A theory currently making the rounds is that the war has made the Islamic Republic “more hardline” — with proponents pointing to the consolidation of power by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and the succession of Mojtaba Khamenei. All this, it is argued, might have been avoided had the US and Israel not launched their war. Khamenei Sr may have died peacefully in his bed, and the Islamic Republic might have made a liberal turn with the appointment of a moderate leader. Seasoned observers of Iran would recognise that the word “might” is doing some heavy lifting, while those Iranians at the sharp end of last January’s savagery would fairly wonder just how much more hardline the regime was planning to be.
The notion that the IRGC is making a bid for power that had long evaded it is, frankly, risible. It is no doubt taking advantage of the state of emergency to reinforce its position, but then all militaries, even in non-authoritarian states, enjoy a position of pre-eminence in time of war. There may be an argument that it will seek to prolong the war because its leaders are more fearful of the peace that will follow; but it is altogether different to suggest that the IRGC’s seizure of power has been predicated on the conflict itself. The rise of the Revolutionary Guards has long been in gestation, and their present dominance as a political-military conglomerate is tied closely to the related rise of Mojtaba Khamenei.
Mojtaba first emerged into the political limelight in 2005, when he was accused by one of the contenders in that year’s presidential elections, Mehdi Karrubi, of having interfered to ensure the success of his protegé, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ever since, his political activities have been a matter of intense controversy in the Islamic Republic, not least because of his character and the hereditary trajectory his emergence implied. The 2005 presidential election was intended to be the crowning moment of the rise of the hardline “principle-ists” — coined from the Persian translation for “fundamentalist” — and the eclipse of the reformists who had ostensibly dominated the political scene since the election of Mohammad Khatami in a shock landslide victory in 1997. So horrified had hardliners been at this reformist turn that they determined to eliminate it as a political force.
Under the ideological mentorship of the uncompromising authoritarian, Ayatollah Misbah-Yazdi, himself also a mentor to Mojtaba, the hardliners developed a framework for the seizing of power, centred on the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Around him, they built a cult of personality. For Misbah-Yazdi, the Supreme Leader was far more than a constitutional position — it was a sacred calling, a pillar of belief against which one’s identification as a true Muslim could be defined. Indeed, as Misbah-Yazdi contentiously argued, to deny the principle of the Guardianship of the Jurist (velayat-e faqih) — in other words, to deny the Supreme Leader — was to deny one of the principal pillars of Islam. Adherence to the constitution of the Islamic Republic became a sacred duty, and to challenge it was heresy.
“The rise of the Revolutionary Guards has long been in gestation.”
To reinforce this conviction, Khamenei was increasingly identified as the “Ali of the Age”, in emulation of the Imam Ali, whose hereditary successors were considered to be the rightful leaders of the Islamic community, and whose followers became known as Shia. This was an extraordinary claim to make, and few outside the “elect” either understood or appreciated its significance. It was first publicly promoted on Iranian television in the early 2000s, when one Ali Larijani was in charge of state broadcasting. More suspicious types were wary of this development, and its implication of hereditary succession, but when Karrubi raised the red flag in 2005, he was dismissed as a sore loser.
Misbah-Yazdi’s project incorporated the IRGC, which became the armed wing of the movement. Having moved away from the “brotherhood in arms” of the Iran-Iraq War, it had through the Nineties reshaped itself as an ideological army with growing business interests, though these were as yet modest. When, in 1999, it challenged the then-reformist president to suppress student discontent “or else”, it found itself at the sharp end of a rebuke. Were the Revolutionary Guards not aware, retorted Khatami, that the father of the revolution himself, Ayatollah Khomeini, had told the armed forces to stay out of politics? The IRGC’s response, albeit at this stage tempered by realities, was that as a Revolutionary Guard, it existed to protect the revolution: from enemies both without and within.
With this ideological and material framework established, the plan was now to overturn the popularity of the reformists with a populist of their own. The IRGC found its man in Ahmadinejad, a hitherto-unknown lecturer at the Basij militia’s university. Ahmadinejad was generally dismissed as an obsessive who was preoccupied in his relationship with the “Hidden Imam”, the twelfth of the hereditary Shia imams who had disappeared, or gone into “occultation”, sometime in the 9th century. Even revolutionary diehards found him tiresome. But Ahmadinejad did have the populist touch and found favour with the Basij, which could provide the infrastructure for his forthcoming campaigns.
In the 2003 “local elections”, an extremely low turnout ensured Ahmadinejad’s emergence as the mayor of Tehran, providing him with a platform for his populism. Parts of the Western media were suitably impressed by the dynamic “Dr” Ahmadinejad, even as Iranians mocked his risible PhD thesis on traffic management. Ahmadinejad’s religious susceptibilities, and his folksy superstitions, made him the ideal candidate for the project to come, though his pretensions were eventually to sour his relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei. Initially, however, Khamenei had nothing but praise, and his son was dispatched to arrange Ahmadinejad’s ensuing electoral victories. In 2004, the parliamentary elections were rigged to ensure a principle-ist victory; in 2005, with Mojtaba’s management of the Basij, Ahmadinejad stormed from being a nobody to the prime contender in a matter of weeks.
Karrubi, who everyone expected to be in the run-off, was not impressed by this turn of events, and made his feelings felt. At this stage, some reformists warned about the development of an “Islamic monarchy”, pointing to the new sense of deference that was accorded to Khamenei, notably including hand-kissing. But few ventured further, or else considered hereditary succession a remote possibility. Such things, it was argued, went against the “principles” of the revolution. It did not, however, go against tradition, be it Persian or Shia, nor did it account for the practicalities of retaining power in an Islamic Republic that was inexorably shedding its republican skin.
If there were any doubts as to the direction of travel, these were laid to rest in the “Green Movement” protests of 2009, the suppression of which Mojtaba was widely involved in. It was in this period of heightened crisis that Misbah-Yazdi made the extraordinary claim that, since Ayatollah Khamenei was the replacement of the Hidden Imam, obedience to him — and by extension, to the president he approved — equated to obedience to God. This claim was so shocking, not least to many traditional clerics, that it was suppressed in the press. But the cult was clearly now well established; opponents were decried as heretics and therefore beyond the law; and concerns over a planned dynastic succession had people voicing concerns about an “Umayyad” succession — a reference to the first Caliphal dynasty which Shias in particular condemn as the establishment of an Arab kingdom.
With the Green Movement crushed, it should have been apparent that the theoretical and practical justifications for dynastic succession were being put firmly in place. (When I’ve made this point from time to time since 2009, it was dismissed as incompatible with the “republican” principles of the revolution, with one analyst memorably telling me they would “eat their hat” if it ever happened. I hope it’s tasty).
A renewed tolerance of the idea of “monarchy” gathered pace in this period. Ahmadinejad systematically stripped the republican institutions of any real power, transferring them to the revolutionary organs of power: the Supreme Leadership and the IRGC. The institutional emasculation that took place was widely commented on. Even conservatives noted that parliament had been stripped of any effective power, with a succession of rigged elections stuffing it with hardline apparatchiks who competed for the favour of the Supreme Leader. The Guardian Council, whose membership was already partly nominated by the Supreme Leader, became another cypher, while the Assembly of Experts, which ostensibly existed to hold the Supreme Leader to account, became a talking shop of aging clerics — who increasingly pointed out that their role was not to select the new Leader, but merely to recognise whomsoever God had chosen.
This, in short, was government by personality, not institutions, and it all revolved around the personality of Ali Khamenei, the Ali of the Age, and the replacement — not representative — of the Hidden Imam. It is testament to the boldness of this idea that many resisted it as antithetical to the spirit of the Islamic Republic. But the “Islamic Republic” was itself an innovation, not only in its republican turn but in its application of Khomeini’s notion of the Guardianship of the Jurist. For many principle-ists, indeed, the Islamic Republic was merely a transitory affair towards the much purer Islamic state shorn of any democratic heresies.
Meanwhile, Mojtaba was quietly rising up the ranks of the clerical hierarchy, being promoted as an “ayatollah” in his forties, a remarkably young age for such an achievement. Later, ostensibly in order to broaden his appeal, some suggested that he would be Iran’s MBS. Those who were familiar with him indicated that he was more ruthless than his father, but without the oratorical skills. None of this was heavily publicised, but those on the inside were aware, and Khamenei always demurred when the question of the succession came up. During Rouhani’s presidency, and the focus on the nuclear negotiations, such issues took a back seat. But following Ibrahim Raisi’s “election” to the presidency in 2021, the question emerged again, in large part because some wondered whether Raisi himself might be being groomed to take the elder Khamenei’s role.
Given his background and character, this was always unlikely, and the reality was that Raisi’s engineered rise to the presidency was done to facilitate Mojtaba’s eventual succession as Supreme Leader. Such was speculation that the elder Khamenei was eventually forced to deny such a possibility, albeit indirectly through an intermediary. He never publicly spoke about it himself, thereby retaining a measure of plausible deniability. But no one basides the most naive could imagine that this, in the best traditions of Iranian political culture, was anything but an exercise in dissimulation, a non-denial denial.
In other words, the succession of Mojtaba Khamenei and the restoration of the hereditary principle has long been in train. His rise has been tied closely with that of the IRGC, and has been part of a project to emasculate the republic and replace it with an Islamic autocracy defined by charismatic leadership. The resilience of the system is not “institutional” — this is not a constitutional system in any meaningful sense of the word; no one loses sleep over the semantics of the constitution — but reflective of personal networks whose allegiance is not to the state but to the Supreme Leader as the manifestation of the revolution which he himself defines.
While it was not illogical to target Ayatollah Khamenei in the first strike of the war, it was far from risk-free. His death no doubt demoralised the faithful, but it probably angered and energised them too. They would have been acutely aware that they had nothing to lose and everything to lose. They also likely know that, following the massacre in January, they can expect as much mercy from the Iranian population as they themselves have shown. It has proved a clarifying moment in a manner they may not have immediately understood; they are bound together as much by their fear of the wider public as their devotion to the Supreme Leader.
In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that the IRGC moved swiftly to have Mojtaba declared his father’s heir. Khamenei, they declared, had returned rejuvenated, the charismatic succession was secure, and the allegiance of the faithful could be counted on. Mojtaba has nonetheless remained very much hidden, his mystique intact, his charisma sustained and managed. His IRGC handlers may want to keep it that way. But, sooner or later, he will have to reveal himself — and then his charismatic authority will truly be put to the test.
