When people try to make sense of Iran, they tend to reach for the usual explanations. They talk about nationalism, long-standing grievances, or the basic logic of how states survive. Those things matter, but they don’t really get to the heart of it. The Islamic Republic isn’t just a political system that happens to lean on religion for support. It’s built out of a theological problem, one that shapes how it understands authority, law, and even history itself. If you miss that, a lot of what Iran does ends up looking confusing—like it’s picking confrontation when it ought to be backing down.

That problem starts with an absence. In Twelver Shiʿism, the one person who is supposed to rule—the Twelfth Imam—isn’t gone, but he’s not accessible either. He’s believed to be alive, just hidden. His authority hasn’t been passed on or dissolved; it’s still there, but no one can fully exercise it. That creates a strange situation. Authority is real, but it can’t quite be carried out. Legitimacy is affirmed in theory, but it never fully shows up in practice. Governments exist, but none of them can claim to be what they’re meant to be.

For centuries, Shiʿi thought didn’t try to solve that tension so much as live with it. Scholars and jurists played a central role—interpreting the law, resolving disputes, guiding everyday life. But they didn’t pretend to stand in for the Imam or erase the gap his absence created. Their authority had clear limits. It was necessary, but it was also understood to be incomplete. Political order held things together, but it didn’t answer the deeper question of who truly had the right to rule.

Khomeini changes that in a significant way. He starts with an argument that sounds straightforward: if divine law is still binding, then it has to be enforced. And if it has to be enforced, then you need real institutions—courts, administration, some way to make people comply. In other words, you need a state. Once you accept that, the next step follows quickly. If the Imam is absent but the law still applies, then someone has to take responsibility for putting it into practice. For Khomeini, that role belongs to the jurist.

It might sound like a modest adjustment, but it isn’t. Earlier ideas about juristic authority stayed within fairly narrow bounds—interpretation, oversight, guidance. Khomeini pushes past those limits and turns the jurist into the one who actually governs. Formally, the jurist is still acting on behalf of the Hidden Imam, not replacing him. But in practice, that line starts to blur. Once you are the one enforcing the law, making decisions, and running institutions, it becomes harder to say you’re not really ruling. Once you are responsible for enforcing the law, you are also responsible for deciding what it requires in real situations. You begin to exercise the kinds of powers normally associated with sovereignty.

That’s where the tension sharpens. The jurist is supposed to be a caretaker, someone acting within a gap created by the Imam’s absence. But the more seriously that role is taken, the more it begins to look like rule in the full sense. A caretaker who must enforce divine law cannot remain modest for long. He has to command, decide, and, when necessary, coerce. The system ends up defining him as something less than a sovereign while requiring him to act like one.

At that point, the problem doesn’t go away—it becomes the structure of the system itself. The Islamic Republic cannot claim full legitimacy, because that still belongs to the Hidden Imam. But it also cannot step back from power, because the law it claims to uphold demands enforcement. It governs in the name of an authority it does not possess, while exercising powers that come very close to that authority in practice. That tension is not something the system occasionally runs into. It is what the system is built on.

And once you see that, certain patterns start to make more sense. If legitimacy is always incomplete, then it has to be continually demonstrated. It can’t simply be assumed. And if it has to be demonstrated, then there is pressure to make that demonstration visible—through enforcement, through ideological clarity, through action. Over time, that pressure tends to intensify. What might otherwise look like caution can begin to appear as failure, even negligence. The system leans toward showing, again and again, that it is aligned with the order it claims to represent.

This is also why dissent becomes difficult to contain within normal political boundaries. In an ordinary system, opposition is part of how politics works. Here, the stakes are different. If the state understands itself as upholding divine law, then disagreement risks being interpreted as something more than disagreement. It can start to look like resistance to the very order that gives the system its meaning. The line between political opposition and moral deviation becomes harder to draw.

The same logic helps explain why the Islamic Republic often looks outward rather than inward. It doesn’t see itself as just another state trying to secure its interests. It sees itself as participating in a larger, unfinished struggle—one that goes beyond its own borders. Its mission is framed in terms that are not merely national, but moral and even historical. From within that perspective, exporting its vision is not simply a strategic choice. It begins to look like part of what the system is there to do.

You can see how this plays out in the way the regime draws on sacred history. The story of Karbala is not just remembered; it is used to interpret the present. Sacrifice is given meaning by linking it to a larger narrative that stretches forward toward the return of the Imam. During the Iran–Iraq War, this way of seeing things moved from rhetoric into lived experience. Martyrdom was not treated simply as loss, but as participation in something larger. Institutions like the Revolutionary Guard took on that role of translating belief into action.

At the same time, the system cannot push this logic all the way without creating problems for itself. If the Hidden Imam becomes too present—if his return is treated as imminent—then the need for a jurist to rule in his absence starts to break down. The system depends on that absence remaining intact. So it ends up managing its own theology, keeping the expectation of the Imam alive, but not allowing it to become too immediate. It has to preserve the gap it relies on.

In the end, what you’re looking at is a political system built around a problem it can’t solve. The Islamic Republic governs in the name of a sovereignty it doesn’t fully possess and, in a sense, never can. It enforces a law that always points beyond itself, to an authority that remains out of reach. That gives the system a certain durability—it always has something to appeal to, something higher to invoke. But it also means the system never quite settles. Its authority is real, but it’s never final, never complete.

So the issue isn’t just that the system hasn’t stabilized yet. It may be that it can’t, at least not on its own terms. A regime that has to keep proving what it cannot fully claim is going to stay in motion. It has to keep asserting itself, keep demonstrating that it really does stand in for what it says it represents. And that creates a kind of restlessness built into the system itself—a constant effort to close a gap that, by definition, isn’t meant to close.

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Eliash, Joseph. “The Ithnaʿashari-Shiʿi Juristic Theory of Political and Legal Authority.” Studia Islamica 29 (1969): 17–30.

Hussain, Jassim M. The Occultation of the Twelfth Imam: A Historical Background. Muhammadi Trust, 1982.

Khomeini, Ruhollah. Islamic Government (Velayat-e Faqih). 1970.

Mavani, Hamid. “Ayatullah Khomeini’s Concept of Governance (Wilayat al-Faqih) and the Classical Shiʿi Doctrine of Imamate.” Middle Eastern Studies 47, no. 5 (2011): 645–666.

Ostovar, Afshon. Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Schirazi, Asghar. The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic. I.B. Tauris, 1998.

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