Iran’s Supreme Leader was killed on February 28th, aged 86
Photograph: Polaris/Eyevine
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A cross the decades, Ali Khamenei built up countless reasons for his hatred of the West. They began with a fiery speech he heard at 13, when at school, inveighing against the monarchy that was backed by America and its allies. As a young man he was jailed six times, beaten and tortured by the Shah’s secret police. When the Shah fell in 1979, and the hotheads in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s new Islamic Republic took American diplomats hostage, it was plain that America would seek to undermine Iran by any means. In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 America even supported Iraq, ruled by a tyrant, rather than Iran. A decade later, when Ali Khamenei became Supreme Leader himself, attitudes had hardened on both sides. Increasingly, over the next 30 years, he knew he was personally in the Great Satan’s sights.
This did not daunt him. Martyrdom would be sweet; in many ways, he had already courted it. Like Khomeini, his long-term mentor and friend, he had divine right on his side. America led a phalanx of countries that were morally corrupt; but Islam made Iran strong, pure and spiritually protected. It disgusted him to have to deal or negotiate with the West, even through officials. He came to disdain foreign investment, in case it increased “Westoxification” in Iran; during the pandemic he refused to import Western vaccines, because they might bring the virus in.
Only “heroic flexibility” induced him to agree to the nuclear deal with America in 2015. Then, predictably, Donald Trump tore it up and tried, with Israel (the Little Satan) to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities into oblivion. Why trust such people? Why negotiate, when America’s sole purpose was to ensure that Iran had no nuclear power at all? No free nation would behave that way. Besides, when Mr Trump’s body was ashes, eaten by worms and ants, the robust tree of the Islamic Republic would still be standing.
His position as Supreme Leader seemed unassailable, but it had never been his ambition. He was a literary boy, and the books he most enjoyed—“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, “The Grapes of Wrath” and, especially, Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables”—were about the struggles of the poor. Growing up as he did, with many siblings in a single room and a damp basement, sometimes subsisting on bread and raisins, he knew that story. He enjoyed music, too, and his mother quoted the poet Hafiz to him. But he was in Mashhad, a sacred city; his father was a religious scholar; so from four years old he was immersed in Islamic studies, eventually in Qom.
They went slowly. By the 1980s he was still a hujjat al-islam, equivalent to a middle-ranking Christian priest. As he was appointed to higher and higher posts—first, by Khomeini, to the presidency, then by Khomeini’s allies to the ultimate position—he did not feel it was his proper place. He, after all, had been the mild cleric sent to wish the American hostages Happy Christmas. But when he was made an ayatollah almost at once, and the constitution amended to overlook his lack of learning, he settled into the role as if born to it. It was as a supreme jurist, wearing the black cap of a direct descendant of Muhammad, that he gazed benignly from billboards and posters across the country. And it was as a great teacher that he preached and wrote books on forgiveness, patience and “101 tips for a happy marriage”, telling Iranians how to live. In short he was everywhere, ruling now by divine authority. His tongue could channel God.
Also, though many had underrated him, he knew how to build up worldly power. He proved adept at playing Iran’s state institutions off against each other—the presidency against parliament and the army against the regime’s most powerful security force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose activities he encouraged. This made him the final arbiter. Besides, whereas Iran’s often-more-moderate presidents had a limit of two consecutive terms, he was appointed for life.
Beneath him, too, he had the Guardian Council, a quango of clerics and lawyers that vetted electoral candidates and, increasingly, disqualified or drove out all but his favourites. Rival ayatollahs and their acolytes were co-opted with government money and jobs. Meanwhile his office vastly expanded, with commissars in all government departments, provinces and military units. A force of over 1m paramilitaries enforced ideological discipline at home. Meanwhile an “axis of resistance”—Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen—carried it abroad.
His business empire was also extraordinary. He might live frugally, receiving visitors in a bare room with one sofa and a few wooden chairs, but he controlled assets worth tens of billions of dollars. Soon after his succession he took over the Shia charities from the government and turned them into vast conglomerates that hoovered up state contracts. He also seized the properties the Shah’s men had abandoned when they fled from the Islamic revolution. The humble cleric from Mashhad had inherited the Earth.
Yet many of his subjects grew to loathe and rise against him. Their troubles were economic, obviously the result of American sanctions, though they added those familiar, tiresome Western tropes of freedom, human rights, dress codes for women. Clearly, foreign enemies had fomented this. So he responded by beating, jailing and shooting, eventually ordering the killing of thousands. An attack by dissident revolutionaries in 1981, which paralysed his right arm, had taught him never to concede. As he said then, he did not need his arm, as long as his brain and tongue worked.
He hoped to leave a legacy. This was not necessarily a dynasty, though he had four sons, all of them clerics. He was thinking more of his “Second Step” of the Islamic revolution, more pious and more energetic. Evidently, his own time was limited. He would be bundled away for safety if or when Iran’s enemies struck. How much more honourable, more deserving of the paradise to come, to drink the pure draught of a martyr’s end. ■