Dr. Sumit Kumar Pandey, Jadetimes Contributor
Assistant Professor, Department of Media, Communication and Fine Arts, Manipal University Jaipur
"Nobody has heard his voice in months. How can a country carry on when its own leader has gone silent?"
Jaipur, July 10, Since Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei was installed as Iran's Supreme Leader in early March, a week after his father, Ali Khamenei, was killed in US and Israeli strikes, he has not been seen, heard, or read from. No photograph, no recorded address, no written statement. For a country navigating war, sanctions and a still-fresh memory of suppressed unrest, its most powerful office has become an unanswered question.
A recurring concern even among those serving the Islamic Republic – in an informal series of interviews during the past few weeks – is that a faceless government is inviting just what the regime is constructed to avoid: chaos right at the moment when Tehran is being confronted by Washington. Reza, a 44-year-old central Tehran shopkeeper, was among those who spoke to the IPS casually over the last month who said "we have to know somebody is navigating the ship. It's better to have an injured captain than an empty wheelhouse.
The unease is a function of the unusual nature of the office itself. The Supreme Leader is not just a head of state, but a “deputy” of a messianic imam who is said to have disappeared in occultation in the 9th century, and who relies on an “authority that is seen as felt” in addition to having formal power under Iran's constitutional doctrine of velayat-e faqih. It was established in 1979 by Ruhollah Khomeini, who was retained through his own revolutionary charisma. Whereas Ali Khamenei, who was far from Khomeini's stature at the beginning, has been patiently developing his powers with the Revolutionary Guards throughout nearly four decades. Whereas Khomeini's founding legend and decades of accumulated leverage are absent, Mojtaba reportedly enjoys close ties with the Guards.
"He doesn't need to give a speech," one former mid-ranking official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal politics, offered by way of illustration. "He needs to be photographed. Just once. Power in this system has always required a face, not just a signature."
That absence of a face was starkest at Ali Khamenei's own funeral. The gold-domed shrine of the Imam Reza, Shi'ite Islam's holiest site in Mashhad, Iran, was the venue for the funeral prayers, but the new Supreme Leader was not the one to lead these prayers, rather it was his three brothers, all senior clerics, none of whom were recognized as political powerhouses. A grandson of Khomeini, on Mojtaba's behalf, spoke at a separate ceremony for the mourning, a move interpreted by a number of observers as an effort to gain the legitimacy of the founder through another mouth, as the incumbent was unable to lend his own.
Many had hoped that this would be the time when Mojtaba finally emerged, if not in person, then in a video statement or a new photo showing that he is alive and working. None of that ever came to pass. Iran is testing its leader of whom the public never saw lead for the toughest test in years, with the fighting with the United States again displayed this month, the economy still under sanctions and the memory of the violently suppressed protests of January still fresh.
