Explainer: The Messianic and Revolutionary Ideology Driving Iran's Ruling Establishment

The assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, and the IRGC-orchestrated appointment of his son Mojtaba as successor, brought renewed global attention to the ideological architecture of the Islamic Republic [1]. But the doctrine that underpins Iran's theocracy — a fusion of clerical absolutism and apocalyptic expectation — was decades in the making. Understanding it requires tracing two interlocking ideas: the political sovereignty of the senior jurist (Velayat-e Faqih) and the belief that the Hidden Imam will return to establish divine justice on earth.

The Jurist as Sovereign: Velayat-e Faqih From Theory to Absolute Rule

In Twelver Shia Islam, the twelfth imam — Muhammad al-Mahdi — is believed to have entered a state of divine concealment, or "occultation," in 874 CE. For centuries, mainstream Shia scholars held that political sovereignty properly belonged to this Hidden Imam, and that the clergy's role in his absence was limited to matters of religious law [2].

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini upended this consensus. In a series of lectures delivered in Najaf, Iraq, in 1970 — later published as Islamic Government — Khomeini argued that a senior Islamic jurist (faqih) had both the right and the duty to govern the Muslim community in the imam's absence [3]. Of the dozen Shia Grand Ayatollahs alive at the time of the Iranian Revolution, only one besides Khomeini — Hossein Ali Montazeri — endorsed this reading; the rest either rejected or ignored it [2].

After the 1979 revolution, Velayat-e Faqih was enshrined in Iran's constitution, with Khomeini as Supreme Leader. But Khomeini expanded the doctrine further in February 1988, declaring the "absolute authority of the jurist" (velayat-e motlaqaye faqih). Under this formulation, obedience to the ruling jurist was as obligatory as performing daily prayer, and the leader's authority extended to the temporary suspension of essential Islamic rites, including the hajj pilgrimage [2].

When Khomeini died in June 1989, the succession exposed a structural weakness in the system. Ali Khamenei, who became Supreme Leader, lacked the scholarly credentials that Khomeini's own doctrine demanded. The Assembly of Experts amended the constitution to remove the requirement of senior clerical rank (marja'iyyat) from the qualifications for leadership [4]. What had been an office theoretically grounded in jurisprudential authority became, in practice, a political position sustained by institutional control.

Unable to claim Khomeini's blend of charismatic and scholarly legitimacy, Khamenei compensated through institutional consolidation. His office became embedded in every significant domain — nuclear policy, intelligence, the judiciary, the media, the economy, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [4]. Scholars at Cambridge University Press have described this evolution as "Khameneism," a system in which the absolute velayat became less about religious learning and more about loyalty networks and coercive capacity [5].

The Dissidents: Clerics Who Challenged the System

The most prominent internal critic was Montazeri himself. Originally designated as Khomeini's successor, Montazeri broke with the regime over the 1988 mass execution of political prisoners, during which thousands were killed under a fatwa issued by Khomeini. Montazeri wrote three letters — two to Khomeini and one to the execution commission — condemning the killings in direct terms: "The execution of several thousand prisoners in a few days will not reflect positively ... In some prisons of the Islamic Republic young girls are being raped" [6].

Khomeini responded by stripping Montazeri of his successor designation in March 1989 [6]. After Montazeri publicly questioned Khamenei's qualifications to hold the office of Supreme Leader in 1997, he was placed under house arrest, where he remained until 2003 [7]. He continued to criticize the system until his death in 2009.

Montazeri was not alone. The Special Clerical Court (Dadgah-e Vizheh-ye Rouhaniyat), an extrajudicial body answering directly to the Supreme Leader rather than the judiciary, became the primary instrument for suppressing dissent within the clergy. Over a twelve-year period from 1988 to 2000, approximately 2,000 clerics were defrocked and another 4,000 were punished with prison sentences, fines, or beatings [8]. The proceedings are secret; according to human rights researcher Hadi Ghaemi, no accurate public registry of cases exists [8].

Notable cases include Mohsen Kadivar, a philosopher-cleric sentenced to 18 months in prison in 1999 for "spreading false information" about the Islamic Republic [8], and Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, who was sentenced to death for apostasy by the Special Clerical Court in 2000 after attending a conference in Berlin — a sentence later commuted to four years' imprisonment [9]. The regime also computerized and unified data on clergy of all ranks, making information on their economic and intellectual lives accessible to the state, while co-opting cooperation through government stipends and exclusive financial privileges [10].

Waiting for the Mahdi: Eschatology as State Policy

Parallel to the doctrine of clerical rule runs a second current: the expectation that the Hidden Imam will return to inaugurate an era of global justice. This belief is standard within Twelver Shia theology. What distinguishes the Islamic Republic's version is the claim that human action — and specifically conflict with the enemies of Islam — can actively hasten the Mahdi's return [11].

This activist reading of Mahdism became most visible during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013). Ahmadinejad allocated approximately $17 million in state funds to the Jamkaran Mosque, a site in Qom associated with Mahdist devotion [12]. During his term as mayor of Tehran (2003–2005), the municipality printed a city map showing the route the Mahdi would take upon his return [12]. In a 2007 speech, he stated: "We have a mission — to turn Iran into the country of the Hidden Imam" [12]. His cabinet reportedly signed a pledge of allegiance that was dropped into a well at Jamkaran Mosque where believers leave prayers for the Mahdi [12].

The Middle East Institute has documented how, particularly after the suppression of the 2009 Green Movement protests, Mahdist doctrine became a primary lens through which the IRGC understood its own mission [11]. The IRGC's involvement in arming, financing, and training Shia militias across the Middle East, its ballistic missile program, and its role in Iran's nuclear development have all been framed by regime ideologists as preparation for the Mahdi's return — removing barriers and establishing the conditions for divine intervention [11].

The Atlantic Council noted in a 2025 analysis that ideology functions as "the engine of Iran's nuclear doctrine," with senior officials explicitly connecting the nuclear program to the broader revolutionary mission [13].

The Revolutionary Economy: Bonyads, the IRGC, and the Ideology of Control

The ideological mandate of the revolution extends into economic life through two overlapping structures: the bonyads (revolutionary-religious foundations) and the IRGC's corporate empire.

Bonyads are a consortium of over 120 tax-exempt organizations that receive state subsidies and religious donations. They answer directly to the Supreme Leader, not to parliament or any public audit body [14]. Estimates of their share of Iran's GDP vary, but the International Foundation for Middle East Tracking puts it at roughly 30 percent [15].

Source: World Bank Open Data

Data as of Dec 31, 2024CSV

The IRGC's economic footprint is larger still. A 2004 constitutional amendment allowed the IRGC and affiliated organizations to control up to 80 percent of major sectors, including construction, telecommunications, banking, and defense [14]. The Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank, estimated in a detailed study that the combined military-bonyad complex accounted for more than 50 percent of Iran's GDP, though it cautioned that the opacity of ownership structures makes precise measurement difficult [14]. The U.S. Treasury noted in 2019 that Khatam al-Anbiya, the IRGC's construction arm, alone held contracts worth the equivalent of $22 billion in oil and petrochemical industries — four times the IRGC's official budget [16].

In 2025, the Iranian budget allocated 51 percent of total oil and gas export revenues — an estimated 12 billion euros — to the IRGC and the Law Enforcement Command [17].

Source: World Bank Open Data

Data as of Dec 31, 2024CSV

No independent audit of bonyad or IRGC finances has ever been published inside Iran. The Supreme Leader's own financial holdings, which include the Execution of Imam Khomeini's Order (Setad), a conglomerate valued at an estimated $95 billion by Reuters, operate outside parliamentary oversight [14].

The Belief Gap: What Iranians Actually Think

The Islamic Republic's census claims 99.5 percent of the population is Muslim. Independent survey data tells a starkly different story.

A 2020 survey by GAMAAN (Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran), which sampled nearly 40,000 Iranians living in Iran, found that only 40 percent identified as Muslim [18]. Nine percent described themselves as atheists, 7 percent as "spiritual," 6 percent as agnostic, and 8 percent as Zoroastrian. Forty-seven percent reported having lost their religion during their lifetime. Only 26 percent said they believed in the coming of a savior — a direct measure of Mahdist belief [18].

More than 60 percent said they did not perform the obligatory daily prayers. Seventy percent supported the separation of religion and politics [18].

A leaked confidential Iranian government study, reported by Iran International in February 2024, found that 85 percent of respondents said Iranians had become less religious compared to five years prior, and over 81 percent anticipated a continued decline [19].

These findings carry significant methodological caveats. The GAMAAN survey relied on online sampling, which may overrepresent urban, educated, and younger demographics. Respondents in an authoritarian state may also underreport religious belief to express political dissent. Nonetheless, the scale of the findings — and their consistency with the government's own internal data — suggests a substantial gap between the ruling ideology and the beliefs of the population it governs.

The Case for Pragmatism: Do Western Analysts Overstate Ideology's Role?

A number of Iran scholars argue that Western and Israeli policymakers consistently overstate the operational influence of messianic doctrine on Iranian strategic behavior. Scholars including Nader Tarock (1999), R.K. Ramazani (2004), and Alan Salehzadeh (2013) have traced what they identify as a predominantly pragmatic and realist approach to Iranian foreign policy, contradicting more "ideologically-bounded representations" [20].

The Middle East Institute has argued that Iranian foreign policy reflects a "concurrence of ideology and pragmatism," not the dominance of one over the other [20]. Research published in the journal Comparative Strategy found that when faced with threats to state survival, Iran adopts a more flexible posture, and the degree of flexibility correlates directly with the severity of the threat [21].

Concrete examples support this reading. Iran accepted the 1988 ceasefire with Iraq — which Khomeini compared to "drinking poison" — when military defeat threatened the regime's existence. Iran cooperated with the United States on intelligence sharing against the Taliban after September 11, 2001. The 2015 nuclear agreement (JCPOA) involved significant concessions on enrichment capacity in exchange for sanctions relief.

However, not all scholars accept that pragmatism is the dominant mode. A study published in Iran's own Quarterly Political Studies of Islamic World argues that the "essence" of Iran's foreign policy is ideological, and that pragmatic moves represent tactical retreats rather than strategic reorientation [20]. The 2025 Twelve-Day War and the subsequent 2026 conflict, in which Iran escalated to direct missile strikes on Israeli civilian targets and a failed attack on Diego Garcia, complicated the pragmatist thesis considerably [22].

Comparative Framework: Iran Among Millenarian Political Movements

Scholars have drawn structural parallels between Iran's revolutionary ideology and other modern movements that fused state power with eschatological or utopian expectations.

The Soviet comparison is the most frequently cited. Political scientist Ervand Abrahamian described the Iranian Revolution's ideology as a "complex combination" of pan-Islamism, political populism, and Shia "religious radicalism" [23]. Just as the Soviet Union integrated Russian nationalism with Marxist-Leninist utopianism — promising a classless future that justified present-day repression — the Islamic Republic fused Iranian nationalism with Shiite millenarianism, with the return of the Mahdi serving a structural role similar to the communist promise of a post-revolutionary paradise [23].

The comparison with political Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia reflects a mirror-image dynamic: Sunni supremacism formalized through the Saudi-Wahhabi pact versus Shia supremacism expressed through Khomeini's pan-Islamic irredentism [23]. Both systems subordinated religious authority to state power while claiming to derive legitimacy from religious authenticity.

Where the comparisons break down, scholars note, is in institutional specificity. The Soviet vanguard party replaced religious institutions entirely; Iran's system attempted to capture them. Saudi Wahhabism operated through a monarchy that never claimed clerical authority for itself; Iran's Supreme Leader claims to be both political sovereign and religious guide. These structural differences shape each system's vulnerability to internal challenge.

Succession and the Future of the Ideology

The events of early 2026 tested the system's succession mechanisms under extreme conditions. Following Khamenei's assassination on February 28, Iran's constitution mandated a Provisional Leadership Council comprising the president, the head of the judiciary, and one cleric from the Guardian Council [1]. The Assembly of Experts was convened to select a new Supreme Leader.

According to reporting by the Times of Israel and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the IRGC moved to control the process immediately, bypassing deliberation to install Mojtaba Khamenei — the late leader's son, a cleric with strong IRGC ties but limited public profile [1][24]. Assembly members reported "repeated contacts and psychological and political pressure" from IRGC commanders [1]. On March 9, with 85–90 percent of those present voting in favor, Mojtaba was named the third Supreme Leader of Iran — the first dynastic succession in the office's history [1].

The selection carried costs. Iran International reported that pragmatic conservatives within the Assembly viewed the process as a "bludgeoning aside" of their concerns, with the IRGC having gained disproportionate influence during wartime [25]. The Carnegie Endowment analysis noted that Mojtaba was chosen precisely because the IRGC viewed him as "a more pliant version of his father who would back their hardline policies" [24].

Whether Mojtaba Khamenei can sustain the ideological framework his father spent 35 years consolidating — amid a population that has largely abandoned its premises, an economy dominated by military-linked entities under intensifying sanctions, and the physical devastation of two wars in under a year — remains the central question of Iranian politics in 2026.

Limitations of the Available Evidence

Several significant gaps constrain this analysis. Bonyad and IRGC financial data relies on external estimates rather than audited figures. The GAMAAN survey's online methodology carries sampling limitations. Internal regime deliberations, including the Assembly of Experts proceedings, are largely closed to independent verification. The fog of the ongoing conflict makes real-time assessment of power dynamics within the establishment unreliable. Where possible, this article has noted the range of estimates rather than presenting single figures as definitive.