Iran has moved swiftly to steady its leadership after the death of longtime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, appointing 67-year-old Ayatollah Alireza Arafi as interim Supreme Leader during a critical period for the Islamic Republic.
Khamenei was killed in joint US-Israeli airstrikes on Tehran early Saturday, triggering only the second leadership transition since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
In Iran, choosing a new supreme leader is meant to be the responsibility of the Assembly of Experts, a body of around 90 senior clerics who are elected every eight years.
Under Iran’s constitution, an interim leadership arrangement takes effect until the body selects a permanent successor. Arafi has been appointed as the jurist member of a temporary Leadership Council alongside President Masoud Pezeshkian and Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei.
Together, they are tasked with carrying out the supreme leader’s duties during the transition period.
WHO IS AYATOLLAH ALIREZA ARAFI?
Born in 1959 in Meybod in Yazd province, Arafi comes from a clerical family and was educated in Qom, Iran’s main seminary city. He rose to the rank of Mujtahid, qualifying him to issue independent Islamic legal rulings. His influence has grown through institutional appointments rather than popular politics.
From 2009 to 2018, he led Al-Mustafa International University in Qom, which trains clerics from Iran and abroad. During his tenure, he claimed the seminary network had converted 50 million people worldwide to Shi’ite Islam over eight years — a figure widely viewed as exaggerated but one that signalled his ambition to expand Iran’s religious reach.
Khamenei steadily promoted him to sensitive posts. Arafi served as Friday prayer leader in Meybod and later in Qom. In 2019, he was appointed to the Guardian Council, the powerful body that vets legislation and election candidates. Analysts say those moves reflected Khamenei’s confidence in his ideological reliability and administrative skill.
Arafi’s electoral record has been mixed. He failed to win a seat in the 2016 Assembly of Experts election in Tehran but entered the body through a 2021 midterm by-election. In the March 2024 vote, he emerged as the top vote-getter in Tehran and later became the Assembly’s second deputy chairman, placing him close to the heart of the succession process.
His rhetoric has often been uncompromising. “America will take its wish for Iran to abandon production of military hardware to the grave,” Arafi said last year. In another speech, he described the United States as an “epicentre of the violation against human rights.”
As Iran observes a 40-day mourning period, attention now turns to how quickly the Assembly of Experts will name a permanent Supreme Leader. For now, Arafi stands at the centre of a historic and delicate transition.
(With inputs from agencies)
