Ayatollah Khomeini
The exiled cleric who led Iran's 1979 revolution and built the world's first modern theocracy, ruling as its Supreme Leader until his death.
For nearly fifteen years he was a voice in exile, his sermons smuggled into Iran on cassette tapes. Then, on 1 February 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini stepped off a chartered Air France jet in Tehran and, within days, became the most powerful cleric in the modern history of the Middle East. He was seventy-six, and he had just led the overthrow of a monarchy that traced its lineage back 2,500 years, without holding any office, army, or party of his own.
The exile
Khomeini was a senior Shia cleric, a marja or source of emulation, in the seminary city of Qom when he turned his authority against the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1963 the Shah launched the White Revolution, a Western-facing program of land reform, women's suffrage, and secular schooling. Khomeini denounced it as an assault on Islam and on Iran's independence from the United States, whose grip on the monarchy he attacked in sermon after sermon. In 1964 the Shah exiled him. He spent nearly fifteen years abroad, most of them in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf and his final months near Paris, keeping the pressure on from a distance while his recorded voice circulated hand to hand inside Iran.
Guardianship of the jurist
What set Khomeini apart from other clerical critics was a specific and, at the time, radical idea. In lectures delivered in Najaf he argued for velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist: the claim that in the absence of the hidden Imam, ultimate political authority should rest not with kings or elected politicians but with a supreme Islamic jurist qualified to interpret God's law. Most senior clerics had traditionally kept their distance from direct rule. Khomeini wrote his doctrine into the constitution of the new Islamic Republic and made himself its first Supreme Leader, an office that outranks the elected president and commands the armed forces, judiciary, and state media.
The Republic he built
The revolution that carried him to power turned quickly toward confrontation. In November 1979 students loyal to Khomeini seized the United States embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, severing relations between the two countries for a generation. In 1980 Iraq invaded, beginning a war that ground on for eight years and killed hundreds of thousands before a UN ceasefire in 1988. Months before his death he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of the novelist Salman Rushdie, extending his authority beyond Iran's borders. When Khomeini died on 3 June 1989, mourning crowds estimated in the millions overwhelmed his funeral. He left behind the first modern state governed by a clerical jurist, and a template revolutionary Islamists elsewhere have studied ever since.