Wilayat el-Faqih: Khamenei and the Death of a Theological Fiction
On February 28, 2026, joint American-Israeli strikes killed the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei, aged 86, in his Tehran office. Iran declared forty days of national mourning, Netanyahu and Trump publicly proclaimed victory, while the Arab world — divided as it was over the dictator's figure — bore the wrath of the Revolutionary Guards. In certain streets of Tehran, fireworks erupted. It is worth pausing on this paradox to understand what, far beyond any single man, may well have breathed its last alongside him.
It is particularly tempting to treat Khamenei's death as an act of war — one more episode in the spiral in which the United States and Israel have elected to play, simultaneously, the roles of surgeon-enforcer and arsonist. But to reduce the event to its military dimension would be to commit a serious error of perspective — precisely the error made by strategists who mistake the decapitation of a regime for the resolution of the contradictions that inhabit it. All the more so since Tel Aviv announced, from the very outset of the military operation, that its objective was the fall of the mullahs' regime.
For Khamenei was not merely a head of state. He was, or claimed to be, the wali el-faqih — the Guardian Jurisconsult of the faith — that is, the keystone of a theologico-political edifice unique in the history of Shia Islam. And it is this edifice, far more than its occupant, that deserves to be scrutinised in the light of the event.
The question worth asking here is not so much who will succeed him. It is far more vertiginous than that: was it even possible to succeed him? Was Khamenei — independently of the bombs that killed him — the last wali el-faqih, the last viable embodiment of a concept that had carried within it, since 1989, the seeds of its own dissolution?
The Long Genealogy of a Persian Idea
To understand the structural fragility of the wilayat el-faqih, one must go back well before Khomeini. More precisely to the Safavid Empire of the sixteenth century, and to this distinctly Persian idea of a royal authority tinged with divinity.
Twelver Shia Islam, in its Arab and Najafi form, never envisaged an Islamic government administered by men. The logic is limpid, almost tragically coherent: only the Imam Mahdi — infallible, appointed by God — can establish a just government. In his absence — and he has been occulted since the ninth century — every state is by definition usurping. One tolerates it, participates in it, reforms it, but one does not absolutise it. During the period of occultation, even the khoms — the religious tithe — even the Friday prayer, were in principle forbidden, reserved solely for the authority of the Imam Mahdi. Jihad was proscribed; the use of violence in the name of commanding good and forbidding evil lay outside the prerogatives of the faqih. This is the Najafi marja'yya in all its rigour: a clear separation between the tolerated usurping state and the religious reference that guides consciences without claiming to govern bodies.
It is a different logic — Safavid and Persian — that would crack this edifice. The Safavids, a Sufi family of Turkmen origin, close to the Qizilbash and Bektashis, adopted Twelver Shia Islam in the sixteenth century to distinguish themselves from the Sunni, Hanafi Ottomans and to consolidate their empire. The great Shah Ismail claimed to have encountered the Mahdi in a cave and received his sword and horse — signs of earthly power and jihad. He thus positioned himself as the repository of the Mahdi's powers, inaugurating what Shia jurisprudence would call the niyaba malakiyya — the "special vicegerency" of the Mahdi entrusted to the sultan. To consolidate this claim, he summoned the ulema of Lebanese Jabal Amel, seeking their legitimation. They refused to validate the idea that the shah was the Mahdi's deputy — but the Safavids imposed their Shia government regardless, cloaking it in a divine aura.
The Safavids introduced into Shia Islam a series of practices that had not existed before: the bloody rituals of Ashura — imported into Jabal Amel only in 1912 by Iranian refugees in Nabatiyeh — the veneration of Abu-Lou'lou'a, the Persian who assassinated the Caliph Omar, and the historically false legend according to which Imam Hussein had married Shahrabano, daughter of the last Persian shah, so as to fuse the sacred lineage of the Imams and Persian royalty into a single dynastic sanctity. It was Ali Shariati who best theorised this distinction in his seminal essay on Alid Shia Islam and Safavid Shia Islam.
It was also during the Safavid period that the first debates on wilayat el-faqih began — on the nature and extent of the jurisconsult's power during the occultation. But even the ulema of the time limited this power. Only one faqih in this long period dared go further: Ahmed Mahdi Naraqi, at the end of the eighteenth century, at the junction between the Safavid and Qajar empires. It is he — and not Khomeini — who first theorised that a faqih could establish an Islamic government and that his wilayat could be absolute. He did so by relying on two hadiths attributed to Imam el-Sadeq and the Imam Mahdi which, in reality, carry none of this meaning. A bold deduction resting on a fragile textual foundation — the original sin of the concept.
Khomeini and the Sunni Contamination
Exiled to Najaf in 1964, Khomeini delivered in 1969 a series of lectures that would become, published in 1979, his foundational text: al-houkouma el-islamiya, "the Islamic Government" — in other words, wilayat el-faqih. But one must understand the intellectual atmosphere in which this text was steeped in order to grasp its true nature.
The writings of Sayyed Qotb and the Pakistani Mawdoudi were circulating and being ardently debated in Najaf. Their central concept — hakimiyya, sovereignty belongs to God, and therefore those who represent Him must govern — had profoundly marked the young Islamist intelligentsia. For Qotb, it was the Islamic vanguard of the Muslim Brotherhood that was to seize power. Khomeini, being Shia, performed the same translation by substituting the faqih for the Islamist vanguard: in the succession to the Prophet, the Imams were the most legitimate; after them, consequently, the fouqaha who are their heirs. Khomeinism's wilayat el-faqih is therefore not merely a Persian idea — it is also a radical Sunni idea dressed in Shia garb.
Indeed, all major contemporary Shia Muslim fuqaha — Mohsen el-Hakim, el-Khoï, Sistani, Moussa Sadr, Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine — were opposed to the wilayat el-faqih, as the eminent scholar of Shia Islam Saoud el-Mawla has emphasised. They had introduced instead the notion of wilayat al-oumma: during the period of awaiting the Mahdi's return, power should revert to the people through democratic elections. In the wilayat el-faqih, the mandate comes from the Imam Mahdi. In the wilayat al-oumma, it comes from the voters. The former is tyrannical, the latter pluralist. Here lies an abyss between two conceptions of legitimacy.
Nor was Khomeini unaware that his project fractured tradition. Between 1975 and 1978, a profound conflict set him against Moussa Sadr — the former in exile in Najaf, the latter in Lebanon, each embodying an irreconcilable vision. Rafsandjani had to travel to Lebanon in 1975 on a conciliation mission. The disagreement centred precisely on marjaïya: Moussa Sadr supported el-Hakim, then el-Khoï, as the reference for Shia Muslims — he refused to recognise Khomeini's. He refused, in effect, both the marja' and the wilayat. Sadr disappeared in Libya in August 1978, one year before Khomeini's accession to power in November 1979.
A Coup Within the Revolution, then Another Coup Within the Coup
In 1979, the Iranian Islamic Revolution was first and foremost a moment of plurality. Alongside Khomeini stood the democratic Islamic liberation movement of Mahdi Bazargan and Ibrahim Yazdi, the National Front of Banisadr, Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Taleqani — so many visions of political Islam that refused clerical absolutism. The first Constitution of the Islamic Republic made no mention of wilayat el-faqih. It was subsequently, between 1979 and 1981, that Khomeini staged a coup within his own revolution: Bazargan was sidelined, Banisadr overthrown, the Islamic democrats marginalised. The Mujahideen-e Khalq, who had fought the Shah, were hunted down. The wilayat el-faqih entered the Constitution by force of accomplished facts.
One must here recall the origins of Hezbollah, for they cast a harsh light on the nature of the project. The al-Da'wa party, originating in Iraq, had resolved as early as 1975 to infiltrate Amal — Moussa Sadr's movement — in order to reverse it from within. This tactic of entrism, explicitly defined, was the plan. All the founders of Hezbollah — Sobhi Toufeyli, Naïm Kassem, Abbas Moussawi, Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Amin el-Sayyid, Ali Kourani — were members of al-Da'wa embedded inside Amal. The scene is striking: at Amal's founding congress in 1975, when the pact was read stating that the movement "is based on Islam", Naïm Kassem rose and asked Moussa Sadr: "Which Islam are you talking about?" Moussa Sadr replied: "Islam as conceived by Moussa Sadr, not as conceived by the al-Da'wa party, ya Sheikh Naïm." The war had been declared. The destruction of the Lebanese Shia option did not begin in 1979 — it began in 1975. Sadr's disappearance becomes more legible in this light.
Then came 1989, and the second coup — this time within the Islamic Revolution itself. Khomeini's designated successor was Grand Ayatollah Montazari, who was giving lectures in Qom questioning the absolutist wilayat el-faqih and defending instead a wilayat al-oumma, a return of governance to the people. Khamenei, Rafsandjani and Ahmed Khomeini formed an alliance to oust him. Mehdi Hashemi, close to Montazari and head of the Revolutionary Guards' unit overseeing liberation movements including Hezbollah, was executed in 1986. Not a single word in any Hezbollah publication. Khamenei — a mere hojatolislam, well below the rank of marja' — was elevated by political decree to the rank of Ayatollah and then elected wali el-faqih. The Constitution was amended to grant him powers Khomeini himself had never arrogated: supreme commander of the armed forces, ultimate arbiter of all institutions. By 1989, the wilayat el-faqih was no longer a theology. It was a republican monarchy dressed in Quranic language.
Khamenei had, moreover, openly acknowledged his own imposture in 1989, declaring: "According to the Constitution, I am not qualified for this position, and from a religious point of view, many of you will not accept my words as those of a leader." He became the permanent holder of the function only after constitutional amendments had reduced the religious qualifications required. This confessional phrase is perhaps the most honest — and the most devastating — formulation of the concept that one could offer.
Rafsandjani: The Door Closed Shut
A word must be said about Rafsandjani, who died in 2017 of a heart attack in circumstances that have always fuelled rumours in Tehran. This man, nicknamed l'Âqâ — the Notable — was the pragmatist par excellence, the architect of the 1989 alliance that had propelled Khamenei to power. Yet in the final years of his life, he had broken with the hardened establishment that had formed around the Guide, drawing closer to the reformists. In circles of internal opposition, it was whispered that he was positioning himself as a possible fallback, as a transition figure acceptable to the regime's contradictory factions. His death closed that door. And the question left hanging — was an alternative wali el-faqih conceivable from within the system? — never received an answer.
The Succession Impasse
Iran's Constitution provides that in the event of a vacancy at the summit of power, a tripartite council — the President of the Republic, the head of the judiciary, and a member of the Guardian Council — manages the interim while the Assembly of Experts, composed of 88 clerics, designates a new Guide. But the strikes of February 28 decimated this mechanism: IRGC commander Pakpour, Defence Minister Nasirzadeh, adviser Shamkhani and Chief of Staff Bagheri were all killed. The interim falls de facto to Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the sole senior survivor of the chain of command, who vowed on X that Iran would deliver the United States and Israel "an unforgettable lesson."
Larijani is, by all accounts, a capable politician and a genuine strategist — but not a faqih. He possesses neither the religious authority, nor the stature of a marja', nor the theological legitimacy that the function of Supreme Guide requires, even in its most diluted form. A Larijani wali el-faqih would be an admitted aberration — the mask dropped over the theological void the system has been concealing since 1989.
The other name in circulation is that of Mojtaba Khamenei, the Guide's younger son — a mid-ranking cleric, the IRGC's man in the shadows, behind the doors of power for 27 years. His appointment would represent precisely what Shia revolutionary ideology has always claimed to reject: a dynastic transfer of power, a hereditary theocratic monarchy — exactly what the revolution of 1979 claimed to abolish. Israeli intelligence indicates he survived the strikes, but his fate is unconfirmed. Ali Khamenei's daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter were killed, according to Iranian agencies.
Among the regime's internal candidates, three names were selected by the Assembly of Experts in secret before the strikes. Their identities remain officially confidential. Two names nonetheless circulate in the analyses: Mohammad Arafi, deputy chairman of the Assembly of Experts, head of the seminary system, a confidant of Khamenei — a religious technocrat fluent in Arabic and English, but without political weight or ties to the IRGC; and Mohammad Mirbagheri, representing the most conservative wing of the clerical establishment, low-profile, without popular base. Sadeq Larijani — Ali's brother, former head of the judiciary — is also mentioned, as is Hassan Khomeini, 53, the founder's grandson, who stood in for Khamenei at an important revolutionary ceremony in February 2026 — a signal that his candidacy has not been foreclosed in clerical circles, an option of compromise that would preserve the revolutionary fiction while offering it a face of reconciliation. None of these men possesses the full stature of a marja'. None could convince the Shia world beyond Iran's borders.
And then there is the scenario that few chancelleries are willing to name clearly: the de facto transfer of power to the Revolutionary Guards. As researcher Behnam Ben Taleblu has formulated it, Khamenei's true partner in power was not the clergy — it was the security apparatus. The IRGC is a hydra, and cutting off one head does not exhaust the institution. The real question is which faction of the Guards is the most coherent and organised to take the helm. This scenario — an Islamic Republic without a faqih, governed in practice by its own Praetorians — would be the terminal liquidation of the concept.
The Internal Opposition: Between Lucidity and Impotence
A word must be said about those figures who, from within the system, had long since broken with the absolutist wilayat el-faqih.
Mir-Hossein Mousavi, 84, the face of the 2009 Green Movement, has been under house arrest since 2011. Just before the strikes, he had published, from his confinement, a blazing appeal: "The game is over." He demanded a referendum for a new Constitution and called on the security forces to lay down their arms. His position aligns precisely with Montazari's — governance must return to the people, not to the jurisconsult.
Mehdi Karroubi, the other figure of the Green Movement, had his house arrest lifted less than a year ago after fifteen years of confinement. He declared that the regime had "lost all moral basis to continue governing without the consent of the people", naming Khamenei as responsible for a "costly and futile nuclear project." Where is Karroubi today? No one knows.
Hassan Rouhani, who served as president from 2013 to 2021, had gathered his former ministers just before the strikes to call for fundamental reforms — some said he was positioning himself for an internal transition. He denied these rumours, calling them "American-Israeli psychological operations." The irony: the bombs rendered the question moot before he could answer it honestly. Mostafa Tajzadeh, former adviser to Khatami, is in prison and explicitly demands a democratic transition. He carries some legitimacy among dissidents and mid-ranking officials.
What all these men share is an effective rupture with the absolutist wilayat el-faqih. But they also share a common weakness: in the eyes of the young Iranians who died in the streets in January, they remain insiders compromised by decades of partial loyalty to the system. They can bear witness. They cannot embody. One does not build the new with the old — not at the extravagant price the Iranians are currently paying.
The Alternatives: Between Monarchical Nostalgia and Republican Utopia
Khamenei's death provoked, within hours, a torrent of statements revealing all the fractures of a deeply divided opposition.
Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah deposed in 1979, exiled in Washington for decades, published an op-ed in the Washington Post on Saturday night, positioning himself as leader of the transition. He declared that the Islamic Republic "has in effect reached its end", that any attempt to name a successor to Khamenei "is doomed to fail", and presented his Iran Prosperity Project as a road map for the transition. He is undeniably a cultivated and diplomatic man who has managed to broaden his base beyond the strict monarchist circle. But he remains his father's son — and the memory of SAVAK has not faded. Monarchical nostalgia has its militants; it also has its ceilings, ones that the crowds in Los Angeles brandishing the imperial flag cannot simply erase.
Maryam Rajavi, president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), responded bluntly by declaring that Iranians "reject both the Shah and the mullahs." Her ten-point plan calls for separation of religion and state, gender equality, and a non-nuclear Iran. But the problem with the Mujahideen is structural and insurmountable in the short term: they supported Iraq against Iran during the 1980-88 war, and this betrayal remains unforgivable for millions of Iranians, including some of the regime's fiercest opponents. Their network is real, their financial resources in the West considerable, but their popular legitimacy inside the country is virtually nil.
Between these two poles lies the silent mass of technocrats, academics, economists — two hundred of whom signed, before the strikes, an appeal for a "change in the paradigm of governance." No face, no leader. A reality without incarnation. So who? No one knows. One can only hope the answer will come from the people themselves — and that Washington will not be tempted to repeat the disastrous experiences of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, or, worse still, Ahmad Chalabi in Iraq.
Hezbollah: Orphaned of a Theology
Nineteen years ago, the writer Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine — who died, by a bitter irony, just hours before Khamenei's assassination — wrote with a prescience that commands admiration today that "the Lebanese Shia are in the majority opposed to the general authority of the faqih." He described Hezbollah as an organisation that "has never attempted to develop a Lebanese vision of itself", condemned to remain the armed instrument of a Khomeiniste vision of Lebanon, serving a State-Resistance duality already weakened by the death of Nasrallah.
Khamenei's death poses to Hezbollah an existential question no bomb could have formulated more cruelly: to whom does the wali amr al-muslimin — the phrase Nasrallah invoked as the foundation of his authority — now owe obedience? Hezbollah was born from a political decision in 1982, from the methodical infiltration of al-Da'wa into the ranks of Amal — its theological DNA is indexed to the validity of the wilayat el-faqih. What becomes of an organisation whose founding concept has just been orphaned? The short-term answer is predictable: resistance to the strikes will be brandished as proof of vitality. But the fundamental question has been posed, and it will not dissolve in the smoke of missiles. The Arab militias born of the export of the revolution are all orphaned now, and their identity crisis may well push them, out of despair and decompensation, toward collective martyrdom.
A Fiction That Was Already Gone Before the Bomb
The true question, ultimately, is not military. It is whether an Islamic Republic can survive without a wali el-faqih. The concept has traversed fifteen centuries — from the Safavid niyaba malakiyya to Naraqi's intellectual overreach, from the contamination by Qotb and Mawdoudi to the double revolution-within-revolution carried out first by Khomeini and then by Khamenei. At every stage, it survived by betraying itself: by lowering its theological requirements, by purging its critics, by substituting political decree for religious legitimacy.
Khamenei had himself admitted in 1989 that he was not qualified for the function. He became the permanent holder of the highest theological office in Shia Islam by having the Constitution amended so that his own inadequacies would no longer constitute a legal obstacle. This is what one might call the constitutive confession: the last wali el-faqih reigned by lowering the bar of entry for himself, thereby guaranteeing that no successor could ever occupy the post with a legitimacy greater than his own — which is to say that no one could occupy it legitimately at all.
The missile of February 28 merely formalised what theology had already pronounced.
What remains is the question of the rubble — human, geopolitical, confessional. What remains is the Iranian people, celebrating in the streets with exemplary courage despite the scale of the repression they have just endured, and trembling perhaps as well, knowing that the revolutions that follow decapitations are not always the revolutions of which one dreamed. What remains too is Iraq, Yemen, and above all Lebanon, suspended from equilibria that the death of one man in Tehran has rendered more precarious still. With death squads whose fate, if it is indeed sealed — and it is, without doubt — may well impel them to bring the whole temple down with them.
And what remains, finally, is that phrase of Montazari's — the man Khamenei had helped remove in 1989, who until his death in 2009 never ceased to repeat that the absolute wilayat el-faqih was a political heresy. He was right. He was simply wrong to believe that regimes die of their contradictions before dying of their bombs. It took, in the supreme cynicism of history, Netanyahu and Trump — two Caesars who believe themselves each invested by God — to bury, literally, the wilayat el-faqih along with the man who erected this pontifical theology into an instrument of domination and repression of the region's peoples.
Robespierre used to say that "a pure man always finds a purer man to purge him" — with that dark humour peculiar to despots.
History has never ceased to prove him right.