Despite his low profile, Mojtaba has been seen for decades as a kind of “guardian” of Ali Khamenei and a figure of great influence among Iran’s elites.
Mojtaba Khamenei had long been tipped to succeed his father, Ali Khamenei, as Supreme Leader of Iran, despite the ayatollah’s alleged discomfort with the idea of creating a dynasty reminiscent of the Pahlavi monarchy, which he himself helped to overthrow in 1979.
Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, is the second son of Ali Khamenei, killed a week ago in joint US and Israeli attacks. In addition to the father, his mother, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, his wife and a son were also killed in Saturday’s attacks.
Born in 1969 in Mashhad, an important religious center in Iran, close to the borders with Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, Khamenei grew up watching his father lead the opposition to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Ten years later, the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded.
After completing secondary school at Alavi High School in Tehran, where the children of many officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran study, Mojtaba Khamenei joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps around 1987, and served during the final period of Iran’s war with Iraq (1980-1988). From then on, Mojtaba cultivated deep ties with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which continue to this day.
In the late 1990s, Mojtaba studied with some of the most prominent conservative clerics of Shia Islam at the seminary in Qom, the holy city for Shiism. Afterwards, he also began teaching, maintaining strong links with Iran’s top clerics.
Mojtba ended up living in his father’s “shadow”, working mainly behind the scenes in the Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran. Mojtaba never held a formal position in the government of the Islamic Republic and rarely spoke in public. Just check that there are few photographs of Mojtaba released to the public, and those that exist are almost all from the same event, when he participated in a demonstration on the 41st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, on February 11, 2020.
Despite his low profile, Mojtaba has been seen as a figure of great influence among Iran’s elites for decades.
The accusations of electoral interference and the defense of the father
In 2005, however, Mojtaba Khamenei was at the center of a controversy related to alleged interference in the presidential elections, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative relatively unknown to the public, suddenly appeared in the final days of the campaign and won the elections against heavyweights in Iranian politics. Reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi accused Mojtaba, “the son of a leader”, of using his connections to influence Ahmadinejad’s election. The Supreme Leader defended his son, describing him as “a leader, not the son of a leader.”
Four years later, Mojtaba was again accused of interfering in the elections, when Ahmadinejad, who until then had failed to deal with the economic problems in Iran and adopted an international provocative stance, obtained a much higher percentage of votes than expected. The Guardians of the Revolution found discrepancies in the votes, but concluded that these differences were not significant enough to affect the outcome.
Despite the verdict of the Guardians of the Revolution, the opposition accused Mojtaba of having interfered in the elections and the people soon took to the streets, in a movement known as the Green Movement of 2009. According to Al Jazeera, Mojtaba used the Basij paramilitary force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to suppress the demonstrations, which were mostly peaceful, with brutal repression.
Mojtaba’s religious status has also been a matter of controversy, given that he is a hojatoleslam, an intermediate-level cleric, and not an ayatollah, of higher rank. However, as , his father, Ali Khamenei, was also not an ayatollah when he assumed leadership of Iran in 1989, and the law was changed to allow his appointment as Supreme Leader of Iran. The same is likely to be done now for Motjtaba, writes Al Jazerra.
In 2024, Iran’s Assembly of Experts met to plan the Supreme Leader’s succession. According to , Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated at the time that his son should be excluded from the equation, fearing that his name would sound familiar, like a dynasty, which he himself helped to overthrow in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
According to some analysts, however, the choice of Khamenei as Supreme Leader of Iran could be interpreted as a sign that members of the most radical wing of the Revolutionary Guard remain in power, and that they are not willing to give it up.
