The Exposition : Ruhollah Khomeini
The revolutionary cleric who made sacred authority into state power
Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) was an Iranian Shi‘i cleric, jurist, revolutionary leader, and the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He led the political and religious movement that helped overthrow Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919–1980) in 1979, ending the Pahlavi monarchy and reshaping Iran into a state built around Islamic revolutionary legitimacy.
Yet Khomeini cannot be understood only as the face of an anti-monarchical uprising. His historical meaning lies in a sharper transformation: he converted religious authority into the organizing principle of a modern state. He gave political form to the idea that the Islamic jurist should not merely advise power but stand at its summit. This is why his legacy is still so charged. He spoke the language of dignity and anti-imperial independence, but his state also developed structures of coercion, censorship, execution, and ideological supervision.
His early formation came from the seminary, not the party office
Khomeini was born in Khomeyn, in central Iran, into a family of Shi‘i religious scholars. His father was killed when he was still an infant, and he grew up in a world where religious learning, local authority, and social insecurity were tightly connected. Around 1922, he moved to Qom, the major Iranian center of Shi‘i scholarship, where he studied jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, and mysticism.
This matters because Khomeini was not formed as a conventional party politician. His authority came from the seminary, where reputation is built through learning, discipline, discipleship, and moral standing. In Shi‘i Islam, a jurist is not merely a preacher. He is an interpreter of divine law. Khomeini’s political innovation was to move that interpretive authority from the classroom and mosque into the constitution, prison, army, court, and broadcasting system.
His confrontation with the shah intensified in the early 1960s. The shah’s White Revolution promised land reform, women’s suffrage, modernization, and state-led development. For many Iranians, however, it also meant authoritarian rule, rapid Westernization, widening inequality, and a security state backed by the United States. Khomeini attacked the shah as tyrannical and dependent on foreign power. He was arrested in 1963 and exiled in 1964. Exile did not erase him. Sermons, messages, and cassette tapes carried his voice back into Iran with a strange intimacy, as if the absent cleric had become more present than the monarch.
Velayat-e faqih was the doctrine that changed Iran’s political grammar
The central concept in Khomeini’s political thought is velayat-e faqih, usually translated as the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. In lectures delivered in Najaf in 1970, later published as Islamic Government, Khomeini argued that Islamic law requires an Islamic government, and that in the absence of the hidden Imam, qualified jurists must assume political guardianship.
The argument was simple in structure and vast in consequence. If Islam contains law for public life, then a government is needed to enact that law. If the government must enact Islamic law correctly, then those trained in that law must occupy decisive authority. From there, Khomeini moved beyond the older Shi‘i caution toward temporal rule. The jurist would no longer stand outside political power as adviser, critic, or moral witness. The jurist would become the highest political authority.
Khomeini’s wager was that the oppressed could be liberated by placing sovereignty under clerical guardianship. That wager mobilized millions. It also created the enduring tension of the Islamic Republic: the people could revolt, vote, sacrifice, and participate, yet final authority would rest in an office whose legitimacy was not reducible to electoral consent.
The 1979 revolution made him a vessel for many kinds of anger
By the late 1970s, the shah’s regime faced opposition from religious groups, leftists, students, workers, bazaar merchants, nationalists, and ordinary citizens exhausted by repression and inequality. Khomeini became the name under which very different grievances gathered. When the shah left Iran on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini returned to Tehran on February 1, he entered not only a capital city but a charged field of expectation. On February 11, the monarchy collapsed.
In April 1979, a referendum established the Islamic Republic. Later that year, a new constitution institutionalized the office of Supreme Leader. Khomeini thus became both the symbol of revolutionary victory and the center of a new system of rule. The revolution promised independence, justice, and a break from monarchy. But the new state also narrowed political pluralism, suppressed rivals, imposed religious norms, and reorganized public life around revolutionary loyalty.
The paradox is severe but necessary to state plainly. Khomeini helped give language to people who had experienced the monarchy as humiliating, unequal, and foreign-backed. He also presided over a state that punished dissent with increasing severity. The liberating word and the commanding word came from the same mouth. History, alas, is very capable of such double speech.
The 1988 death committees revealed the darkest logic of revolutionary certainty
The most devastating episode in Khomeini’s final years was the 1988 mass execution of political prisoners. After Iran accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 598 in July 1988, moving toward an end to the Iran–Iraq War, the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization launched an armed incursion from Iraq. Iranian forces defeated it. The MEK had a violent record and was widely despised inside Iran because of its wartime alliance with Saddam Hussein. Still, what followed inside Iranian prisons cannot be justified as battlefield necessity.
Human Rights Watch reports that Iranian authorities, acting on Khomeini’s orders, summarily and extrajudicially executed thousands of political prisoners in 1988, with estimates commonly ranging between 2,800 and 5,000 across at least 32 cities. Amnesty International has described the killings as enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions whose concealment continues to wound families.
Committees later known among survivors as “death committees” questioned prisoners about loyalty, repentance, prayer, political affiliation, and willingness to cooperate with the Islamic Republic. Some interviews lasted only minutes. Those who failed the test could be sent to execution. The horror lay not only in killing, but in procedure. A few questions. A brief answer. A corridor. A body not returned to the family.
Hossein Ali Montazeri (1922–2009), then Khomeini’s designated successor, protested the executions. In a 1988 meeting whose audio was released in 2016, he condemned officials involved in the killings.
In my view, the biggest crime in the Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us, has been committed at your hands, and they will write your names as criminals in history.
— Hossein Ali Montazeri, 1988 Meeting Audio Recording (2016)
Montazeri’s objection did not stop the executions. It did, however, help end his political future. The expected successor became a liability because he refused to bless the state’s hardest act. After Khomeini died in 1989, Ali Khamenei (1939– ) became Supreme Leader. The massacre therefore belongs not only to the history of repression but also to the history of succession. Power remembered who obeyed, and who hesitated.
His legacy is a struggle between dignity, domination, and memory
Khomeini’s supporters remember him as the man who defeated monarchy, defied Western domination, and restored Islamic dignity to public life. His critics remember him as the architect of a theocratic order that fused religious truth with state coercion. Both memories point to something real, but neither is sufficient alone. Khomeini’s power came from joining social grievance to sacred meaning. Poverty became injustice before God. Foreign influence became humiliation. Political loyalty became moral obedience.
That fusion gave revolutionary energy to the disempowered. It also made dissent dangerous. If the state speaks for God, the opposition can be recoded as treachery, heresy, corruption, or war against the divine order. The 1988 executions show where that logic can lead. A prisoner no longer appears as a citizen with rights, or even as an enemy protected by minimum law. He becomes a stain to be removed.
There have been partial attempts at accountability. Hamid Nouri, a former Iranian prison official, was convicted in Sweden in 2022 for grave war crimes and murder connected to the 1988 executions, but he was released in 2024 in a prisoner exchange between Sweden and Iran. For survivors and families, this was another wound added to the old one. The courtroom had briefly opened; diplomacy then closed it again.
Why Khomeini still matters
Khomeini still matters because he exposed a weakness in secular modern assumptions. Religion did not withdraw quietly into private life. Under the right historical pressures, it returned as a theory of sovereignty, justice, law, and punishment. He also matters because his career warns us that anti-imperial language does not automatically produce democratic freedom, and religious sincerity does not guarantee human mercy.
To ask who Khomeini was is to ask how liberation can become command, how faith can become constitution, and how a revolution can inherit the cruelty it once denounced. His life teaches one severe lesson: when a state claims sacred certainty, citizens must listen for the moment when justice begins to sound like obedience.
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