The Islamic Republic of Iran has formed an interim transitional council until the Assembly of Experts elects a new Supreme Leader or a Supreme Council of Leadership. By constitution, President Masoud Pezeshkian and Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i are on the council. The Expediency Council has selected Alireza Arafi as its third member. Since 2009, Arafi has been the ideological enforcer of Iran’s proxy network. Domestically, he does not believe in ceding any ground to the people.
Arafi comes from a clerical lineage. His father, the late Ayatollah Mohammad Ebrahim Arafi, studied at the Qom Seminary under many prominent teachers, including Ruhollah Khomeini, whom he supported politically against the Pahlavi regime. The younger Arafi also attended the Qom Seminary, studying under the most dedicated supporters of the fringe velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist) teachers.
Arafi has navigated the line between the clergy and politics. Like his teachers and most others who attain ijtihad rank, Arafi has never held governmental positions that are not exclusive to the clergy. Khamenei once quipped to him, “There have been positions offered to you, but you never accepted them because they conflict with your scholarly work.” He has, however, held senior clerical positions within the government.
Like his teachers and most others who attain ijtihad rank, Arafi has never held governmental positions that are not exclusive to the clergy.
In 2009, Arafi took his first leap in politics. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei combined two clerical think tanks focused on foreign indoctrination to form the Al-Mustafa University and appointed Arafi its head. Al-Mustafa University is the Iranian equivalent of Columbia University: It accepts foreign students and teaches them to be good Islamists who hate America. The seminary students then embed with the Qods Force, which coordinates Iran’s proxies. Arafi liked to emphasize two things: These seminarians all learn fluent Persian, and that the academy reach out to Sunnis. He left the position in 2018. Two years later, the State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organization, emphasizing its role, stating, “The [Qods Force] has recruited Pakistani and Afghan students at Al-Mustafa International University to join the Zaynabiyoun Brigade and Fatemiyoun Division, two militias fighting on behalf of the IRGC–QF [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Qods Force] in Syria that were previously designated under counterterrorism and human rights authorities.
Domestically, the regime began boosting Arafi’s profile. The state propaganda machine publicized and likely exaggerated his father’s association with Khomeini and participation in the Iran–Iraq War, a sign that Khamenei was grooming him as a potential successor. His profile on the Supreme Council of the Seminaries begins with, “His father … was a close friend of Imam Khomeini,” and ends with, “During the [Iran–Iraq War] years, Professor Arafi showed up on the battlefields many times and encouraged the soldiers of Islam.”
Arafi’s next appointment was in 2015, when Khamenei appointed him as the Qom Friday Prayer leader. In 2016, Khamenei made him the Head of Seminaries, which sets the direction of Shi’ite scholarship by appointing seminary heads and teachers. After he left Al-Mustafa University, he ran for the Assembly of Experts, which elects and provides checks and balances on the supreme leader but lost the election. In 2019, Khamenei put him on the Guardian Council, which both fixes elections by deciding who can run for office and reviews bills passed by the parliament, vetoing undesirable ones. In 2022, he ran for the Assembly of Experts again and won, while retaining his other positions.
His public commentary has focused on foreign affairs and aligned with the regime’s talking points. He has defended the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, including the Basij. He once said, “America will take the dream of stopping the Islamic Republic’s defense industry to the grave.” He has also emphasized Iran as the center of “the resistance” and defended “resistance economy,” which means subjugating all economic decisions to foreign policy.
As the head of the Al-Mustafa University, he traveled extensively to Africa to recruit students. In 2016, he said, “I’m in love with Africa. …. If I ever were to live abroad, I would prefer to live in an African country.” He called Africa “Islamic thought’s strategic depth” and boasted, “We have students from almost all African countries.”
His public commentary has focused on foreign affairs and aligned with the regime’s talking points.
Arafi has largely refrained from commenting on domestic politics, though his brother Mohammad, who is the Friday Prayer leader in their hometown of Maybod, once denounced former President Mohammad Khatami’s national reconciliation project and called on Khatami to repent; some analysts have misattributed this comment to Alireza. His domestic commentary largely concerns social issues, such as gender roles, family, and the erosion of Islam and the rise of underground churches.
Arafi did, however, denounce the 2009 protests on multiple occasions, calling them an “American conspiracy.” Separately, during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, he bemoaned that the clergy was ceding ground. He explained, “There is no unified order in evangelizing the religion,” adding that when seminaries decide on something, they are told, “This [matter] is the business of another organization.”
Arafi also believes that a capable military is important. But his connection with the security establishment is not deep, and his enmity with America and the free world is rooted in ideological incompatibility between liberalism and Islam. His work with the proxies and lack of executive responsibility has required ideological indoctrination, not flexibility. His public commentary and seminary work suggest that he believes any compromise should be made in strategy, not in religious values, and that he will favor attention to the proxies. Whether responsibility changes his mind is an open question, but if he rises to more permanent leadership after the war, he will try to revive the role of the clergy, at the expense of the conventional armed forces.
