institute for global

The administration of Iran’s new president, hardline Islamist cleric Ebrahim Raisi, is now crystallising. A student and loyal follower of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Raisi was groomed to become president to ‘purify’ the Islamic Republic. For Khamenei and his hardline followers, purification is necessary to advance the next stage of the Islamic Revolution – the creation of an idealist Islamic state – which, they believe, has not yet been achieved.1

As well as cleansing the system of Western influences, one of the goals of an Islamic state is to make the Islamic Republic more efficient by reversing decades of government mismanagement. To advance this goal, Iran’s clerical regime is aware that it requires trained technocrats and bureaucrats who can implement the regime’s policies.

However, Khamenei and his close circle believe that running an Islamic state requires ideologically devoted technocrats equipped with both modern knowledge and religious-ideological training. The supreme leader and his allies blame decades of mismanagement in the Islamic Republic not on corruption and a lack of technical expertise but on Western-oriented and -educated technocrats not having undergone the ideological-religious training they believe is required to run an Islamic state. As Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, the supreme leader’s representative to Iran’s eastern Khorasan Razavi province and Raisi’s father-in-law, asserted in October 2020, “Belief in the [Islamic] Revolution is the difference between classical and jihadi management styles … if this jihadi management style, which genuinely believes in the revolution and God, enters our social and political life, all the problems can be solved