-Analysis-
A recent sermon by senior Iranian Shia cleric Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri offered a glimpse into his mindset: In the battle between “believers and infidels,” the 63-year-old official said, “half the people in the world will be dying.”
Mirbagheri is a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body tasked with electing the supreme leader. His name is being floated as a possible successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s highest political and religious authority — alongside the more frequently mentioned Mujtaba Khamenei, one of the aging leader’s sons.
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In principle, once the supreme leader dies, the Experts vote for the most suitable successor, though it is widely believed the choice is made behind the scenes and the vote is a formality — like much of Iran’s institutional life.
Mirbagheri, an Assembly member since 2015, rose to relative public prominence months ago when his sympathizers urged him to run for the presidency following the sudden death of President Ebrahim Raisi.
He is reputedly a follower of a notorious regime ideologue, the late Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, who was in past years speculatively associated with the murky killing of writers and critics, and a spate of acid attacks on girls with loose headscarves. Mirbagheri might have a similar mindset.
Regime theoretician
Recently speaking on state television about the Middle East, he said “God has a great plan for the people of the world and that is war between the believers and infidels. This began with Creation and will continue to the end of the world, and victory belongs to the faithful. That is a certainty.”
Mirbagheri said it was alright for half the people in the world to die in that epic battle, “never mind the 42,000 people in Gaza. Of course dying is not a failure but the greatest of blessings. It is in any case a victory.” Many regime supporters already consider him an ideologue or regime theoretician, not unlike Mesbah-Yazdi or Morteza Motahari, a prominent theologian shot in Tehran in 1979.
Having studied with senior clerics, Mirbagheri will have imbibed the ideas of other, former teachers including the ayatollahs Hussein Wahid-Khorasani, Abdullah Javadi-Amoli and Alireza Arafi.
Mirbagheri is a sayyid, or purported descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
Arafi is himself being cited as a possible supreme leader. He is a member of the Guardian Council, the body of constitutional jurists that double-checks legislation, which is an advantage. But Mirbagheri and the younger Khamenei, are sayyids or purported descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima. That may be a bigger advantage.
Mirbagheri’s current responsibilities include running the Islamic Sciences Academy (Farhangistan-e olum-e islami) in Qom, Iran’s religious studies hub. The Academy was founded by another of Mirbagheri old mentors, Muniruddin Hashemi (who died 2000), a member of the first Experts Assembly after the 1979 revolution.
Like most members of that assembly, Hashemi backed the institution of the Wilayat-i faqih or Rule of the (Ranking) Jurisprudent, the regime that effectively has put Iran under the supreme leader’s thumb.
Society without secularism
Mirbagheri is also a fervent servant of the wilayat and has little time for the Experts exercising prerogatives such as overseeing the supreme leader’s performance, believing them to be at best a rubber-stamp body to back the leader as required. He needn’t worry of course, as the body has done precisely that.
Beyond legalities, Mirbagheri favors proselytizing society to rid it of every last shred of secular and republican modernism. He has repeatedly called for “Islamic” universities and may, if the rumors are credible, become one of the rotating preachers at Tehran’s Friday prayers. That usually turns unknown entities into national figures as the Tehran prayers are broadcast nationwide.
Politically he has so far kept a low profile, while steering clear of those tagged as reformists. Such as the late Mesbah-Yazdi he was for a while associated with the rabble-rousing former president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad. That must have ended when Ahmadinejad fell afoul of the leader.
In the 2013 presidential elections, he backed the conservative candidate Saeed Jalili over the winner, the more moderate Hasan Rouhani. In 2021, he supported the very conservative Ibrahim Raisi, who died last May.
Anti-Western
After the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, Mirbagheri blamed the rioting on “those who brought us minimalist Islam.” It wasn’t clear if this was a jab at regime pragmatists or the West, which the Tehran regime accused of undermining religion in Iran, and elsewhere.
It certainly echoed a favored term of the 1980s and 90s, namely “American-style Islam” that meant diluted, casual religion. Since 2022, he has said it is not enough to simply punish the girls who let their headscarves slip, or anyone serving them as customers. Rather, the state must go after everyone in society promoting the end of the hijab or modest clothing.
In 2011-12, Mirbagheri accused the West of promoting Western-style education for women that would inevitably entail “loose living.” College degrees weren’t the type of female education Islam had in mind, he said.
Six years later, he blamed emphasizing female education over family duties for postponing first marriages by “10 years, and clearly in those 10 years, youngsters have urges and need affection, so you need a solution.” Unfortunately, he said, society had come up with “Western-style boyfriends and girlfriends.” The internet, he said another time, is “the devil’s paraphernalia.”
Too extreme?
In 2019, Mirbagheri deplored how young people were enthralled by soccer but “indifferent to the state of the struggle between Hezbollah and the Zionists.” A year later he asked why Western scientists were repeatedly cited as references to science students.
In June 2024, he refused to run for the presidency and asked his supporters to back a “revolutionary government” instead, which led him to back Jalili a second time as candidate. Jalili, a former nuclear dossier negotiator, is another conservative and distrustful of any détente with the West or of economic liberalism. Both believe an “economy of resilience” or autarky would strengthen Iran’s hands against the United States and Western sanctions.
Most recently, Mirbagheri dismissed the often used division between reformists and “hardliners” or conservatives in Iran. The real division, he said, was between a “revolutionary front” and “Westernizers.”
It is doubtful even half of Mirbagheri’s family could accept such opinions.
His recent remarks on television have not gone unnoticed in Iran. The more moderate cleric, Muhammad Taqi Fazel-Meibodi, told the Tehran-based newspaper Hammihan that it was a pity “certain people” kept speaking as religious experts while knowing “nothing about national interests or the world.”
Warmongering and martial provocations, he said, were neither moral nor godly. On X, he separately wrote “4 billion people should die so the gentleman can get what he wants?”
Mirbagheri’s goal, he wrote, was victory for the anti-Israeli Resistance, while “presumably he himself wants to be among the half of the world who will live. What a shame he is speaking in the name of Islam.”
Another reformist and former vice-president, Muhammad Ali Abtahi, wrote on X that he doubted “even half of Mirbagheri’s family could accept such opinions.”
