Sayyid ‘Ali Khamene’i

Ali Hosseini Khamenei (; born 19 April 1939) is an Iranian cleric and politician who has served as the second supreme leader of Iran since 1989. He previously served as the third president from 1981 to 1989. Khamenei's tenure as Supreme Leader, spanning over years, makes him the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East and the second-longest-serving Iranian leader of the 20th and 21st centuries, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. A Grand Ayatollah and , he is often associated with leading the Axis of Resistance, a term used to describe a coalition of Iran-aligned groups in the Middle East.

According to his official website, Khamenei was arrested six times before being exiled for three years during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In June 1981, after the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of the shah, he was the target of an attempted assassination that paralysed his right arm. Khamenei was one of Iran's leaders during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, and developed close ties with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which he controls, and whose commanders are elected and dismissed by him. The Revolutionary Guards have been deployed to suppress opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Khamenei served as the third president of Iran from 1981 to 1989, while becoming a close ally of the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. Shortly before his death, Khomeini had a disagreement with his deputy – Hussein Ali Montazeri – and there was quandary for choosing a successor when Khomeini died. The Assembly of Experts elected Khamenei as the next supreme leader on 4 June 1989, at age 50. According to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei was the man Khomeini had endorsed as his successor. Khamenei has been head of the servants of Astan Quds Razavi since 14 April 1979.

As supreme leader, Khamenei is the most powerful political authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran.Ganji, Akbar, "The Latter-Day Sultan: Power and Politics in Iran", ''Foreign Affairs'', November December 2008 He is the head of state of Iran, the commander-in-chief of its armed forces, and can issue decrees and make the final decisions on the main policies of the government in economy, the environment, foreign policy, and national planning in Iran. As supreme leader, Khamenei has either direct or indirect control over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, as well as the military and media. All candidates for the Assembly of Experts, the presidency and the Majlis (Parliament) are vetted by the Guardian Council, whose members are selected directly or indirectly by the Supreme Leader of Iran. There have also been instances when the Guardian Council reversed its ban on particular people after being ordered to do so by Khamenei.

There have been major protests during Khamenei's reign, including the 1994 Qazvin protests, the 1999 student protests, the 2009 presidential election protests, the 2011–2012 protests, the 2017–2018 protests, the 2018–2019 general strikes and protests, the 2019–2020 protests, the 2021–2022 protests, and the Mahsa Amini protests. Journalists, bloggers, and others have been imprisoned in Iran for insulting Khamenei, often in conjunction with blasphemy charges. Their sentences have included lashing and jail time; some have died in custody. Regarding the nuclear program of Iran, Khamenei issued a fatwa in 2003 forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of all kinds of weapons of mass destruction.

Early life and education

Born to Javad Khamenei, an Alim and Mujtahid born in Najaf, Iraq, and Khadijeh Mirdamadi (daughter of Hashem Mirdamadi) in Mashhad, Khamenei is the second of eight children. Two of his brothers are also clerics; his younger brother, Hadi Khamenei, is a newspaper editor and cleric. His elder sister Fatemeh Hosseini Khamenei died in 2015, aged 89. His father was an ethnic Azerbaijani from Khamaneh, while his mother was an ethnic Persian from Yazd. Some of his ancestors are from Tafresh in today's Markazi Province and migrated from their original home in Tafresh to Khamaneh near Tabriz.

Khamenei's great ancestor was Sayyid Hossein Tafreshi, a descendant of the Aftasi Sayyids, whose lineage supposedly reached to Sultan ul-Ulama Ahmad, known as Sultan Sayyid, a grandchild of fourth Shia Imam, the Ali al-Sajjad.

Education

Khamenei's education began at the age of four, by learning the Quran at Maktab; he spent his basic and advanced levels of seminary studies at the hawza of Mashhad, under mentors such as Sheikh Hashem Qazvini and Ayatollah Milani. Then, he went to Najaf in 1957, but soon returned to Mashhad due to his father's unwillingness to let him stay there. In 1958, he settled in Qom where he attended the classes of Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi and Ruhollah Khomeini. Like many other politically active clerics at the time, Khamenei was far more involved with politics than religious scholarship.

Political life and presidency

Khamenei was a key figure in the Iranian Revolution in Iran and a close confidant of Ruhollah Khomeini. Since the founding of the Islamic Republic, Khamenei has held many government posts. Muhammad Sahimi claims that his political career began after the Iranian Revolution, when the former President of Iran, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then a confidant of Khomeini, brought Khamenei into Khomeini's inner circle. Later on, Hassan Rouhani, then a member of Parliament, arranged for Khamenei to get his first major post in the provisional revolutionary government as deputy defense minister.

Khomeini appointed Khamenei to the post of Tehran's Friday prayers Imam in 1980, after the resignation of Hussein-Ali Montazeri from the post. He was briefly the vice Minister of National Defence from late July to 6 November 1979 and as a supervisor of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. He also went to the battlefield as a representative of the parliament's defense commission.

Assassination attempt

Khamenei narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by the Mujahedin-e Khalq when a bomb, concealed in a tape recorder, exploded beside him. On 27 June 1981, while Khamenei had returned from the frontline, he went to the Aboozar Mosque according to his Saturday's schedule. After the first prayer, he lectured to worshippers who had written their questions on paper. Meanwhile, a young man who pressed a button put a tape recorder accompanied by papers on the desk in front of Khamenei. After a minute the recorder began whistling, then suddenly exploded. "A gift of Furqan Group to the Islamic Republic" was written on the inner wall of the tape recorder. Khamenei's treatment took several months and his arm, vocal cords and lungs were seriously injured. He was permanently injured, losing the use of his right arm.

As president

In 1981, after the assassination of Mohammad-Ali Rajai, Khamenei was elected President of Iran by a landslide vote (97%) in the October 1981 Iranian presidential election in which only four candidates were approved by the Council of Guardians. Khamenei became the first cleric to be in the office. Ruhollah Khomeini had originally wanted to keep clerics out of the presidency but later changed his views. Khamenei was reelected in 1985 Iranian presidential election where only three candidates were approved by the Council of Guardians, receiving 87% of the votes. The only Iranian presidential election with fewer candidates approved by the Council of Guardians was the 1989 Iranian presidential election, where only two candidates were approved by the Council of Guardians to run, and Rafsanjani easily won 96% of the votes.

In his presidential inaugural address, Khamenei vowed to eliminate "deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists". According to the Iran Chamber, vigorous opposition to the government, including nonviolent and violent protest, assassinations, guerrilla activity and insurrections, was answered by state repression and terror in the early 1980s, both before and during Khamenei's presidency. Thousands of rank-and-file members of insurgent groups were killed, often by revolutionary courts. By 1982, the government announced that the courts would be reined in, although various political groups continued to be repressed by the government in the first half of the 1980s.

During Iran–Iraq war

Khamenei was one of Iran's leaders during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s and developed close ties with the now-powerful Revolutionary Guards. As president, he had a reputation for being deeply interested in the military, budget and administrative details. After the Iraqi Army was expelled from Iran in 1982, Khamenei became one of the main opponents of his own decision to counter-invade into Iraq, an opinion Khamenei shared with Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, with whom he would later conflict during the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests.

After the war

In its 10 April 1997 ruling regarding the Mykonos restaurant assassinations, the German court issued an international arrest warrant for Iranian intelligence minister Ali Fallahian after declaring that the assassination had been ordered by him with knowledge of Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Iranian officials, however, have categorically denied their involvement. The then-Iranian Parliament speaker Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri dismissed the ruling as political, untrue and unsubstantiated. The ruling led to a diplomatic crisis between the governments of Iran and several European countries, which lasted until November 1997. The accused assassins, Darabi and Rhayel, were finally released from prison on 10 December 2007 and deported back to their home countries.

Supreme Leader

Election as Supreme Leader

In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini dismissed Ayatollah Montazeri as his political successor, giving the position to Khamenei instead. Because Khamenei was neither a marja' or ayatollah, the Assembly of Experts had to modify the constitution to award him the position of Iran's new Supreme Leader (a decision opposed by several grand ayatollahs). Khamenei officially succeeded Ruhollah Khomeini after Khomeini's death, being elected as the new Supreme Leader by the Assembly of Experts on 4 June 1989.

Leadership Council proposal

Initially, some members of the Assembly of Experts proposed the idea of a leadership council. Various lists were proposed and Khamenei was named in all of them. For instance, a council of three members, Ali Meshkini, Abdul-Karim Mousavi Ardebili and Khamenei, was proposed to lead Iran. According to Rafsanjani, he and Khamenei were against the proposal, while Ayatollah and Ayatollah Ebrahim Amini were in favor of it. Supporters of the council proposal believed that having a council would produce a higher degree of unity in society and more positive characteristics would be found in a council. In contrast, the opposers believed that an individual leader was more efficient according to past experiences in the case of the Judiciary Council.

Ebrahim Amini listed the summary of the reasons presented by the two sides. According to him, the opposers rejected the proposal because: I) Evidence for Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist was true only for the guardianship of an individual and it was not clear who held the guardianship when there was a council. The guardianship of a council was not rooted in Hadiths and Islamic jurisprudence. II) Previous council-type organizations, such as the broadcasting council and supreme judicial council, were not successful in practice and the leadership council would not do well for similar reasons. III) People were accustomed to the leadership of an individual and a council of leaders was something unfamiliar to them. IV) An individual leader could act more decisively when dealing with critical and essential decisions and solving problems and crisis.

On the other hand, the supporters of the proposal believed that: I) At the time, there were no Faqīh equal to Khomeini or even two or three levels lower than him so that he could fulfill the expectation of people. II) In the case of a council of leaders, the members could compensate each other if any of them had some shortage in a field.

Finally, 45 members voted against the leadership council proposal while more than 20 people were in favor of it and the proposal was rejected. After the assembly rejected the idea of a Leadership Council, Khamenei was elected Leader by 60 of the 74 members present with Grand Ayatollah Mohammad-Reza Golpaygani