The New Yorker:

The selection of Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the assassinated Supreme Leader, signals defiance, as the Islamic Republic confronts the gravest threat in its history.

By Robin Wright

In his treatise on Islamic governance, Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, raged at the idea of political leadership passing down through family lines. Monarchy and hereditary succession were “sinister” and “evil” and “invalid,” he wrote. They “have no place in Islam.” The revolution that he led, in 1979, centered on ending dynastic rule in Iran, specifically of the U.S.-backed Pahlavi family. The Islamic Republic has, nevertheless, just created a new dynasty.

Early on Monday morning, amid the pounding of U.S. and Israeli bombs, Tehran defiantly announced, on state-controlled television, that the Assembly of Experts had selected Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the previous Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—to succeed his father, who was killed in an air strike on the first day of the war. Mojtaba, as he is commonly referred to, is a fifty-six-year-old cleric who was his father’s closest adviser. He wears frameless glasses, a salt-and-pepper beard manicured to proper clerical length, and a black turban, signifying his descent from the Prophet Muhammad. During his father’s thirty-seven-year reign, he kept a low profile and was rarely photographed or quoted. He married well; his wife was the daughter of a former speaker of parliament. She was killed, along with other family members, in the same strike as the former Supreme Leader.

Mojtaba had never held a government title or elected position until, on Monday, he became, for those who still believe in the principles of the Revolution, God’s representative on earth. Among Iran experts, he was not considered an important scholar or thinker, although he was educated in the élite seminaries of Qom, the center of theological learning, and taught religious classes. But Mojtaba, who will now assume the role of commander-in-chief, has long cultivated a base of support in the military, notably among the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as his father had, too, to solidify his own prominence, four decades ago. Alan Eyre, a former senior Iran watcher at the State Department, who is now at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, told me, “Before the tsunami of analysis drowns us all, let’s flag the most important fact about this appointment: he is ‘Putin light’ in clerical garb, and his appointment marks the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the beginning of Iran as an I.R.G.C.-dominated police-military-security state.”

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