PROFILE: AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEIHis public image is that of benevolent head of the Islamic Republic, but Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's post-election partisan stance has prompted an unprecedented challenge to his legitimacy
THE FACE of the man who holds the fate of Iran's 30-year experiment in Islamic revolution in his hands is ubiquitous in the country's cities and towns. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's bespectacled visage, framed with an untrimmed white beard and black turban signifying that the wearer is a seyyed, or descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, has been rendered into thousands of gigantic murals, billboards and roadside banners. Pictures of Khamenei, most often hung alongside those of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preceded him as supreme leader, adorn government offices, shops, airport lounges, and even living room walls throughout Iran. In some portraits Khamenei smiles benevolently, in others he gazes pensively into the distance. The intention, it seems, is to present the supreme leader as a fatherly benefactor, the patriarch of a system Khamenei often describes as something akin to a family.
Three weeks after Iran's disputed presidential election, as shockwaves continue to pass through the Iranian body politic, Khamenei's "family" looks more dangerously dysfunctional by the day. The controversy prompted by allegations that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's return to power was manipulated by the regime shows little sign of abating. Khamenei's "family" stands in disarray, it fissures laid bare like never before, as Iran's establishment takes sides between Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Mousavi, a former prime minister who claims the election was stolen from him.
In the midst of this upheaval, the gravest faced by the Islamic Republic since its inception following the 1979 revolution, Khamenei has resolutely cast off any remaining pretence of the supreme leader as impartial arbiter charged with balancing factional disputes, as tradition holds. He rushed to declare Ahmadinejad's contested re-election a "divine victory" and then struck an uncompromising stance on the protests that followed, unleashing vast numbers of riot police and militia to snuff out demonstrations he deemed illegal. He has constantly reiterated that his opinion of the election and its result is final.
This emphatic siding with Ahmadinejad, and insistence that he will brook no dissent, has prompted an unprecedented challenge to Khamenei's legitimacy as supreme leader, one that many believe threatens to sunder the very fabric of revolutionary Iran. When protesters yelled "Death to the Dictator" two weeks ago, it was Khamenei they had in mind. In a country where criticism of the supreme leader has always been a great taboo - and indeed a crime - this is just one of several signs that Khamenei's credibility has been badly frayed. Rumours abound of behind-the-scenes machinations to unseat him - something that can only be done by the 86-member clerical body known as the Assembly of Experts - or dilute his powers as supreme leader.
The events of the past three weeks have shone a harsh spotlight on the man who had up to now cultivated an image of himself as enigmatic leader at the apex of Iran's labyrinthine political infrastructure. A man who, while preferring to stay largely in the background, did all he could to ensure the levers of real power remained firmly in his hands.
"There is perhaps no leader in the world more important to current world affairs but less known and understood than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei," writes Karim Sadjadpour in Reading Khamenei, a study published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Neither a dictator nor a democrat - but with traits of both - Khamenei is the single most important individual in a highly factionalized, autocratic regime."
KHAMENEI WAS BORN in 1939 in Mashhad, a city in northeastern Iran that is home to one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines. His father was a religious scholar and, interestingly, a cousin of Mousavi's father. In a biography posted on his website, Khamenei recalls a reclusive and ascetic father, and a home life with few comforts.
As a young man, Khamenei studied in the seminaries of his hometown and later moved to Qom, Iran's august centre of Shia learning.
There, he encountered Ayatollah Khomeini, the radical cleric who would later help spark the Iranian revolution. The young scholar studied at Khomeini's feet and became a devoted propagator of his religious and political ideas. As a result, Khamenei was jailed six times under the Shah, and endured years of torture at the hands of his secret police.
After the revolution, Khamenei moved effortlessly within his mentor's inner circle, acting first as defence minister and then, from 1981, as a two-term president. The same year he escaped death after a bomb hidden in a tape recorder exploded as he was leading Friday prayers in a Tehran mosque. He has been unable to use his right arm and hand since.
Throughout the 1980s, Khamenei held the weaker position of president while Mousavi served as prime minister, a post which was later abolished. No love was lost between the two even then, and they repeatedly clashed on political and economic issues.
When Khomeini died in 1989, the question of who would succeed him was a vexed one. The father of the Islamic Republic had sidelined his designated heir, Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, after the cleric dared to publicly criticise the excesses of the regime.
Khamenei was in many ways an unlikely choice. He was not even an ayatollah, instead he held a lesser clerical rank - that of hojat al-Islam, meaning authority on Islam - and therefore lacked credibility as a religious scholar. He was only hastily elevated to ayatollah after his nomination for the position of supreme leader. In another example of how the recent crisis features actors whose history together is a long and tangled one, it is believed that Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who later became president and now supports Mousavi, played a central role in persuading the clerical hierarchy to endorse Khamenei as supreme leader. Some suspect Khamenei, a mid-level cleric without a firm political base, was chosen partly because he was not considered a threat to other powerful figures.
Perhaps then it was to compensate for his lack of religious authority that Khamenei, once installed as supreme leader, went on to assiduously court Iran's security apparatus, forging alliances and shoring up support among the ideologically-driven commanders of the Revolutionary Guard and its auxiliary, the volunteer Basij militia.
As supreme leader, Khamenei wields power through velayat-e faqih - meaning rule by Islamic jurist - a concept developed by Khomeini that gives control to the clerics. The presidency, parliament, judiciary, military, the Revolutionary Guard, police and intelligence services all ultimately answer to him.
Analysts say Iran's security establishment has expanded its powers, with Khamenei's blessing, in recent years at the expense of the clerics, and the supreme leader's manoeuvrings have made the workings of government even more opaque. But Khamenei knows there are several who question - albeit quietly - his decisions, and some who go further and question the very position of supreme leader. The fractures exposed by last month's crisis, with several clerics and political figures refusing to toe the official line on the disputed vote, are not new. Even Khamenei's younger brother Hadi, a cleric and former parliamentarian, has called for the supreme leader's powers to be curtailed.
"The most important thing we're looking for today in Iran is the rule of law," Hadi Khamenei said in 1999. "And that means no one, whatever his position, is above it. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there are still people at the top who don't accept that basic right."
Khamenei's son, Mojtaba, is typical of the kind of reactionary hardliner that has grown in strength and number within Iran's multiple centres of power during his father's rule. Often described as Khamenei's gatekeeper, Mojtaba is rumoured to nurture leadership ambitions of his own, and he is believed to have helped orchestrate the brutal crackdown on post-election demonstrations last month.
Mojtaba is one of Khamenei's six children. According to an interview Khamenei's wife gave to a Muslim publication in the early 1990s, the supreme leader had encouraged his daughters to become physicians. The family lived simply, she said, and disdained luxury.
Khamenei himself is reputed to be a voracious reader - his library reportedly contains 10,000 volumes - and a lover of art and music. He is said to have once played the tar, a traditional Iranian stringed instrument.
The supreme leader has personally developed and set policy for the country's nuclear programme, and has steadfastly refused to entertain the notion that Iran would ever give up uranium enrichment, even in the face of UN sanctions. This unbending stance is also reflected in the regime's position on a range of other issues at home and abroad.
As the Carnegie study concluded last year, Khamenei has "a remarkably consistent and coherent - though highly cynical and conspiratorial - world view", that hinges on opposition to US hegemony as well as a loathing of Israel.
As the Islamic Republic comes to terms with a crisis that has rocked its very foundations, the decisions Khamenei makes over the coming months will be key. Some believe it may already be too late to paper over the cracks that have emerged since the June 12th election.
As supreme leader, Khamenei symbolises the two intrinsic elements that bind the Islamic Republic's official identity: revolution and religion. If the supreme leader's credibility unspools even further, whither Iran?
CV AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI
Who is he?
Iran's supreme leader. As Ayatollah Khomeini's successor, Khamenei's position gives him the final word in the Islamic Republic
Why is he in the news?
Three weeks after a disputed presidential election that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power amid allegations the vote was rigged, Khamenei has managed to crush widespread protest. But can he steer Iran out of the political crisis that remains? And will his unabashed siding with Ahmadinejad cost him legitimacy?
Most likely to say:
It is divinely ordained
Least likely to say:
Can you put me through to the Oval Office?
" Khamenei himself is reputed to be a voracious reader - his library reportedly contains 10,000 volumes