{"id":2148,"date":"2026-03-08T19:03:47","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/?p=2148"},"modified":"2026-03-08T19:05:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:05:38","slug":"who-is-irans-leader-ayatollah-ali-khamenei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/who-is-irans-leader-ayatollah-ali-khamenei\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Iran\u2019s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sahar Maranlou, Lecturer in Law and Socio-legal Studies, Royal Holloway University of London<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n

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Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1939, as the second son of a local religious leader, Javad Khamenei, and he grew up in relative poverty<\/a>. <\/p>\n

He learned to read the Qur’an in early childhood before attending a theological seminary school in Mashhad. At 18, he travelled to Najaf<\/a> in central Iraq to study Shia<\/a> jurisprudence, but was later asked by his father to return. He was a student of Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi<\/a> and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini<\/a>. <\/p>\n

There is not much known about Khamenei\u2019s family life, except that he is married and has six children. Khamenei\u2019s interest in poetry <\/a> is a well-known part of his public persona. He often cites poems in his speeches and hosts poetry gatherings where pro-government poets gather to read their poems to receive his comments. Khamenei\u2019s interest in literature is quite rare among religious clerics. The same goes for his interest in gardening.<\/p>\n\n

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In the 1960s and 1970s Khamenei was involved in protests<\/a> against the US-backed monarchy (the shah), and was an ardent supporter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then living in exile, and against the \u201cwesternisation\u201d of Iran. This led to his arrest by the shah\u2019s secret police and intelligence operation, the Organisation of National Security and Information (Savak)<\/a>, which suppressed opposition to the shah.<\/p>\n

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the monarch who ruled Iran until 1979, was backed by western powers including the US and the UK. After a decade of economic growth in Iran, mainly based on oil revenues, did not lead to an improvement in the standard of living for ordinary Iranians, a combination of students, intellectuals and clerics created combined support<\/a> for a revolution.<\/p>\n

After the shah was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, Iran became an Islamic republic. Khamenei was appointed as a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Council, which was put in place to manage the revolution, and served as deputy defence minister and led Friday prayers in Tehran, which was considered highly prestigious. <\/p>\n

The new republic adopted an anti-western \u201cimperialist\u201d<\/a> foreign policy. This is known as \u201cglobal arrogance\u201d<\/a> (Estekbar<\/em> Jahani<\/em>) in Iranian post-revolutionary discourse. <\/p>\n

In 1982, he was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, winning 95% of the vote, after the previous president, Mohammad Ali Rajai,<\/a> was killed in a bomb attack in Tehran. Khamenei had been the target of an assassination attempt two months earlier, leaving him with serious injuries and paralysis in his right arm. <\/p>\n

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