Ayatollah Khomeini

Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (Born 24 September 1902 in Khomein, Iran; died 3 June 1989 in Tehran) led the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and founded the Islamic Republic of Iran, serving as its first Supreme Leader. He returned from exile in France on 1 February 1979 to become the new state's Singular authority. His core doctrine, velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist), holds that a senior Shia jurist must exercise governmental authority during the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, systematised in his 1970 Najaf lectures and constitutionally enshrined in Articles 5 and 110 of Iran's 1979 constitution. Khomeini also founded the Basij in 1979 as a mass militia, originally conceived as a '20-million-man army' to defend the revolution; it served in human-wave assaults during the Iran-Iraq War and became the domestic coercion apparatus that persists today.

Khomeini's successors treat his fatwas and pronouncements as binding precedent. Death Commission member Mostafa Pourmohammadi stated publicly in 2016, 'We are proud we have implemented God's order', referring to the 1988 executions, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei labelled the 1988 victims 'terrorists'. Iranian hardliners routinely invoke Khomeini's authority to suppress dissent, treating velayat-e faqih as a permanent constitutional settlement and any reformist challenge as illegitimate under his framework. His portrait still appears on Iranian banknotes and public buildings; his political-theological architecture, not just his memory, is the structure the Islamic Republic operates within.

In July 1988 Khomeini issued a secret fatwa ordering the systematic execution of political prisoners. A Death Commission, judge Hossein-Ali Nayyeri, Tehran prosecutor Morteza Eshraqi, deputy prosecutor-general Ebrahim Raisi and Intelligence Ministry official Mostafa Pourmohammadi, classified prisoners as moharebs (those who war against God) and hanged them in groups across at least 32 cities; Amnesty International and Montazeri's memoir put the death toll at 2,800 to 5,000. The current wartime execution cadence at Ghezel Hesar and Yazd Central Prison is compared by human rights monitors directly to 1988: both use moharebeh charges, Islamic Revolutionary Courts outside ordinary criminal procedure, and accelerated timelines under military pressure. Khomeini set a further precedent for reluctant wartime concessions: in July 1988 he accepted the Ceasefire ending the eight-year Iran-Iraq War only after continued fighting became untenable, describing the decision as 'more deadly than drinking a poisoned chalice'.