When the Supreme Leader Disappears: The Politics of Occultation in Iran

On March 8, eight days after the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes killed his father, Mojtaba Khamenei became the third Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. He was selected by the Assembly of Experts, the elected body of clerics with the constitutional authority to appoint and remove the Supreme Leader. As of late summer, the public has yet to see him. Only an undated, short video without audio surfaced, apparently showing him in conversation with President Masoud Pezeshkian. His first message as the new leader, in mid-March, was read out by a state television anchor, with a still image of his face in the background. It seemed like a scene from another age: no live updates, no high-resolution images, and no curated public appearance, all of which have become hallmarks of Iran’s sophisticated media environment.

In late April, The New York Times, citing unnamed Iranian officials, reported that the new Supreme Leader had suffered severe burns to his face and lips, was awaiting a prosthetic for his leg after three surgeries, and sustained injuries to a hand and burns that impaired his speech.

The same NYT sources said that Mojtaba Khamenei governs through written notes, delivered by motorcycle couriers and passed from hand to hand through a chain of commanders. This uncanny form of politics echoes precedents enshrined in Shiite historical memory.

Before he became Supreme Leader, Mojtaba served as his father’s vakil, a person authorized to act in his name. For 18 years, from 2008 until March 2026, he was one of his father’s closest aides in the Office of the Supreme Leader — the central institution that directs and oversees political, diplomatic, economic, military, and educational affairs in Iran. When the U.S. and Israel assassinated his father, the younger Khamenei disappeared from public view amid security concerns over his life, preserving the chain of political continuity through what amounted to a form of occultation.

Occultation is a central doctrine in Twelver Shiism: it refers to the rightful leader of the community withdrawing from public view while retaining political, spiritual, and religious authority.

There is a historical and theological precedent that remains deeply resonant across Iran. In 874 CE, the eleventh Shia Imam, Hasan al-Askari, died, according to Shia tradition, after being poisoned by the Abbasid caliph. His young son, Muhammad al-Mahdi, is believed in Twelver tradition to have inherited the imamate and disappeared from the public eye.

When the U.S. and Israel assassinated his father, the younger Khamenei disappeared from public view amid security concerns over his life, preserving the chain of political continuity through what amounted to a form of occultation.

The line of succession, after all, had never been without its tensions, its contenders, or its struggles — present from the time of Ali ibn Abi Talib, assassinated while leading dawn prayer in Kufa. 

For nearly seven decades, according to Twelver Shia tradition, the divinely concealed Twelfth Imam exercised his authority through deputies — men who received his written rescripts, or towqi‘at, and carried his instructions to the believers. This period is known as the “Minor Occultation” (260–329 AH; 874–941 CE). Then, in 329 AH / 941 CE, the line of deputies came to an end, and the “Major Occultation” began — an ongoing phase in which the Imam withdrew from all contact, present in the world yet hidden from it, sovereign and unreachable, until his promised return.

The imams who preceded him had been, in Shia memory, a line of the hunted: poisoned, surveilled, kept under the watchful eye of successive caliphs. The tenth and eleventh Imams — Ali al-Hadi and his son Hasan al-Askari — were held for years under Abbasid supervision in Samarra, in the military quarter known as al-‘Askar, from which the latter’s appellation al-Askari was derived.

Al-Askari’s son is the Mahdi, or “the Guided One,” the Twelfth and last of the imams. He is also called Imam-e Zaman, “the Imam of Time,” a title signifying his status as God’s proof in the present age and the hidden Imam whose return is awaited at the end of time. His occultation would become foundational to Twelver Shiism.

The post of Supreme Leader in the Islamic Republic of Iran is, in this sense, the political heir during this historical occultation. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, developed a political theory for the exercise of authority in the absence of the Mahdi, the rightful leader in occultation, physically concealed from the world while remaining alive and in command.

Khomeini was not the first to grapple with the question of deputyship: what to do in the absence of the rightful leader has long been a central question in Shia jurisprudence. Khomeini, however, transformed this longstanding question into a theory of political rule, asserting that jurists could exercise authority in the absence of the Twelfth Imam. It was a doctrine about absence, about what must be done while the Imam remains in occultation.

The imams who preceded him had been, in Shia memory, a line of the hunted: poisoned, surveilled, kept under the watchful eye of successive caliphs.

During his years in exile, in the 1960s and 1970s, amid mounting popular anger at the Shah’s repressive rule and the rise of revolutionary ideas among Marxists and Islamists, Khomeini reformulated the idea of “Guardianship of the Jurist” — velayat-e faqih — a longstanding category in Twelver Shia jurisprudence that had traditionally accorded jurists authority over more limited religious, legal, and social matters.

Khomeini’s innovation was to transform this more restricted juridical concept into a comprehensive political theory. In the absence of the Twelfth Imam, he argued, the most qualified and just jurist assumes full sovereign authority as the Imam’s deputy until his return. This theoretical claim was subsequently codified in Iran’s 1979 Constitution.

Under the constitutional and political-theological formulation, the Supreme Leader — the rahbar in Persian — exercises authority during the Imam's occultation. He is also the rahbar of the Islamic Republic of Iran, head of a modern state with all its complex political, economic, social, and logistical infrastructures.

This already powerful position was further expanded through constitutional reforms passed in 1989, following the end of the eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Accepting UN Security Council Resolution 598 — a ceasefire with a regime he considered illegitimate, a decision he likened to a "poisoned chalice" — Khomeini initiated a constitutional review that consolidated the Supreme Leader's authority, expanding the doctrine of velayat-e motlaqe-ye faqih.

The doctrine of absolute guardianship further expanded the Supreme Leader’s authority, allowing him to override institutional constraints within the republican system when deemed necessary to protect the interests of the state or Islam. Although this expansive conception of the Leader’s authority was criticized by prominent clerics, it remains embedded in the political order. 

In 2026, however, the very institution created to exercise authority during the Imam’s occultation is led by a figure who is himself withheld from public view. Perhaps this is a turn of events for which the symbolic ground had been laid over the first four decades of the Islamic Republic. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was at times referred to as “Imam,” an honorific that had become firmly associated with Khomeini before him, in a popular rather than theological manner. 

There are twelve Imams in Twelver Shia Islam, and the divine chain of political succession was suspended with the occultation of the Mahdi. He ceased to be seen to evade Abbasid persecution — a historical context for what is understood within the tradition as a divinely ordained concealment. (By contrast, other Shia traditions, such as the Nizari Ismailis led by the Agha Khan, maintain a hereditary Imamate, passed through designated succession within the Imam’s male descendants.) The Imam in occultation will return at the end of time; Jesus Christ also returns, joining the Mahdi in the final struggle against al-Masih ad-Dajjal, literally the “Deceitful Christ,” or the false Messiah, who is ultimately defeated by the Mahdi.

In 2026, the very institution created to exercise authority during the Imam’s occultation is led by a figure who is himself withheld from public view.

After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic expanded the sacred dimension of the state by adopting the category of martyr (shahid, pl. shuhada’) for people who lost their lives in its service or defense: during the Iran-Iraq War; the “War on Drugs” fought by Iranian soldiers and law enforcement, particularly along Iran’s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan; the war against ISIS; and the ongoing war with Israel and the United States. 

Along with this process of sacralization of the state, velayat-e faqih moved beyond a jurisprudential doctrine to justify clerical authority in politics during the Imam’s absence and became the very foundation of the modern republican state’s sovereignty. With the recent turn in the war, the doctrine has brought the politics of the Islamic Republic into closer alignment with Shia political theology. The authority of Khomeini, and now of the Khameneis, father and son, is situated within a political-theological lineage traced back to Ali, Husayn, and the early leaders of the Shia community who opposed imperial power.

In parallel, different ideological groups within Iran have cultivated since the early 2000s an elaborate apparatus around entezar — the duty to wait for the Twelfth Imam. The expansion of the shrine at Jamkaran, where pilgrims drop written petitions into a well for the Mahdi’s intercession with the divine, accelerated significantly after 2005 under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and stands as a monumental expression of this culture of waiting and expectation.

The authority of Khomeini, and now of the Khameneis, father and son, is situated within a political-theological lineage traced back to Ali, Husayn, and the early leaders of the Shia community who opposed imperial power.

This year, with the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the maddahan, or religious eulogists, who have come to play a prominent role in state and public rituals, recast the Leader’s invisibility into a political and spiritual destiny through elegies recited in collective gatherings and distributed online. Their lyrics fold the unseen Mojtaba into the lament for the Hidden Imam and Imam Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson, killed with his companions at Karbala on the tenth of Muharram in 61 AH — October 10, 680.

This year, ‘Ashoura fell on June 25. Just over a week later, funeral processions for the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei took place across Iran and Iraq, culminating in his burial in the holy city of Mashhad, at the Dar al-Dhikr prayer hall adjacent to the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam. The maddahan stood at the center of the commemorations, performing their nowheh (elegies) amid stirring theatrics and cascading light displays, as religious-nationalist sentiment reached its peak.

The maddahan are professional reciters of grief, distinct from the clerical office, yet supported by public institutions, including those linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Through their recitations, they have cultivated a cultural politics in which the martyrdom of Imam Husayn and his companions has become integral to how Iran understands its geopolitical struggle with the U.S. and Israel. Through this history and symbolism, collective emotion and political aspiration converge in the promise of a world to come. 

During the Ahmadinejad years (2005–13), the work of the hey’at, religious associations organized around Shia devotional and mourning gatherings such as those held for ‘Ashoura, became increasingly visible in Iranian public life. Some hey’at, in keeping with the president’s messianic style, invoked the Mahdi in connection with the escalating geopolitical conditions of West Asia. The former president himself made recurrent references to the Mahdi, at times suggesting that the Hidden Imam guides the affairs of the state.

Iranians have since witnessed the rise of an organized religious nationalism, enmeshing the ancient pre-Islamic past with Shia eschatology, concerning the coming end of times. This overlapping of the ancient past with religious expectations for the future has gained prominence in state and public discourse surrounding the U.S.-Israeli imperial war on Iran. Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff and close adviser, referred to this new ideological vision as maktab-e Irani, or the “Iranian school.”

Against this backdrop of Iranians burying their dead after the U.S.-Israeli strikes and the killings in the streets last winter, occultation can sacralize a living ruler withheld from public view, while martyrdom can place a slain sovereign within a longer mythic-historical narrative, one that predates Shiism. Within this expanded frame, martyred leaders and protesters killed in the streets can become part of a shared, even if contested, historical narrative of the land of Iran.

Before there was Husayn, there was Siyavash, the hero celebrated in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), an epic poem composed in the tenth and eleventh centuries that preserves the myths, legends, and historical memory of pre-Islamic Iran. 

Siyavash is a prince who leaves the Iranian court of his father, King Kay Kavus, and takes refuge with the enemy king Afrasiab in Turan, where he is eventually slandered and murdered in cold blood. His throat was cut over a basin so his blood wouldn’t fall to the earth. Yet the blood fell anyway, the story goes, and a beautiful plant sprang up, an image preserved by Iranians to this day in the name par-e siavashan, or “Siyavash’s Feather.” 

Ferdowsi’s lament for Siyavash is one of the oldest sustained laments in Persian literature:

He cut that kingly head off his body / and let it upon the grass like an upright cypress

…

On a barren ridge where no plant ever grows, / they spilled his blood upon that burning dust

Narshakhi, writing his History of Bukhara in the tenth century, records that the people of that city had songs for mourning the killing of the legendary Siyavash. Their singers called these laments “the weeping of the Magians” — and these, he says, had been sung for three thousand years. 

He records an annual mourning ritual known as kin-e Siyavash, or “The Vengeance of Siyavash” — a tradition that Ferdowsi later gave literary form in his epic, the Shahnameh. This ritual was an occasion to mourn  murdered innocents and appeal to “the blood-claim of Siyavash.”

Before there was Husayn, there was Siyavash, the hero celebrated in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), an epic poem composed in the tenth and eleventh centuries that preserves the myths, legends, and historical memory of pre-Islamic Iran.

The rituals of mourning Siyavash were already ancient when the events of Karbala took place. And as Muslims in the Persianate world later started performing the ta‘ziyeh, the passion drama of Muharram commemorating Imam Husayn’s martyrdom, one could hear echoes of the pre-Islamic lament told in Ferdowsi’s tale about Siyavash. In this overlapping of Shiism and Iranian mythology and literature, both cornerstones of today’s public culture, what emerges at the center is the land of Iran itself, where popular tales of injustice, martyrdom, and revenge have long provided a language for understanding political struggle and calls to arms.

In one instance, the poem recites:

“All the cities of Iran are heartbroken and have tied their belts for Siavash’s revenge.”

The story returns again and again to the idea of the legitimate, the gifted, and the innocent, destroyed by those who hold power and fear losing it. Mourning becomes a verdict on the killers and is part of the act of fighting against injustice. Throughout, the Shahnameh narrates a long lineage of martyrs and innocent victims of imperial, military power.

It is not difficult, then, to see why a culture steeped in mourning the righteous, the virtuous, and the legitimate leader of a people should have taken to Karbala as a paradigm to make sense of the longstanding battle against foreign enemies threatening or attacking the land of Iran; nor why the Islamic Republic — which has made a state liturgy out of mourning — should reach for it now more than ever. 

Those who frame and denigrate the rituals of martyrdom and mourning in Iran as expressions of religious fanaticism risk losing sight of a longer historical and ethical trajectory. In that tradition, the defense of the land of Iran is narrated through tales of martyrs: from the innocent Siyavash to the faithful Esfandiar, who obeys the king’s command to bring Rostam before the royal court in chains, despite recognizing the injustice of the order, and is ultimately killed in battle with the great Rostam, another Iranian hero.

Occultation may emerge as a novel paradigm of political sovereignty: one in which the sovereign cannot appear in public and authority must instead be exercised from concealment.

Ultimately, mythologies of martyrdom and occultation are both political expedients and a language through which political struggle, war, justice, and legitimate authority can be understood in Iran.

With the third chapter of the U.S.-Israeli war now in full swing, occultation may emerge as a novel paradigm of political sovereignty: one in which, faced with the hypertechnological killing machine of imperial armies and their collaborators in surveillance and intelligence, the sovereign cannot appear in public and authority must instead be exercised from concealment. 

How exactly such a system might work remains unclear. Iran’s authorities and its people are experimenting with how to navigate circumstances without precedent in the history of the Islamic Republic. Iran — an ancient land that has witnessed many wars over its long history — and the world are now at a crossroads of what may later be named World War III.

In this tragic landscape, many Iranians prepared for the rites of Muharram, the sacred month during which the faithful mourn Imam Husayn, his family, and his companions, killed at Karbala more than thirteen centuries ago by an unjust imperial army. They looked to history, religion, and mythology to make sense of another absence: the occultation of Iran’s Supreme Leader. 

In this moment of imperial hubris, the U.S. and Israel may have handed Mojtaba Khamenei a legitimacy he would not have gained otherwise.