The spectacular failure of political Islam

The Islamic Republic of Iran awoke on Sunday to its most profound rupture since 1979.

- * By MENAHEM MERHAVI

PEOPLE MARCH after Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an air strike in Basra, Iraq, yesterday. For the first time since the revolution, the office that fused divine sovereignty with state power stands vacant not through natural succession but through abrupt termination, the writer says. (Mohammed Atfy/Reuters)

(Mohammed Atfy/Reuters)

Tehran officially confirmed the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei alongside several senior officials and commanders of the Revolutionary Guards.

For the first time since the revolution, the office that fused divine sovereignty with state power stands vacant not through natural succession but through abrupt termination. This is not merely a leadership transition. It is a structural moment. A system built on concentrated theological authority must now confront the question it has long deferred: Is its legitimacy institutional or personal?

To grasp the magnitude of this moment, one must see it not as an isolated shock but as the culmination of a decades-long political experiment.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was one of the boldest political experiments of the 20th century. It attempted to resolve a profound theoretical problem: Can a modern, sovereign, national state operate not merely inspired by religion but under the full sovereignty of binding religious truth? An Islamic one specifically?

This was not an exclusively Iranian question. Since the 19th century, Muslim societies have grappled with the dilemmas of the modern state: sovereignty, bureaucracy, nationalism, civil law. In the West, the tension was resolved through some sort of separation between religion and state.