eri later proved to be a controversial choice, however, because he questioned the sta-
tus of the faqih as the all-powerful leader free to make decisions without consulting
fellow clergy members. In addition, other religious leaders—notably Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, then serving as president—considered Montazeri a threat because he held
a higher status as a student of Islam than they did. (Khamenei was a lower-ranking
cleric.)
At the urging of Khamenei and others, an ailing Khomeini in March 1989 dis-
missed Montazeri as his successor and appointed a committee to revise the constitu-
tion. That committee’s revisions gave the supreme leader even more power than before
and at the same time reduced the degree of stature a religious figure would require to
become faqih. While the new constitution was being debated, Khomeini died, on June
3, 1989. His funeral three days later was a dramatic event, memorable for its frantic
mourners and a chaotic scene during which thousands of them upended the litter car-
rying Khomeini’s corpse, forcing soldiers to deliver it to the burial site on a helicopter.
Under the provisions of the new constitution, which had not yet been adopted,
the Assembly of Experts immediately appointed Khamenei as the new supreme leader.
Voters ratified the constitution in a plebiscite on July 29, 1989. A month later, vot-
ers elected Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as president to succeed Khamenei; Rafsan-
jani had been Speaker of the parliament. The constitution had eliminated the post of
prime minister to oversee the day-to-day affairs of the government. This change gave
more power to the president, who was responsible to and could be dismissed by the
supreme leader despite being elected by the citizenry.
Rafsanjani served two terms as president and was succeeded in 1997 by Moham-
mad Khatami, a moderate cleric who also served two terms and made modest changes
in social policy (for example, allowing somewhat greater freedom for women).
Khatami’s program of more serious economic and political reform was blocked, how-
ever, by Khamenei and the clerical establishment, particularly after the police violently
put down a student revolt at Tehran University in July 1999. Among other things,
this event demonstrated the president’s inability to control the security services, which
in theory were under his authority (U.S.-Iranian Relations, p. 395).
In 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former mayor of Tehran, succeeded Khatami
in a surprising electoral victory based on a platform of reinvigorating Khomeini’s rev-
olutionary ideals. Once in office, Ahmadinejad traveled the country promising every
region more jobs and social services, but a sluggish economy made it difficult for him
to keep these promises. The new president also heightened tensions with Europe and
the United States—and ultimately with the UN Security Council—by rejecting efforts
to bring Iran’s nuclear energy program into compliance with international protocols
and allay concerns about the government’s ambitions to build nuclear weapons (Iran-
ian Nuclear Ambitions, p. 404).
Following is a speech delivered by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on April 1, 1979,
in which he proclaims the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran.IRAN 381