42 Time October 14, 2019
(2013–present)—Khamenei emasculated
each. In more than two decades research-
ing Iran, both in Tehran and the U.S., I
have learned the most important indicator
of the regime’s behavior is in the speeches
of the Supreme Leader.
Khamenei projects a life of piety and
service. He hasn’t left the nation since
1989 and, apart from a small, trusted
coterie of advisers, is largely inaccessible.
His modest official residence in working-
class central Tehran is hidden from the
public, and his clothing usually consists of
dull robes and cheap slippers. Visitors to
Khamenei’s abode curry favor with him by
publicly recounting its simple decor and
plain dinner menu, often bread, cheese
and eggs.
Among his two daughters and four
sons (all of whom became clerics) only
one, Mojtaba, has a public profile. And
in contrast to Arab first ladies whose
spendthrift ways have fueled popular
anger, Mrs. Khamenei has never been
seen in photographs. Still, the facade was
pierced by a 2013 Reuters investigative
report that revealed Khamenei controls a
$95 billion financial conglomerate, which
he uses as he wishes. The conglomerate
was built on the seizure of property of Ira-
nians, many of them religious minorities,
and holds stakes in sectors as diverse as
oil, telecommunications, the production
of birth control pills and ostrich farming.
But if Khamenei controls more bil-
lions than Trump ever claimed to, his or-
igin story is both humbler and bloodier.
The second of eight children born to a
Shiʻite cleric father in the shrine city of
Mashhad, Khamenei has often romanti-
cized his deprived but devout upbring-
ing, saying he frequently ate “bread and
raisins” for dinner. He was enrolled in
religious education by age 5 and recalls
entering “the arena of jihad” as a teen-
ager, inspired by a radical Shiʻite cleric
complicit in the assassination of several
prominent Iranian secular intellectuals
and government officials in the 1950s.
While studying in Qom—the Shiʻite
Vatican—in his early 20s, Khamenei
came under the tutelage of Khomeini,
who became his lifelong mentor.
At the time, Khomeini was largely
unknown in Iran, but his opposition to
the social reforms—particularly wom-
en’s enfranchisement— and modern pre-
World
tensions of Iran’s ruling monarch, Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, gained him a
loyal following among deeply traditional
seminary students. When the Shah exiled
Khomeini in 1963, Khamenei remained
in Iran disseminating his mentor’s un-
orthodox teachings about Islamic gov-
ernment. Because that theocratic doc-
trine cast the West as a foil to the virtue
of fundamentalist Islam, it made common
cause with Iran’s anti-imperialist liberal
intelligentsia, who resented American
meddling in Iran. Traumas in Khamenei’s
personal history also shape his worldview.
While working underground, he was re-
peatedly arrested for his antigovernmentagitations by the Shah’s secret police
(SAVAK) and endured torture and solitary
confinement. Those who know Khamenei
personally have speculated that the roots
of his hatred toward Israel and the U.S.
go back to this period, since SAVAK was
widely believed to have received assis-
tance from the CIA and Mossad.
When Grand Ayatollah Khomeini re-
turned in triumph in 1979, having over-
thrown the Shah, his disciple was cata-
pulted from anonymity. Khamenei was^
Khamenei and Qasem Soleimani flank
Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr at a
Tehran mourning ceremony on Sept. 10