Future Perfect

The clerical establishment has become so sick of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that they will not replace him when he dies.

Iranian reformists and liberals worldwide can be forgiven for thinking that the election and crackdown last summer strengthened the hardliners. In the short term, they're right: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still president and his opposition has gone to ground. In the long run, though, they may have already won the battle: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is likely to be the last all-powerful Supreme Leader of the Islamic republic, even if the theocratic system manages to survive this tumult.

A not-so-quiet debate is now brewing inside the seminaries of Qum, Iran's religious capital, over how to abolish the post, the velayat-e faqih, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini assumed when he established the Islamic republic in 1979. Khomeini asserted that his role as the ultimate political and religious authority was effectively endorsed by God, the Prophet Muhammad, or by his last legitimate heir, the Twelfth Imam, whom Shiites believe went into hiding in 941 to escape rival Sunni caliphs but will return to earth to usher in an era of peace and justice.

Despite Khomeini's immense scholarly authority, revolutionary prestige, and religious charisma, his radical interpretation of traditional Shiite practice provoked enormous unease among Iran's most senior clerics. Many held to the traditional view that, in the absence of the Twelfth Imam, political power was always illegitimate—while religious thinkers now say they always worried that the claim of divine rule would contradict the principles of a republic, even an Islamic one. Khomeini was able to pacify his critics because of his enormous power and influence over the Iranian population and his respect among Sunnis and Shiites worldwide.

But now the hapless behavior of his successor, Khamenei, has sapped that goodwill. Khamenei's response to the massive election demonstrations this past summer reaffirmed a longstanding but secretive belief among a majority of Iran's religious teachers and scholars: supreme clerical rule, no matter who is at the helm, can lead only to despotism and should be abolished. There can be no absolute power because, as Khamenei showed, men are fallible. It's well enough understood outside Iran that those clerics have found common cause with the street demonstrators; what the rest of the world hasn't realized yet is that they also want Khamenei gone.

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