encroach upon all facets of state administration and consolidate power, Ali Khamenei’s fervent loyalty to Khomeini and close relationship with Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Khomeini’s closest acolyte, began paying dividends.

Khomeinist Consolidation of Power

The unity, discipline, and spirit of cooperation that Iran’s competing factions exhibited in toppling the monarchy broke down almost immediately after Shapour Bakhtiar’s short-lived government fell. The hopes and aspirations of the Iranian population for more inclusive, less repressive governance, democracy, and economic justice never came to fruition.

Sayyed Ali Khamenei had a deeply religious upbringing and modest economic background before ascending to the highest levels of religious and political power in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was born on July 16, 1939, in the northeastern Iranian holy city of Mashhad, which is the country’s second most populous city and home to the Imam Reza Shrine, a renowned site visited by millions of religious pilgrims each year. Khamenei was the second son among eight children born to a clerical father of Azeri descent.

This resource aims to contextualize Ayatollah Khamenei’s role in Iran’s emergence as a major source of instability in the Middle East. Motivated by the need for political survival, Khamenei has resisted calls for domestic reform and international cooperation. Despite failing to deliver promised benefits to the citizens of Iran, he has managed to maintain his grip on power in the face of growing unrest, largely by enhancing the role of the IRGC.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, only two individuals have held the role of Supreme Leader of Iran. The first was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, who served from the beginning of the Islamic Republic in April 1979 until his death on June 3, 1989. His successor, Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, was a member of Khomeini’s inner circle who took over as Supreme Leader the following day and has held the role since. Khamenei, a lover of poetry and literature, became a Shi’a cleric at the age of 11.

The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran is based on the concept of velayat-e faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), which grants a learned Islamic jurist (faqih) – a cleric tasked with interpretation of sharia (divine Islamic law) – with the role of Supreme Leader. The Supreme Leader of Iran holds final religious and political authority over all affairs of the state, ruling essentially by divine right.