What Is the Iranian Theocracy’s Future Now?

Keep reading after Tajbakhsh’s essay to get a preview of another essay on our website today by Arash Azizi on the future of Shia Islam—the branch headed by Ali Khamenei before his assassination.

While I was imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin Prison for more than a year—eight months of it in solitary confinement—I occasionally had brief conversations with the young Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officer assigned to interrogate me. I had first been arrested in 2007 and then again in 2009 during Iran’s Green Movement protests, part of a sweeping crackdown on civil society activists, and accused of threatening national security. The young IRGC guard was about 30, polite, restrained, and intensely pious. At one point he looked at me and offered a warning I have never forgotten.

“Mr. Tajbakhsh,” he said calmly, “the fact that I am polite to you should not make you think we are on the same side. I want you to understand something very clearly. I will do anything for this regime.”

The remark was chilling not because it was shouted, but because it was delivered with quiet conviction. This man did not see himself merely as an employee of the state. He saw himself as a soldier of a revolution—and, more than that, as a servant of God acting through that revolution.

I once asked him about something I had read in the writings of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—who, as this essay is written, was killed in an Israeli strike during the current war. Years earlier Khamenei had translated and introduced the work of the Egyptian Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, who argued that Islam represented a superior civilizational alternative to the modern world and could become the revolutionary force that would reorder it. In his introduction, Khamenei echoed that ambition: The Islamic Revolution was not meant merely for Iran but ultimately for humanity.

I asked my interrogator whether he truly believed such a vision was possible—that a revolutionary Shiite state could transform the world. He paused for a moment and shook his head slightly.

I have often wondered what that moment revealed: the limits of ideological belief, or its quiet persistence.

The closest I came to a more personal encounter with Khamenei himself came months later. One day a guard knocked on my cell door and opened the small metal hatch.

“Pay attention,” he said. “The supreme leader is about to make a speech about you people”—meaning dissidents—“and it will be broadcast throughout the prison.”

Hoping I might glean some hint of my fate, I dropped to the floor and pressed my ear against the narrow crack at the bottom of the heavy metal door. The coarse prison carpet scraped against my face as I tried to hear the words echoing faintly down the corridor.

Khamenei’s message was addressed to those who had opposed the revolution. The Islamic Republic, he said, was a merciful revolution. Its approach toward those who opposed it—whether deliberately or because they had been misled by enemies or by the devil—was one of “maximum acceptance and minimal expulsion” from the revolutionary community.

The meaning was unmistakable. Repent, and you might be forgiven. Resist, and the consequences would be far harsher.

Today, as Iran faces sustained military attack by the United States and Israel and the world speculates about the Islamic Republic after the death of its supreme leader, the question that haunted me in that prison cell returns: What kind of system is the Islamic Republic, and how resilient is it without the man who embodied it for so long?

One recent essay by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour in the online journal Mosaic argues that Iran has finally reached the question it spent 47 years deferring: whether the Islamic Republic can survive without a supreme leader and whether anyone can command the loyalty that once accrued not merely to the office but to the man who held it.

From this premise the author draws a sweeping conclusion: The death of Ayatollah Khamenei may mark not merely a leadership transition but the end of the revolutionary project that began in 1979. Islamism, in this telling, was always a modern ideological construction—one that borrowed heavily from the revolutionary traditions of modern Europe. It fused theology with concepts drawn from modern European revolutionary thought, including Marxism, and translated them into the language of Islamic revival.

But now, after decades of repression, war, and geopolitical overreach, that ideological project has reached its historical limit.

It is a bold and provocative thesis. But it rests on assumptions that are far less certain than they first appear.

The death of Ayatollah Khamenei—even amid war—will not necessarily mark the end of the Islamic Republic or of Islamism, because the Iranian regime is not a personalist dictatorship but a deeply institutionalized revolutionary state built to outlive its founders.

The Mosaic argument implicitly treats the Islamic Republic as though its survival depended primarily on the authority of a single leader.

It is true that the system was founded on the doctrine of velayat-e faqih—the rule of the Islamic jurist—developed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1960s. The doctrine concentrated ultimate authority in a supreme religious leader who was understood to embody divine legitimacy in political life.

But over four decades the Islamic Republic evolved into something far more complex: a deeply institutionalized revolutionary state whose power rests on the fusion of clerical authority, military force, ideological bureaucracy, and economic patronage.

By the 1990s the regime had developed an interlocking network of institutions designed to preserve the revolution regardless of who occupied the highest office. The clerical establishment, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia, the intelligence services, and a sprawling network of religious foundations and economic conglomerates linked to the state together formed a system whose reach extended into nearly every sector of Iranian society.

Schools, universities, mosques, media, charities, and major industries all operate within structures of ideological supervision and patronage.

In this sense the Islamic Republic came to resemble the revolutionary party-states of the 20^th century more than the monarchies or military regimes of the Middle East. Its political structure is closer to a Leninist ideological order than to the autocratic personalist rule of the shah it replaced.

In this political theology, power flows outward from an ideological core into society rather than upward through representative institutions.

Such regimes are not designed to collapse with the death of a leader. They are designed precisely to outlive their founders.

In one respect, however, the Mosaic essay is correct. Islamism is not simply a revival of classical Islamic governance. It is a hybrid.

On one level it is unmistakably modern. Islamism seeks to capture the centralized power of the modern state and use it to reshape society according to a comprehensive ideological vision.

But its intellectual roots run deeper.

Long before the Iranian Revolution, historian Maxime Rodinson observed that Islam possessed a political dimension from its earliest period. Muhammad was not only a prophet but also a state-builder whose religious movement reorganized political authority.

For centuries, however, most Muslim societies operated under a pragmatic division of labor. Political authority rested with rulers—kings, sultans, or emperors—while the religious establishment provided moral and legal guidance.

The Iranian Revolution shattered that arrangement.

Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih argued that senior clerics should not merely advise political rulers but govern directly. In doing so, he fused an ancient tradition of religious authority with the centralized institutions of the modern state.

Modern Islamists transformed that legacy into something new: a comprehensive ideological program for governing modern societies, visible not only in Iran but in projects such as the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan or ISIS’s short-lived caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Like the revolutionary ideologies of the 20^th century, Islamism offered a total explanation of political life and a moral mandate to reshape society according to a single vision of justice. Seen in this light, the Islamic Republic was not an anachronism but one of the most sophisticated ideological states of the late 20^th century.

And whatever its failures, it has proven remarkably durable.

For nearly half a century it has governed a large and complex society, built powerful security institutions, and projected influence across the Middle East through networks of allied militias and movements.

That record complicates any easy claim that Islamism has already exhausted itself.

Part of the confusion in these debates stems from a failure to distinguish between three related but distinct phenomena: Islam as a religion, Islamdom as a civilization, and Islamism as a political ideology.

Islam—the faith practiced by more than a billion people—will obviously endure regardless of the fate of the Iranian regime.

Islamdom, the broader civilization shaped by centuries of Islamic societies, will also continue to evolve across the Muslim world. Historian Marshall Hodgson once suggested the term “Islamdom” as a parallel to “Christendom,” though the term never fully caught on.

Islamism, however, is something different. It is the modern attempt to fuse religious authority with the centralized machinery of the modern state and impose a comprehensive ideological vision upon political life.

The Islamic Republic represents the most ambitious attempt in modern history to construct such a state.

Even if the regime eventually collapses—perhaps under the pressure of war, economic crisis, or internal fracture—the ideological vocabulary it created will not disappear overnight. Ideas rarely vanish simply because the regimes that embodied them weaken.

There is, however, another reality that must be acknowledged.

Over the past generation Iranian society itself has undergone profound change.

Urbanization, mass higher education, global communications, and repeated cycles of protest have produced a population that is far more secular, individualistic, and skeptical of clerical authority than the revolutionary generation of 1979.

Many Iranians—especially the young—have little appetite for the fusion of religion and state that defined the Islamic Republic.

The paradox of modern Iran is that the revolutionary ideology has lost much of its appeal among society while the institutional structures that sustain it remain formidable.

Perhaps 10-15 percent of the population forms the ideological core of the regime—a mixture of true believers and beneficiaries whose status and livelihoods depend on its survival. Such a minority, when backed by powerful security institutions, can sustain political systems for far longer than many outside observers expect.

This widening gap between state and society is one of the defining tensions of the Islamic Republic’s later decades.

For these reasons it is premature to declare the end of Islamism or the imminent collapse of the Islamic Republic.

History rarely unfolds so neatly—even if the regime emerges from the current war substantially weakened—its leadership decapitated, its military capabilities degraded, and the coercive apparatus on which it depends significantly damaged.

Few observers in the 1970s predicted that Iran—a country widely seen as modernizing and secularizing—would produce one of the most radical theocratic revolutions of the 20^th century. Likewise, the triumph of liberal democracy after the Cold War did not produce the “end of history” that many once expected.

The Islamic Republic may yet fall, particularly as it now faces sustained military attack and the loss of the supreme leader who dominated its politics for decades. But systems like this do not disappear simply because a leader dies. They disappear only when the men—such as my prison guard—who once believed they would “do anything for this regime” no longer do.

At the heart of much of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s conflict with its Arab neighbors is the division between Sunni Islam and and Shia Islam, a conflict that goes back to the earliest days of Islam. So what now for Shiites in the wake of the death of Ali Khamenei? Scholar Arash Azizi tries to answer that question in an essay on our website today.