Today's Edition
Imam Mohammad Tawhidi*
This week (July 4–9, 2026), Iran is holding official funeral ceremonies for Ali Khamenei, who was killed on February 28, 2026, in American-Israeli strikes that targeted his residence in Tehran on the first day of the war. A full four months separate the killing from the funeral, and this alone is unprecedented in the regime's traditions.
The delay itself is telling: the ruling establishment was not prepared for this shock. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was appointed Supreme Leader by the Assembly of Experts in March, but he has not appeared publicly since; no image, no audio recording, which opens the door to serious questions about how fragile the transition truly is, and about whether he too was wounded in the attack.
The moment deserves a calmer pause than the news bulletins allow: how did the system of "Guardianship of the Jurist" (Wilayat al-Faqih) arrive at this point?
Khamenei's assassination was the culmination of a long trajectory of failures for which the regime itself bears responsibility. For four decades, the "Supreme Jurist" ran a closed system of governance that drew its legitimacy from a single religious interpretation not subject to genuine electoral accountability; the Guardian Council alone decides who is fit to run, turning elections into a formal ritual that simply reproduces the same elite.
Abroad, the regime gambled on exporting its crisis through the "Axis of Resistance"; militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria, which it funded and armed with billions of dollars while its own people languished below the poverty line. The collapse of Hezbollah and the fall of Iranian influence in Syria fully exposed the fragility of this axis. Decades of "deterrence by proxy" did not protect the regime at the moment of the real test; instead, they left it exposed to a strike that targeted its head directly.
Economically: repeated collapses in the value of the rial, chronic inflation that devoured the savings of the middle class, and massive spending on the nuclear programme and regional projects without transparency or effective oversight; amid entrenched corruption networks within institutions tied to the Revolutionary Guard that control vast sectors of the economy without competition or accountability.
And whenever popular legitimacy wavered, from the 2019 fuel protests to the 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising, the response was systematic, bloody repression that left hundreds dead and thousands detained. The pattern is constant: survival through force, not reform.
The clearest paradox: Khamenei's own death was met in several Iranian cities with public street celebrations; a rare scene at the passing of a ruler, one that reveals the depth of the rupture between the regime and a broad segment of its society after decades of repression and restrictions on freedoms and the media.
There is also a point that is hard to overlook: regardless of who carried out the assassination, its success represents a grave intelligence and security failure for a regime that spent decades on massive security apparatuses under the banner of "protecting the revolution," yet ultimately failed to protect the very top of its hierarchy.
Add to this the military failure to mount an effective response, the economic failure to provide a decent life, and the political failure to build legitimacy beyond repression; and what you have is a regime that has exhausted its three tools of survival: religious legitimacy, regional deterrence and economic capacity. All that remains is the coercive-security tool.
Khamenei's absence, combined with the absence of his announced successor from public view since March, without a single public appearance, reveals that it is the Revolutionary Guard that actually runs the country behind a nominal religious facade.
A "transitional leadership council" was announced, comprising President Masoud Pezeshkian, the head of the judiciary, and a member of the Assembly of Experts, but reports indicate that it is the Guard that has imposed its own pace and pressured for the selection of the new leader to be settled within a matter of days; without genuine constitutional transparency, and with a military-security institution imposing its will on a process that is supposed to be religious-representative in nature.
In practice, this means that "Wilayat al-Faqih," as a theoretical framework that claimed to establish a just religious government, has turned into an empty formal cover for direct military-security rule, led by an institution not subject to civilian oversight and controlling the economy, media, judiciary and foreign policy all at once.
The foundational claim that the system rests on a "just jurist" who protects the interests of the nation collapses at the first real test: actual power has gone to whoever holds the weapons, not to whoever holds the alleged religious legitimacy.
What is striking is that official Iranian discourse after the war has carried no serious self-examination of the reasons behind the intelligence and military defeat. Instead, the tone has been openly escalatory: talk of "the blood of the martyred Imam," the need to keep the "call for revenge" present globally, and funeral ceremonies accompanied by banners, military symbols and images of ballistic missiles. A collective mourning has been mobilised as propaganda fuel, rather than serving as an occasion for accountability.
This is a pattern well documented academically in authoritarian systems facing an acute crisis of legitimacy: escalating the rhetoric of external hostility as a compensatory mechanism, to divert attention from internal failure and avoid holding accountable those responsible for the catastrophe that cost the “Supreme Leader” his life.
The paradox is that this verbal escalation comes at a time when Iran appears militarily, economically, and diplomatically weaker than at any point since the revolution; its regional arms have disintegrated, its economy has collapsed and its international isolation is deepening. This discourse resembles the survival cry of a regime that feels existentially fragile, more than it reflects an expression of strength or a viable deterrence strategy.
By contrast, the approach of the United Arab Emirates offers a model worthy of study for foreign policy in times of acute crisis. Throughout the months of the war, Abu Dhabi maintained a measured diplomatic line: it was not drawn into direct military escalation, it kept channels of communication open with various parties, and it continued a course of economic and investment diversification that was not fundamentally affected by regional turmoil.
This can be understood within a framework that prioritises stability and economic openness over geopolitical adventurism, an approach that has enabled the UAE to earn the trust of all parties and preserve its position as a regional financial and logistical hub, without being drawn into the sharp polarisation between Iran on one side and Washington and Jerusalem on the other.
The Iranian regime now stands at a crossroads: either it seizes this moment of leadership vacuum to reformulate its internal social contract and ease the intensity of external confrontation, or it moves deeper into security-driven domination led by the Revolutionary Guard and a confrontational discourse; and this is the path the current indicators suggest is more likely.
At the regional level, meanwhile, the Emirati experience offers an important lesson on the value of stability and diplomatic pragmatism in a time of turmoil, even if it is not the only experience worthy of study.
*The write is Parliamentary Adviser and Research Partner with TRENDS Research & Advisory.
