The career of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who has been killed in a helicopter crash aged 63, was defined by violent events. His initiation into politics was triggered by the 1979 Iranian revolution, one of the most cataclysmic and epoch-shaping events of the late 20th century, which unfolded with headline-grabbing drama as Raisi was just turning 18.
Given the heady fervour of that revolutionary period, with daily mass street demonstrations eventually leading to the toppling of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s once seemingly invincible western-allied monarch, followed by the return from exile of the messianic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to ecstatic acclaim, it is perhaps no surprise that a militant, impressionable young activist was sucked into the political system that took shape in the aftermath, was moulded by it - and later participated in some of its more unsavoury actions.
With the theocratic Islamic regime in its infancy, tottering in the face of often violent internal opposition and military attack from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which invaded Iran in September 1980, the young Raisi cut his political teeth in the fledgling system’s judiciary, administering revolutionary justice to political opponents.
He apparently did so with precocious aplomb and a ruthlessness that some say bordered on cruelty. In 1981, aged only 20, he was appointed prosecutor of Karaj, a large town near Tehran; within four months, he was combining that role with prosecutor of Hamadan province, more than 300km away. Political executions during this period were commonplace, although the young Raisi’s direct role in those were unclear.
By 1985, his ideological commitment and judicial zeal earned him a significant promotion to the post of deputy prosecutor of Tehran, Iran’s sprawling capital. He was now well and truly part of the newly formed establishment, so much so that he eventually came to the direct attention of Khomeini, by now undisputed leader of the revolution, who reportedly gave him extrajudicial responsibilities.
It was this relationship that led to a baleful episode that cast an enduring shadow over Raisi’s career and which, critics say, should be the legacy for which he should be remembered.
In 1988, he was among at least four judicial and intelligence ministry-linked figures later revealed to have been members of a shadowy “death committee” established on Khomeini’s orders to oversee the execution of thousands of political prisoners.
According to varying estimates, between 1,700 and 4,400 prisoners – mostly members of the dissident Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), but also leftists, and many of them reportedly in their teens – were summarily put to death. Amnesty International said many had been subject to torture and inhumane treatment. To this day, the executions represent arguably the worst violation of human rights in the 45-year history of the Islamic Republic.
A surviving political prisoner, Iraj Mesdaghi – a writer and activist now exiled in Sweden – recalls seeing Raisi, dressed in plain clothes rather than clerical robes, arriving at Gohardasht prison in Karaj for the purpose of making sure executions were carried out and personally witnessing them. One photograph of Raisi from the period depicts a very different persona from the austere, turbaned figure of his presidential years.
How Raisi acquired such pitiless zeal is open to question. Born into a clerical family, near the religious shrine city of Mashhad, he had begun seminary studies in Qom – seat of Iran’s Shia Islamic establishment – at the age of 15, studying at the Ayatollah Borujerdi school at a time when the city began to be plunged into a state of pre-revolutionary ferment, with cassettes of the exiled Khomeini’s sermons being distributed among devout opponents to the shah’s rule.
Whatever the antecedents, there can be no doubt that Raisi’s commitment to Khomeini’s puritanical vision of Velayat-e-Faqih (rule by Islamic jurisprudence) was unambiguous and lasting.
Under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as supreme leader after the latter’s death in 1989, Raisi ascended to a series of senior judicial positions that kept him close to the heart of the theocracy, including the role of special clerical court prosecutor from 2012 until 2021 and head of the judiciary. During his two years in the latter post, he oversaw more than 400 executions, according to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights organisation.
At the same time, as the regime under Khamenei – who has the last word on all state matters – turned its face against liberalising reform, Raisi’s political stock rose. With the supreme leader’s apparent approval, he stood in the 2017 presidential election as a conservative candidate but was beaten soundly by the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani, a centrist who had taken on the mantle of a reformist in a climate that had become steadily more intolerant of a loosening of Islamic strictures on social behaviour.
In 2021, once more with Khamenei’s backing, Raisi tried again and this time prevailed, on a historically low turnout of 48.8% and with 3.7m ballots not counted – either because they were deliberately left blank or voters had written in protest choices, in anger over the mass disqualification of other candidates.
As a president he seemed a markedly greyer figure than previous incumbents, such as the populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Mohammad Khatami, the popular cleric who had become a champion of reformism by trying to relax the social impact of Iran’s rigid religious rules.
But the political – and contrasting – effect of having Raisi in office became clear in September 2022 following the mass protests triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman who had been arrested for alleged improper observance of Islamic hijab. Her death spawned a wave of rebellion and the launch of a self-styled movement calling itself “Woman, Life, Freedom”, with women openly flouting strict rules on wearing head covering.
In response, Raisi presided over a brutal clampdown resulting in the deaths, so far, of at least 500 protesters. Repression in the Islamic Republic was not new, but critics detected in the severity of the response an ideological zeal greater even than the crackdown on the 2009 protests that had greeted Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election.
Raisi’s reward for such orthodoxy was to be spoken of as a possible supreme leader-in-waiting, in succession to Khamenei, who is 85. The abrupt ending to his life in a downed presidential helicopter terminates a controversial political career and renders such speculation moot.
Raisi is survived by his wife, Jamileh Alamolhoda, a writer and scholar, whom he married in 1983, and their two daughters.
• Ebrahim Raisi, politician, born 14 December 1960; died 19 May 2024
