On June 4, 1989, Imam Khomeini passed away. The next day, the Assembly of Experts chose Ayatollah Khamenei, then fifty years old and serving his second term as president, as Leader of the Islamic Republic.
The office is called wilayat al-faqih, the guardianship of the jurist. It is the highest authority in the Islamic Republic, responsible for protecting the religion, the people, and the direction of the Revolution.
He held it for thirty-seven years, which made him one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world. He described the authority as an amanah: a trust held before Allah, carried among the people, and answerable to the Qur'an and the Ahlulbayt.
4 June 1989
The Assembly of Experts named him Leader the day after Imam Khomeini passed away.
Pillars of Guardianship
Four pillars recur throughout his years of leadership.
Faith
Accountability before Allah
He treated public authority as something the holder answers for before God, and he measured decisions against the Qur'an.
Justice
The cause of the oppressed
He described the Revolution as a movement of the oppressed of society seeking to practice divine teachings.
Unity
One ummah
He rejected sectarian provocation and called Muslims to unite around love for the Prophet and his Household.
Self-Reliance
Independence under sanctions
He answered sanctions and foreign pressure by building internal capacity, scientific knowledge, and refusal to submit.
A Nation Transformed
He oversaw the transformation of Iran's infrastructure, education, science, and culture.
Education
Schools and universities
Literacy campaigns and new universities carried education across the country, and higher study opened to the children of ordinary families. Women came to make up the majority of Iran's university students.
Science
Self-reliance under sanctions
He set scientific progress as a national duty. Under sanctions, Iran built its own capabilities in nanotechnology, stem-cell research, nuclear energy, missiles, and aerospace.
Infrastructure
Building for the deprived
Roads, dams, electricity, water, and clinics reached villages that had none before the Revolution. He kept the deprived regions of the country on the agenda of every government.
Culture
Patron of art and poetry
He met with poets every year, followed literature and cinema closely, and pressed for an Iranian culture confident in its own faith and language.
The Ummah
He taught that the ummah is one body, and that no part of it may be abandoned.
With the Oppressed
He treated the defense of oppressed Muslims as a duty of the Islamic Republic, wherever in the world they were. The Qur'anic word he used was mostazafan: those who are kept weak.
When Bosnian Muslims faced genocide in the 1990s, Iran sent them weapons, military trainers, money, and humanitarian aid while much of the world enforced an arms embargo on the victims. The official Khamenei.ir site records this support as part of Iran's duty toward the oppressed.
He spoke repeatedly for the Muslims of Kashmir, naming them in his messages to the Hajj pilgrims alongside Palestine and calling on Muslims worldwide to support them, even when it strained Iran's relations with India.
The same duty ran through his support for the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen. He taught that the ummah is one body, and that no part of it may be abandoned.
The Decades
Each decade of his leadership had its own test.
In the 1990s he led the reconstruction of a country exhausted by eight years of war. In the 2000s and 2010s, as sanctions tightened, he answered with a policy of self-reliance and scientific progress.
When war came to Syria in 2011, he committed Iran to the defense of Damascus. He understood that the land corridor from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon was the lifeline of the Resistance Front, and he kept it open.
Through it all he remained one of the few Muslim heads of state to openly confront the Zionist entity and American imperialism. That stance cost Iran decades of sanctions and isolation, and in the end it cost him his life. He never abandoned it. In his final decade, Palestine stood at the center of his public speech, and he led Iran until his martyrdom in February 2026.
"The Resistance is alive and must be kept alive. It must become stronger every day."
Ayatollah Khamenei - January 8, 2025
Leadership in Images
His public life brought him together with scholars, martyrs' families, resistance leaders, and ordinary people.
With Imam KhomeiniWith Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah and Qassem SoleimaniWelcoming Ismail HaniyehMeeting families of martyrsMeeting poetsPlanting a saplingReceiving Hungary's Viktor Orban, 2015Receiving Lebanon's Saad Hariri, 2010
