It would be utterly wrong to say the senior Ayatollahs in Iran were without scruples. As this article makes plain, Khamenei Snr. has few backers among the clergy any more, and he is equally lacking in respect from other influential conservatives: this is not news. That he is trying to promote his son, who is scarcely a mid-ranking mullah, or that his son is promoting himself, is a wilder story. It flies in the face of common-sense, since a man almost on the ropes does not place the future in the hands of someone severely under-qualified. But nothing in Iran has made much sense in the past two months. The main players are locked into supporting an inherently absurd governmental structure, where any seemingly rational or consensual decision can be overturned by an old man who has one eye fixed on heaven and one ear, presumably, at the well in Qom where the Hidden Twelfth Imam, the Mehdi, can be contacted.
My hunch, reading Borger, is that Mojtada Khamenei is a player, but he is part of yet another faction in the total game. Ostensibly, that would be the Basiji, the ideological militia used to crush the protests in major cities; but nobody could take over the Basiji just because of his father. Borger’s suggestion that the younger Khamenei is following the example of Hashemi Rafsanjani, and has acquired large business holdings, does make some sense of his purported emerging status, however. Money speaks louder than prayers in Iran, as perhaps it always has.