What's a "Supreme Leader," Anyway?

He preferred bullets to ballots: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the original "Supreme Leader." (Getty Images)

Whenever you begin to get too anxious about what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says, does or spews, just remember: in the arcana of Iranian politics, he is more figurehead than leader, more palliative for the populace than policy wonk of the mullahs. In that latter regard, unfortunately, there's something of an unhealthy competition going on between the old revolutionary guard and the younger reformists. But ultimately the whole machinery of revolution is the "Supreme Leader"'s to steer.

There is no such thing as the concept of a “supreme leader” in Islam’s sacred text or in Islamic jurisprudence—either Shiite or Sunni. It is the recent invention, one of many patented through his revolution, of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989), who was seeking to break down the wall between spiritual and political authority in order to control both.

That wall was fundamental to Twelver Shiite belief, which holds that as long as the so-called 12th Imam has not revealed himself, no other political authority may either stand in for him or be recognized as legitimate. Until Khomeini.

The invention of the post of “supreme leader” was a central paradox of the Iranian revolution. By solidifying absolute temporal and spiritual power in the hands of one man, it was both Khomeini’s way of solidifying power but also an implicit admission that spiritual powers as he interpreted them—uncompromising and closed to interpretation—would not be accepted from the bottom up. So they’d have to be imposed from the top down.

It’s more than a rejection of traditional Shiite thought, which once made room for a considerable range of interpretations. It’s a wholesale theocratic invention in the guise of Shiite-Islamic garb and language. The result has been more morally garbled than coherent, let alone defensible.

So when Ayatollah Khamenei said, during a Friday-prayer sermon in May 1989, that “a single person must be in charge,” and that “people must make demands of him, protest to him, make him responsible,” he was not speaking either of Islamic thought as Prophet Muhammad taught it or Islamic jurisprudence as Shiite clerics had applied it for centuries. He was summing up the ideology of political Islam as Khomeini had reinvented it, mostly to the benefit of his authority, through the Iranian revolution. Speaking those words, Khamenei was announcing to hard-liners that he would be a worthy successor to Khomeini, a “supreme leader” in the original supreme’s image.

Read the complete FAQ, "What's a Supreme Leader?"

Also:

• Can the Iranian Revolution Survive? You decide.