Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s great survivor

JUST OVER a week ago it seemed as if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might be part of a breakthrough with America. Talks involving the two countries were approaching decision-hour. The Americans were offering to lift sanctions in exchange for Iran rolling back its nuclear programme. Some spoke of diplomatic relations between the Islamic Republic and its forever foe. The more optimistic predicted a photo-op of their two supreme leaders shaking hands.

Now, though, Mr Khamenei is back in his Manichean comfort zone. Ever since Israel attacked Iran on June 13th, he has been spewing bile about the “Zionist terrorist entity” and its American underwriters. Israeli officials, including the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, have threatened Mr Khamenei’s life. Donald Trump says he is an easy target. “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” wrote the president on social media. But, he added, “Our patience is wearing thin.”

Mr Khamenei has been an underdog from the start. He was born in 1939, one of eight children of a poor religious scholar from the north-east of Iran. He followed in his father’s footsteps and went to study in the city of Qom, the pre-eminent place of Shia scholarship. From the first he reasoned that God needed a helping hand from man to deliver. Alongside the Koran, he listened to music, recited poetry and read novels such as “Les Misérables” and “The Grapes of Wrath”, which depict secular struggles against oppression. He also took an interest in the works of Sayyid Qutb, some of which he translated into Persian.

The first positions he held after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 had little to do with God. He was deputy defence minister and a commissar in the newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s most powerful security force. In 1981 he won a tightly controlled election to become president of the republic. Obedient and uncharismatic, he was favoured by Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution. Mr Khamenei would hold the largely ceremonial post for eight years, winning re-election in 1985.

His opponents consistently underestimated him. After Khomeini’s death, the late cleric’s wily chief adviser, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, shoehorned Mr Khamenei into the post of supreme leader, while Rafsanjani assumed what he anticipated would be an empowered presidency. Mr Khamenei lacked the religious credentials of a supreme jurist—many clerics didn’t even consider him a marja, or source of emulation for lay Shias. He was just a lowly hujjat al-islam, equivalent to a middle-ranking Catholic priest. Only after his succession did he begin assuming the title of grand ayatollah and start issuing fatwas.

Mr Khamenei proved adept at playing Iran’s state institutions off against each other—the presidency against parliament, the army against the IRGC. He thereby turned himself into the final arbiter. And he had an inbuilt advantage over Rafsanjani and his successors as president, many of whom wanted to turn Iran into a more normal Islamic republic. Whereas they had a limit of two terms, he was appointed for life.

He also had the Guardian Council, a quango of clerics and lawyers that vets the candidates in elections. It has increasingly disqualified all but Mr Khamenei’s favourites. Rival ayatollahs and their acolytes have been co-opted with government money and jobs. Meanwhile, the supreme leader’s beyt, or office, has expanded into a vast apparatus with commissars in all government departments, provinces and military units. (It even selects the winners at book fairs and gives names to Iranian-made cars.) A force of over 1m paramilitaries known as the Basij is there to enforce ideological discipline. The once-lowly vicar presides over a mighty theocracy.

His business empire is also something to behold. Mr Khamenei may live frugally, but he controls assets worth tens of billions of dollars. Soon after his succession, Mr Khamenei took over the Shia charities, or bonyads, from the government and turned them into vast conglomerates that hoovered up state contracts. They outbid rivals by paying no taxes and faced scant foreign competition, thanks to American and international sanctions. He also seized the properties that the Shah’s men had abandoned when they fled the revolution. The meek man from Mashhad inherited the earth.

Increasingly, though, Iran’s descent from hybrid-democracy into dictatorship stirred dissent. While Mr Khamenei celebrated Iran’s isolation from the cultural impurities of the West (he has visited America just once, in 1987), most Iranians wanted to connect with the world. Women resented his enforcement of a dress code that required them to wear a veil and black manteaux.

At protests in recent years, participants have chanted not just for Mr Khamenei’s downfall, but for his death. His response has always been the same: beating, shooting, jailing and kangaroo courts. The lesson he took from the fall of the Shah was to never concede. (An attack by dissident revolutionaries in 1981, which paralysed his right arm, only stiffened his resolve.)

The irony is that in his pursuit of power, Mr Khamenei has come to resemble the Shah. He may even harbour dreams of a dynasty. Many insiders have tipped his second son, Mojtaba, to be his successor. The war might scupper any such plans. If Mr Netanyahu doesn’t get him, his own security forces might. Tehran’s rumour mill is rife with talk of a new IRGC council which has taken the reins while Mr Khamenei is cloistered in a bunker, out of contact, for his safe-keeping. But his latest opponents would be wise not to underestimate him. ■