Towards the end of his long reign, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei felt that God was speaking through him. At least that’s what he said on December 31, 2023, when he met with the family of the former leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Soleimani.
Khamenei said he delivered an inspirational message to Revolutionary Guards officers more than 20 years ago. “Almighty God spoke! It was actually my language, but it was God’s words; it was a very extraordinary session,” Iran International quoted him as saying at the time. In Islamic theology, Khamenei’s claim that God spoke through him can be considered blasphemy.
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“Megalomania, self-centeredness, self-deification, claiming to be a prophet or the voice of God, a sense of exceptional wisdom and extreme narcissism are considered the characteristics of despots at the end of their rule. Despots gradually fall into the trap of power, indifferent to the fragility of authoritarian power,” Faraj Sarkouhi, a well-known Iranian literary critic and political commentator living in exile, responded to Khamenei’s words.
Arbiter of disputes and leader of the armed forces
What was Khamenei really like? Experts describe the Iranian leader as an extremely capable politician – since 1989, when he assumed the role of the founder of the Islamic regime Ruhollah Khomeini, he has been able to deal with all competitors, whether it was the pragmatist Hashemi Rafsanjani, the democrat Muhammad Khatami or the radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
At the same time, he managed to maintain long-standing enmities with three strong opponents: the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. However, with the help of Chinese mediators, the Iranian regime pragmatically came to terms with the last-named country.
His influence on the Iranian regime was absolutely essential. In theocratic Iran, although there is a parliament, a Council of Supervisors and a powerful armed forces led by the Revolutionary Guards, Khamenei always had the final say in key decisions.
He was at the same time head of state, commander of the armed forces and ideological leader. In moments when disputes broke out between the more liberal parliament and conservative clerics, it was Khamenei who was the supreme arbiter.
Analysis:
Ali Khamenei comes from a deeply religious family from the city of Mashhad, his father was already an imam and two of his brothers also became imams (Khamenei has seven siblings in total). After a short stay in Najaf, Iraq, he began studying Islam in the holy city of Qom, where he was taught, among others, by his later predecessor and leader of the Islamic revolution, Khomeini.
It was during his studies that Iran’s future number one man became strongly interested in politics, setting himself apart from most of his classmates.
As his portrait from the Institut Montaigne reminds us, Khamenei, among other things, translated into Persian the work of the radical cleric Sayyid Qutb, whose work is still used by many Islamists today. In his writings, Qutb called for an Islamic revolution and the creation of a state governed by Islamic law.
Lover of poetry and enemy of the West
After all, his fondness for literature is one of the typical aspects of Khamenei’s personality – the cleric is far from reading only Islamic literature, in the past he confided that he was inspired by, for example, Wretches by Victor Hugo. He also liked to read poetry, he was also photographed reading Michael Wolff’s American bestseller with a smile on his face Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Like Khomeini, Khamenei was convinced of the corruption of the West, which also kept the hated Shah of Iran in power. Under the influence of Khomeini, Khamenei began speaking out against the Shah’s regime, which earned him several arrests.
In prison, he was allegedly repeatedly tortured by the SAVAK secret police, and as The Time magazine reports, perhaps his hatred of the USA and Israel stems from these experiences – the Shah’s secret police were allegedly assisted by people from the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad.
Protests for women’s rights in Iran
Protests have erupted in Iran over the death of a woman arrested for not following the rules on wearing a hijab. “The whole nation is mourning and feeling anger,” says reporter Golnaz Esfandiari. Can the demonstrations force the regime to make concessions?
After the Islamic revolution in 1979, Khamenei’s influence grew rapidly – Khomeini appointed his disciple as the cleric leading Friday prayers in Tehran, later he became deputy minister of defense.
When a bomb exploded in the mosque during one of the Friday prayers in 1981, Khamenei suffered numerous injuries and since then he has lost control of his right hand. In the same year, he was elected president, and spent two terms in this role.
After Khomeini’s death in 1989, he was his natural successor and the guarantor of the regime’s continuity and ideological direction.
In 2015, Iran signed an international treaty with world powers to control its nuclear program. Khamenei stood aside at the time and did not hide his skepticism. However, until its termination by Donald Trump, Iran complied with the agreement, known by the acronym JCPOA, according to American and Israeli intelligence services.
Hard against “traitors”
Despite his intellectual background and love of poetry, Khamenei was a ruthless dictator, just remember the so-called Green Revolution in 2009.
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative critic of the West, won the falsified presidential election, supporters of the defeated reformist Hossein Mousavi took to the streets. The Revolutionary Guards sent by Khamenei killed at least ten thousand people, and thousands more protesters ended up in prison. Khamenei then called the protesters traitors.
Another 1,500 people were shot by the regime during the protests that broke out in the fall of 2019.
How women live in Iran
Protests in Iran have weakened significantly. Kathy no longer believes in the continuation of the revolutionary movement: “Protests are probably not the right way, we have already lost too many lives. We don’t have the strength for them and no country supports us. Maybe we need a gradual change of government, that seems more logical to me than protests,” she thinks. According to her, the protests have changed only two things: Everything has radically become more expensive, and women and girls are now daring to go without the hijab.
Another wave of protests was sparked in September 2022 by the violent death of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsá Aminíová. She was detained by the morality police because of a badly worn headscarf, and the young woman then died in custody. The authorities announced that as a result of a heart attack.
During the massive protests, when hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets, the security forces killed over five hundred people, including 69 children, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch reported on its website. Thousands of people ended up in prison, dozens of protesters were sent to death by the judge.
Another at least 7,000 people – according to the most conservative estimates, according to others tens of thousands were dead – died in other anti-government protests at the turn of 2025 and 2026.
The leadership of the oil-rich Middle Eastern power is also reflected in Khamenei’s wealth. As Reuters revealed in 2013, Khamenei controlled a conglomerate of companies worth $95 billion.
The business empire was created mainly from the confiscated property of opponents of the theocratic regime, often coming from numerous national minorities. Khamenei’s companies spanned various sectors, be it the oil industry, telecommunications or ostrich farming.
