Today's Edition
By Imam Mohammad Tawhidi*
When Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his lectures in Najaf in 1970, he made a claim that shocked even sympathetic Shia scholars: that the senior Islamic jurist must not merely guide the faithful but rule them — wielding the same governmental authority once held by the Prophet and the Imams.
This was not a refinement of tradition. It was a break with it. More than five decades later, the experiment that break produced is yielding its verdict, and it is damning.
To understand how radical Khomeini's doctrine was, one must appreciate what came before it. Shia jurisprudence had long accepted that qualified scholars could exercise limited guardianship — over orphans, over the incapacitated, over narrow matters of religious practice.
The 19th-century jurist Mohammad Mahdee Naraqi pushed the boundaries further, arguing that the jurist's authority extended into certain public affairs. But even Naraqi stopped well short of claiming that clerics should hold supreme political power.
The dominant tradition, carried into the 20th century by towering figures like Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi and later Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, counseled the opposite: direct clerical rule would corrupt the clergy and the state alike.
Governance, they insisted, required popular consent — not divine delegation through a jurist's turban.
Khomeini rejected all of this. In his formulation, leaving government to secular rulers was not a pragmatic choice but a theological betrayal. The faqih was the state's supreme authority, and his rulings overrode every other institution — including, as Khomeini later clarified, Islamic law itself when "the interests of the Islamic order" demanded it. This extraordinary claim was enshrined in the 1979 Constitution, making Iran the only state in history governed by this principle.
The question was always whether the principle could survive contact with the realities of governing 80 million people. The answer, written across four decades of Iranian life, is that it could not.
Consider the three pillars on which Wilayatul Faqih staked its legitimacy. First, divine mandate: the Supreme Leader governs as the Hidden Imam's deputy, with God's sanction. Second, meritocracy: the most qualified scholar is selected through a rigorous clerical process. Third, justice: Islamic governance delivers welfare and dignity to the faithful.
Each pillar has crumbled. The divine mandate rings hollow when senior clerics and IRGC commanders amass fortunes while ordinary Iranians endure currency collapse, chronic inflation, and water scarcity severe enough to empty villages. The meritocratic claim collapsed when Ali Khamenei — a mid-ranking Hojatoleslam, not a Grand Ayatollah — assumed the Supreme Leadership in 1989, requiring an embarrassing post-hoc promotion that fooled no serious scholar.
His authority rested not on learning but on institutional control, enforced through the sprawling parallel bureaucracy of the Beyt-e Rahbari and the ever-expanding reach of the Revolutionary Guards. The justice claim needs no refutation beyond the unemployment figures that have left an entire generation economically stranded and politically furious.
The Iranian people have rendered their own judgment, repeatedly and at great personal cost. The 2009 Green Movement still appealed to the system's own constitutional promises. By 2019, when security forces killed hundreds of protesters in days over fuel prices, the pretense of accountability had been abandoned entirely.
And in 2022, when Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police, the resulting Woman, Life, Freedom uprising crossed a threshold that previous movements had not. Its slogans did not ask for reform. They demanded the system's end. "Mullahs get lost" is not a call for better governance within Wilayatul Faqih. It is a withdrawal of consent from the doctrine itself.
The regime survived, as it has survived before, through lethal force. But suppression is not legitimation. A government that can only maintain order by killing its citizens has already lost the argument about its right to govern.
For the Arab world, the implications extend far beyond Iran's borders. The so-called Axis of Resistance — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias — is bound to Tehran not only by money and weapons but by the doctrinal framework of loyalty to the Supreme Leader as a religious obligation. As that framework loses credibility inside Iran, its hold on proxy actors weakens. What emerges is not necessarily less dangerous: proxy networks driven by their own local agendas, less controllable by Tehran, and capable of generating regional escalation that Iran itself cannot manage.
Then there is the nuclear question. The Supreme Leader has historically served as the sole decision-making authority on nuclear matters. A weakened leader — or worse, a contested succession — introduces uncertainty into calculations that the international community can ill afford. A leadership that feels existentially threatened may conclude that nuclear weapons are the only insurance policy worth having. This is not prediction; it is the logic of a system whose legitimacy foundations are cracking.
The March 2026 appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader settles the succession question in name only. A figure who has never held formal office, who commands no independent religious authority, and who owes his position entirely to military backing, cannot resolve a crisis rooted in the gap between the system's claims and its performance. He inherits a title. He does not inherit legitimacy.
None of this means the Islamic Republic will collapse tomorrow. Authoritarian systems can persist for long stretches on institutional inertia, coercive capacity, and the absence of organised alternatives. But persistence is not stability. A system that governs through fear is permanently vulnerable to the unexpected — an economic shock, a succession miscalculation, a protest movement that outpaces the security forces — in ways that legitimate governments are not.
The quietist scholars whom Khomeini dismissed understood something he did not: that religious authority is a fragile thing, easily damaged by the compromises and brutalities that political power inevitably demands. Four decades of Wilayatul Faqih governance have proven them right. The doctrine has not elevated the state to the sacred. It has dragged the sacred into the gutter of ordinary political failure — and the Iranian people, who pay the price daily, know it.
*Parliamentary Advisor
