Within hours of the massive explosion near the Tehran compound of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Saturday morning, Israeli and American sources announced — and Iranian state media later confirmed — that Khamenei had been killed.

Across Iranian cities and among diaspora communities, spontaneous celebrations erupted, a catharsis of the public anger accumulated over decades of repression under Khamenei’s regime, including the violent crackdown in January on nationwide protests, in which government forces reportedly killed or detained tens of thousands of demonstrators. But the shock of Khamenei’s death does not necessarily signal the collapse of the security and political apparatus he spent nearly four decades building. This institutional structure of power may indeed be his most enduring legacy.

When the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died in 1989, few political insiders imagined Khamenei as a dominant or transformative successor. Under article 109 of Iran’s constitution, the supreme leader was originally required to hold the status of marja-e taqlid, or a grand ayatollah, the highest level of Shia religious authority — and a qualification Khamenei did not possess.

© The Japan Times