Ali Khamenei
Ali Hosseini Khamenei is an Iranian cleric and politician who has served as the second supreme leader of Iran since 1989. He previously served as the third president of Iran from 1981 to 1989. His tenure as supreme leader, spanning years, makes him the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East and the longest-serving Iranian leader since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Born into the Khamenei family, he studied at a in his hometown Mashhad, later settling in Qom in 1958, where he attended the classes of Ruhollah Khomeini. Khamenei became involved in opposition to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, and was arrested six times before being exiled for three years by the Shah's regime. Khamenei was a mainstream figure in the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution, and upon its success, held many posts in the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran. In the aftermath of the revolution, he was the target of an attempted assassination that paralysed his right arm. There have been continued assassination threats against Khamenei by Israel. Khamenei served as the third president of Iran from 1981 to 1989 during the Iran–Iraq War, when he also developed close ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. After the death of Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei was elected supreme leader by the Assembly of Experts.
As supreme leader, Khamenei supported Iran's nuclear program for civilian use while issuing a fatwa forbidding the production of weapons of mass destruction. Khamenei favoured economic privatization of state-owned industries and, with oil and gas reserves, transformed Iran into an "energy superpower". His foreign policy has centered on Shia Islamism and exporting the Iranian Revolution. Khamenei played a pivotal role in the development of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, transforming it into a primary tool for domestic control and regional influence. Under Khamenei, Iran supported the "Axis of Resistance" coalition in the Syrian civil war, War in Iraq, Yemeni civil war and the Gaza war, as well as Russia during Russo-Ukrainian war. A staunch critic of Israel and of Zionism, Khamenei has supported the Palestinians in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; his rhetoric has included calls for Israel's destruction and antisemitic tropes. Under Khamenei, Iran has been involved in proxy wars with Israel and Saudi Arabia; in 2025, tensions with Israel escalated to a 12-day armed conflict.
Identified as a pragmatic hardliner, Khamenei has sidelined leftist factions, moderate clerics, and political dissidents, while occasionally easing restrictions when the regime's stability or legitimacy has been threatened. His leadership has been closely associated with the expansion of state militarization and the consolidation of power within the office of the Supreme Leader. Khamenei has also faced many protests, including the 1999 Iranian student protests, the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, the 2011–2012 Iranian protests, the 2017–2018 Iranian protests, the 2018–2019 Iranian general strikes and protests, the 2019–2020 Iranian protests, the Mahsa Amini protests, and the 2025–2026 Iranian protests. Journalists, bloggers and other individuals have been put on trial in Iran for the charges of insulting Supreme Leader Khamenei, often in conjunction with blasphemy charges. Their sentences have included lashing and jail time; some of them have died in custody. He is also known by the title Ayatollah and is considered one of the leading Shia Muslim in the world. Khamenei's critics view him as a repressive despot responsible for repression, mass murders and other acts of injustice.
Early life and education
Ali Khamenei was born on 19 April 1939 to Javad Khamenei, an Alim and Mujtahid born in Najaf, Iraq, and Khadijeh Mirdamadi in Mashhad. Khamenei is the second of eight children. Two of his brothers are also clerics; his younger brother, Hadi Khamenei, is a newspaper editor and cleric. His elder sister Fatemeh Hosseini Khamenei died in 2015, aged 89. His father was an ethnic Azerbaijani from Khamaneh, while his mother was an ethnic Persian from Yazd. Some of his ancestors are from Tafresh in today's Markazi Province and migrated from their original home in Tafresh to Khamaneh near Tabriz.Khamenei's ancestor was Sayyid Hossein Tafreshi, a descendant of the Aftasi Sayyids supposedly reaching to Sultan ul-Ulama Ahmad, known as Sultan Sayyid, a grandchild of the fourth Shia Imam, Ali al-Sajjad. Khamenei's education began at the age of four, by learning the Quran at Maktab; he spent his basic and advanced levels of seminary studies at the hawza of Mashhad, under mentors such as Sheikh Hashem Qazvini and Ayatollah Milani. Then, he went to Najaf in 1957, but soon returned to Mashhad due to his father's unwillingness to let him stay there. In 1958, he settled in Qom, where he attended the classes of Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi and Ruhollah Khomeini. Like many other politically active clerics at the time, Khamenei was far more involved with politics than religious scholarship.
Early political career (1960s–1981)
According to his official website, Khamenei was arrested six times before being exiled for three years during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Khamenei was a key figure in the Iranian Revolution in Iran and a close confidant of Ruhollah Khomeini. Since the founding of the Islamic Republic, Khamenei has held many government posts. Khamenei has been head of the servants of Astan Quds Razavi since 14 April 1979. Muhammad Sahimi asserted that his political career began after the Iranian Revolution, when the former President of Iran, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then a confidant of Khomeini, brought Khamenei into Khomeini's inner circle. Later on, Hassan Rouhani, then a member of Parliament, arranged for Khamenei to get his first major post in the provisional revolutionary government as deputy defense minister.In 1980, after the resignation of Hussein-Ali Montazeri from the position, Ruhollah Khomeini appointed Ali Khamenei to the position of Tehran's Friday Prayers Imam. Khamenei was briefly the Vice Minister of National Defence from late July to 6 November 1979 and as a supervisor of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. He also served on the battlefield as a representative of the Iranian Parliament's Defense Commission.
Assassination attempt
Khamenei narrowly escaped assassination by the Mujahedin-e Khalq when a bomb, concealed in a tape recorder, exploded beside him. On 27 June 1981, while Khamenei had returned from the frontline, he went to the Aboozar Mosque according to his Saturday's schedule. After the first prayer, he lectured to worshippers who had written their questions on paper. Meanwhile, a young man who pressed a button put a tape recorder accompanied by papers on the desk in front of Khamenei. After a minute, the recorder began whistling, then suddenly exploded. "A gift of Furqan Group to the Islamic Republic" was written on the inner wall of the tape recorder. Khamenei's treatment took several months and his arm, vocal cords and lungs were seriously injured. He was permanently injured, losing the use of his right arm.Presidency (1981–1989)
In 1981, after the assassination of Mohammad-Ali Rajai, Khamenei was elected President of Iran by a landslide vote in the October 1981 Iranian presidential election in which only four candidates were approved by the Council of Guardians. Khamenei became the first cleric to hold office. Ruhollah Khomeini had originally wanted to keep clerics out of the presidency, but later changed his views. In the 1985 Iranian presidential election, where only three candidates were approved by the Council of Guardians, Ali Khamenei was reelected as President of Iran, receiving 87% of the votes.In his presidential inaugural address, Khamenei vowed to eliminate "deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists". According to the Iran Chamber, vigorous opposition to the government, including nonviolent and violent protest, assassinations, guerrilla activity and insurrections, was answered by state repression and terror in the early 1980s, both before and during Khamenei's presidency. Thousands of rank-and-file members of insurgent groups were killed, often by revolutionary courts. By 1982, the government announced that the courts would be reined in, although various political groups continued to be repressed by the government in the first half of the 1980s.