Khamenei’s death triggered a profound but bifurcated reaction inside Iran. News and videos on social media showed Iranians cheering, honking horns, and dancing in the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate his death—all actions unthinkable days earlier, amid the government’s ongoing and ruthless crackdown on protesters. But other pictures showed tens of thousands gathering in the capital in sorrow. They struck their hands hard against their chests—a Shiite custom known as matam, or latm—to express intense grief and solidarity. The practice dates to the seventh century, when Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the son of the founder of Shiism, died in Karbala. Beating chests also signals ongoing belief in Shiite principles.
The disparate responses to Khamenei’s assassination reflect foundational questions about Iran’s future. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian political factions have argued—ferociously and sometimes fatally—about whether the Islamic Republic is foremost Islamic or primarily a republic. Is God’s law, or Sharia, as embodied in the Quran, the basis of the regime’s rule, with the Supreme Leader having the last word? Or is man’s law, as outlined in Iran’s constitution, the basis of government, with elected leaders in the Presidency and parliament shaping the country’s policy? For almost half a century, these questions have pitted so-called principlists against various groups of reformists or centrists. In 1981, Khomeini warned the quarrelling political factions to stop “biting one another like scorpions.”
The Iranian people, too, have fought over these questions. Since 2009 and more intensely since 2017, nationwide protests have sporadically challenged Islamic rule. Many Iranians want either major political reform or an end to the Velayat-e Faqih—the rule of the Islamic jurist—altogether. Tens of thousands have died along the way. The regime has been fragile and fractured for years. The late Harvard historian Crane Brinton, in his classic “The Anatomy of a Revolution,” writes that the final stage of a revolution is “convalescence,” when a society becomes so exhausted that it seeks stability. In these early days, it’s still unclear what potential convalescence might look like—or what kind of stability the people seek.
What’s left of the Iranian regime is now even more vulnerable, as many top political and military leaders have been assassinated in the first two days of war. “Khamenei’s death creates a moment of genuine uncertainty, but it does not automatically translate into immediate regime collapse,” Hamidreza Azizi, an Iranian political scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, in Berlin, told me. “The Islamic Republic anticipated a day-after scenario for a long time and built overlapping institutions capable of maintaining continuity, particularly within the security and military establishment.” Khamenei’s bayt, a term used among Shiites to describe a cleric’s religious and political “house,” employed more than four thousand people; his affiliated institutions employed more than forty thousand. These are separate from the executive, legislative, parliamentary, and military branches, and from other civil-service jobs.
Iran’s military, the largest in the Middle East, is estimated to have more than six hundred thousand members on active duty. “The rapid activation of a transitional leadership structure and the continuation of military operations suggest that authority in Iran has already shifted toward collective decision-making bodies and security actors able to operate under crisis conditions,” Azizi said. “In the near term, this makes systemic survival more likely than sudden political transformation, especially while the country remains engaged in active conflict.”
Iran’s political future becomes far more complicated in the longer term, Azizi noted. Khamenei functioned “as the ultimate mediator among competing factions. Without that arbiter, succession becomes a negotiation among élites taking place under wartime pressure,” he said. One possible scenario is “consolidation around a more security-dominated leadership.” Another is “gradual erosion if prolonged conflict weakens state control,” although, Azizi continued, that “would not necessarily be a clean transition.” And the transition might not play out only in Tehran. The country has a decentralized landscape of security forces that “raises the risk that instability could produce fragmentation or localized violence rather than orderly regime change,” Azizi told me.
On Sunday, Patrick Clawson, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that “a wide spectrum of powerful figures will soon be jockeying for control even as they try to evade military strikes. Yet supposing the regime does manage to survive and designate a new Supreme Leader, no such individual will start out with the same deference given to Khamenei.” Some of the surviving leaders, notably among the Revolutionary Guard, he said, may feel that “they should run the show, with the next Supreme Leader playing a modest role.”
