“Sometimes, I imagine myself dying from an accident. Or maybe a fever. And my heart becomes so full of sadness: that the chance for competing for paradise [i.e., martyrdom] will be taken away from me that way.”
Ajatollah Ali Khamenei – (source)
The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran was martyred on Saturday morning, together with other officials, by an Israeli airstrike on his home in Tehran. May he rest in peace.
bigger – Source: Carlos Latuff
First and foremost they are jurists and judges with a deep philosophical knowledge of the law. The title Ajatollah signifies a high academic ranking of an Shia-Islam scholar. Ajatollahs are examples for those living around them. They are extraordinary people who should be emulated and who’s advices are to be followed.
The system of the Islamic Republic was build with redundancies (archived) to be able to survive external and internal shocks:
For those who led the 1979 revolution, problems with leadership change were not just ideas—they were real warnings from history. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did not eliminate the supreme authority; instead, he made it part of the system. The intense debates of 1979 about how to avoid past patterns of collapse led to new answers in Iran’s constitution: Each major body was created to solve a specific risk exposed by history.
The Guardian Council was formed to guard against political drift and to keep laws in line with Islamic principles. The Assembly of Experts took on the task of selecting and supervising the supreme leader, to prevent a concentration of power without oversight. The Expediency Council was established to resolve institutional deadlock, ensuring the system could continue to function even when high-level disagreements arose. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the intelligence agencies were meant to secure the revolution internally and externally, checking both foreign threats and domestic unrest.
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Iran is frequently portrayed as a political order bound tightly to individuals. Yet the architecture that emerged after 1979 was formed by a different logic, one founded in the revolutionary experience itself. Khomeini captured this hierarchy in a remark often cited within Iran’s political elite: “Preserving the Islamic Republic is more important than preserving any individual, even if that individual were the Imam of the Age”—a reference to Shiism’s 12th Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi.It is still unclear whether the system will always follow this principle. But one should expect a change in leadership in Tehran to be treated less as an ending and more as a chance for the country’s institutions to show they can survive.
I am confident that the Islamic Republic will survive this test. ‘Regime change’ in Tehran, which Trump seems to dream of (archived), is unlikely to happen.
Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz is closed and the war of attrition continues …