Like Father, Like Shah
Iran’s revolutionaries overthrew a king. Now they’re preparing to crown a prince.
The Bishops Avenue in north London, the stretch of gated estates commonly known as Billionaires’ Row, is one of the most expensive residential streets in the world. It is also, according to a year-long Bloomberg investigation, a place where the 56-year-old son of Iran’s slain Supreme Leader has been quietly parking a part of his fortune. Security-guarded and largely unoccupied, several mansions on the avenue are linked through layered offshore companies to Mojtaba Khamenei. This is what the Islamic Revolution has produced: not the just society of learned clerics that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini promised in 1979, but secret property holdings in the capital of the old colonial enemy, amassed by the heir apparent to the throne his father’s revolution was supposed to have abolished.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Mojtaba is the frontrunner to succeed his father as Supreme Leader — and that the Assembly of Experts, the 88-member clerical body tasked with choosing the next leader, could announce its decision as early as Wednesday. Multiple outlets, including CNN and Euronews, have since reported that the selection has effectively been made — not through the deliberation of theologians but under direct pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
If confirmed, the appointment won’t merely be controversial — it will be the Islamic Revolution’s death certificate.
The revolution was, above all else, a revolution against hereditary rule. In 1979, Iranians didn’t just overthrow a king, they toppled the very idea of kingship. Khomeini’s great promise was that sovereignty belonged not to bloodlines but to God, exercised through the wisdom of learned religious jurists. Iran’s twenty-five centuries of monarchical tradition were to be replaced by something nobler, more just, more divine: the guardianship of the Islamic scholar. Forty-seven years later, if the reports are correct, the scholar is about to be replaced by the son.
To understand how far removed from the revolution this would be, start with the theology, because that is where the regime always insists its legitimacy begins. The doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, is not some decorative appendage of the Iranian system. It is the system’s founding principle, the philosophical core around which the constitution was written and the revolution was justified. The Supreme Leader is supposed to be, in the literal meaning of the title, a supreme scholar: a senior Shia jurist whose authority derives from deep mastery of Islamic law and whose legitimacy rests on recognition by his clerical peers.
Mojtaba Khamenei is none of these things. He holds the rank of Hojatoleslam — a mid-level clerical title, roughly analogous to a parish priest aspiring to become pope. Leaked American diplomatic cables, cited by the United Against Nuclear Iran research project, indicated he was not expected to achieve the status of mujtahid — an independent religious authority — through his own scholarship. When emissaries traveled to Qom to seek endorsement of Mojtaba as a marja, a source of emulation, the grand ayatollahs reportedly rebuffed them: one refused even to meet them; the others declined to give their assent.
Mojtaba’s backers will no doubt note that Ali Khamenei himself was no ayatollah when he was elevated to the supreme leadership in 1989. His clerical title was essentially engineered after the fact; the constitutional revision council had to loosen the qualifications to fit the candidate. This is true. But there is a difference — a chasm, really — between the father and the son that the apologists would prefer to elide.
Ali Khamenei was a genuine revolutionary. He had been arrested six times by the Shah’s secret police. He had been exiled. He carried a paralyzed right arm from an assassination attempt by the Mujahedin-e Khalq. He served eight years as president during the Iran-Iraq War, the most existential crisis the young republic had faced. The Qom establishment could stomach the theological shortcut because the man had earned his authority the old-fashioned way, through suffering and service to the cause. Whatever his deficiencies as a scholar, no one could question his revolutionary credentials.
His son has no such credentials to offer. Mojtaba was nine years old when the Shah fell. He has never held a formal government position. He has produced no scholarship of note. He has governed nothing. His qualifications, such as they are, consist of a surname, a network of IRGC generals cultivated over decades in the shadows, and those mansions on Billionaires’ Row.
The revolution bent its principles to elevate Ali Khamenei. It will have to break them to enthrone Mojtaba.
Revolutions have a well-documented habit of becoming what they set out to destroy. The French Revolution, which executed a king in the name of liberty, produced an emperor within a decade. The Russian Revolution, which murdered a tsar in the name of the workers, produced a tyranny more absolute than any Romanov’s.
But we need not reach so far back for precedent. In North Korea, the Kim dynasty has sustained a revolutionary republic in name while operating a hereditary dictatorship in practice for three generations — each succession draining a little more of the founding ideology’s already meager credibility. And in Syria, Hafez al-Assad built a Baathist republic on the promise of Arab socialist renewal, then handed it to his son Bashar, who ran it as a family franchise until the whole edifice came crashing down in December 2024.
Here’s hoping Iranians don’t have to wait as long — or suffer as much — as the Syrians did before the Islamic Revolution runs out of road.