Ali Khamenei
Ali Khamenei has been Supreme Leader of Iran since 1989, longer than any other head of state in the modern Middle East. Born in Mashhad in 1939, the son of a cleric, he studied theology in Qom under Khomeini from 1958 and became one of his political followers rather than one of his outstanding students. He was arrested repeatedly under the Shah, imprisoned and exiled internally. He was a founding member of the Islamic Republican Party after the 1979 revolution, served as Friday prayer leader in Tehran, and was crippled in his right arm by a bomb hidden in a tape recorder in 1981. He was elected president later that year and served two terms through the Iran-Iraq war, a largely subordinate office under a constitution that placed real power with the Leader. His elevation in June 1989, days after Khomeini's death, was a surprise and a problem: the post required a marja, a source of emulation at the highest rank of Shia scholarship, and Khamenei was a hojjatoleslam. The constitution was amended and his clerical standing upgraded, which parts of the seminary have never accepted. He built authority instead through institutions — appointing the judiciary, the Guardian Council, the armed forces and the broadcaster, and cultivating the Revolutionary Guards, whose economic reach expanded enormously under him. He outmanoeuvred reformist presidents, endorsed and then permitted the suppression of the 2009 protests, approved the nuclear negotiations while denouncing the United States, and has faced repeated mass unrest. He has vetoed rapprochement with Washington consistently while permitting negotiation, and the system he built now rests heavily on the Guards he promoted.
- Lived: 1939 CE – 2026 CE
- Nationality: Iranian
- Roles: Supreme Leader (1989-2026), cleric
