In Tehran’s Ebrat Museum, once a notorious prison for political detainees under the Shah, a narrow corridor is lined with photographs of former inmates. Among them, in a brown wooden frame, is the image of a middle-aged man with a bearded face and thick rectangular glasses. The name beneath, written in Farsi, reads: Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
Preserved by the revolutionary regime as a grim reminder of the brutality of the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, Ebrat displays torture chambers and documents torture methods. One tiny, dimly lit cell, with a single barred window, has been left intact – it is where Mr. Khamenei was held. Inside stands a life-size wax figure of the Ayatollah, older than he appears in the photograph. Dressed in a black turban, which suggests lineage to the Prophet Mohammed, round spectacles, and a brown robe, the statue evokes both suffering and resolve. “Khamenei was imprisoned six times by the Shah’s police.
He was brought here in 1974,” a museum official told this writer during a visit in February 2022. “In autumn 1974, he endured the most brutal and savage torture for eight months in there,” reads a short biography posted outside the cell. “The Shah wanted to break him. But God wanted him as the country’s rahbar (leader),” said the museum official.
Mr. Khamenei, who has been the rahbar of the Islamic Republic since 1989, has built a theocratic system that is loyal to him. He is the Supreme Leader, the jurist of the guardians. A conservative cleric, he has led Iran through political and economic upheavals, and has survived both reformist and hardliner Presidents. But in recent years, on Mr. Khamenei’s watch, unrest has spread across the country. In recent months, Iran’s influence abroad has dramatically waned, particularly after Israel started attacking the so-called ‘axis of resistance’, the Iran-backed militia network in West Asia. On June 13, Israel, Iran’s arch foe, launched a daunting attack inside Iran, targeting its nuclear facilities and ballistic missile sites, and assassinating its top chain of command. With the Israeli leadership threatening to “burn” Tehran, the 86-year-old Ayatollah must be feeling the weight of the revolution on his shoulders.
Child of revolution
Born in 1939 in royalist Iran, Ali Khamenei grew up in the holy city of Mashhad, which hosts the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shiism. Like many clerics of his generation, his political views were influenced by the 1953 coup, a covert operation orchestrated by the CIA and the MI6, against the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The coup reinstated Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. This episode turned a generation of Iranians against the Shah. The clerical establishment, under the leadership of the exiled cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, played a critical role in the anti-Shah agitation that was building up across the country.
From the early 1960s, Mr. Khamenei was actively involved in the protests. When the Shah regime collapsed and Khomeini returned to Tehran from Paris in February 1979 to establish a new Islamic Republic, Mr. Khamenei rose quickly through the clerical ranks. Khomeini named him as Deputy Defence Minister. He became the Imam of Friday prayers in Tehran, a position which he still holds. If Imam Khomeini was the Supreme Leader of the new regime, Imam Khamenei emerged as its chief commissar.
In June 1981, he was seriously wounded by a tape recorder bomb that went off in Tehran’s Abouzar Mosque. His right arm got paralysed and he lost hearing in one ear. “I won’t need the hand; it would suffice if my brain and tongue work,” Mr. Khamenei once said about the attack. The blast, however, solidified his image as a survivor – a living martyr of the revolution.
Within a few months, he got elected as Iran’s President. When Khomeini died in 1989, the revolution became an orphan. Khomeini had established a unique system in Iran — vilayat-e-faqih, ‘guardianship of the jurist’ or the rule of the clergy. With no clear successor in line, senior clerics tuned to Mr. Khamenei. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, another revolutionary figure with considerable influence in the system, played a key role in the selection of Mr. Khamenei. “I am truly not worthy of this title,” Mr. Khamenei told the assembly that picked him. “My nomination should make us all cry tears of blood.” But he took the chalice. And Rafsanjani became President.
Soon after his ascent to the top office, Mr. Khamenei promised Iranians that the revolution would “lead the country on the path of material growth and progress”. But he faced daunting political and economic challenges. He became the Supreme Leader at a time when the revolutionary fervour was receding.
The Iran-Iraq war was over. The new regime’s internal enemies and critics, from the terrorist Mujahideen-e-Khalq to the leftist Tudeh party, had been suppressed. But there were still strong liberal currents in Iranian polity and society. Despite Mr. Khamenei’s vision for a centralised clerical rule, voters elected Mohammed Khatami, a moderate reformist, as President in 1997.
Mr. Khatami had promised reforms from within. But when protests broke out seeking more individual freedoms, Mr. Khamenei stood by the hardliners. The protests were brutally suppressed, and Mr. Khatami was turned into a lame-duck President. The election of Khatami was an opportunity for Iran to open up the system and implement incremental reforms. But the way the regime handled the protests only reinforced the rigidity of the system, which led to further cracks.
In 2009, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardline favourite of the establishment, was “re-elected”, protests broke out. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who served as Prime Minister of Iran under Mr. Khamenei’s presidency in the 1980s (Iran later abolished the post of Prime Minister), was the opposition candidate. Mr. Mousavi’s followers accused election fraud. Protests spread, with many calling for the downfall of the rahbar. That was a moment of challenge for the Supreme Leader. But he endorsed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory, while security forces cracked down on Mr. Mousavi’s “Green Movement”.
Perilous cycle
While political tensions persisted, what made them worse was the economic mess Iran was in. A country rich with natural resources, Iran was grappling with hyperinflation, stymied growth and a tanking currency, mainly due to the Western sanctions. Mr. Khamenei knew that the future of the revolution was linked to the state’s ability in creating economic opportunities. So even when he called America the ‘Great Satan’, he sanctioned nuclear talks with the U.S. after Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, became President in 2013.
The 2015 agreement between Iran and world powers was the best chance for Tehran to enter the global economic mainstream and rebuild itself. But then Donald Trump entered the scene. In 2018, Mr. Trump, in his first term, destroyed the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran. Ever since, the economic crisis at home got worsened, along with tightening repression, which triggered frequent uprisings. It became a perilous cycle for Iranians.
And then Israel, after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, turned against the Iran-backed network in West Asia, which acted as Tehran’s forward defence and its deterrence. Mr. Khamenei watched helplessly when Israel destroyed Gaza, degraded Hezbollah and bombed the regime of Bashar al Assad in Syria, which eventually collapsed. It was only a matter of time before the Israelis came for Iran. And they did so on June 13.
Set against Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Ayatollah Khamenei finds himself with few good options. Iran’s retaliatory strike against Israel on the night of June 13 was a bold display of force – a message that the Islamic Republic still has the firepower to hit the “Little Satan’. But the conflict is far from over. Iran’s defences remain vulnerable; its regional axis has been rolled back; its partners have their own problems. And Mr. Trump, who extended an offer of dialogue which Iran had cautiously accepted, is throwing his weight behind Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Khamenei, once described by a reformist politician as the ‘Sun of the Iranian solar system’, now faces the greatest test since the revolution — to protect the regime and protect the nation.
Published – June 15, 2025 01:11 am IST