We Are Finally Free From Khamenei’s Suffocating Gaze

Opinion|We Are Finally Free From Khamenei’s Suffocating Gaze

The face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has loomed over every significant milestone of my life — of everyone’s life — in Iran. The requisite photo of him that was hung in every public space, where people learned, worked, lunched, transacted, watched theater, saw art and visited the doctor, altered over the years. In my youth, in his middle age, his image was toothy and callow. As the years passed, his expression grew truculent, his beard gray. But he was always there, always watching.

You get the face you deserve, said Henri Cartier-Bresson. Ayatollah Khamenei never developed the fleshy, decayed look of Muammar el-Qaddafi or the hooded rage of Saddam Hussein. Age turned his image haughty and domineering, rather than mad and ravaged. Yet he outlived them, our seemingly immortal dictator, resisting every effort to oppose and resist him — at the ballot box, through elite maneuvering, through sly satire, through years of protests, first by varying segments of society and then increasingly most of them at the same time.

The permanence of his image signified the control of the regime. His baleful gaze insisted on its preservation at any cost, with a brutality that created thousands of other images framed and placed in Iranian homes: remembrances of the citizens who protested and defied the system over the years and were killed by his coercive apparatus.

Now he is dead, killed by the American and Israeli military campaign underway. Will another face replace his and carry on a version of the same story, collapsing what is true and what is false? Will the regime elite reshuffle itself, dispense with the business of having a symbolic face at all and recalibrate in order to survive? This is the dreaded scenario, a riff on the outcome in Venezuela, in which a pragmatic regime figure assumes power and brokers a cease-fire with the United States, meeting Washington’s surrender demands in return for allowing the regime to carry on in some zombie form, its fundamental nature intact. Surviving at any cost was always worth it to the supreme leader, and this outcome would be his vindication.

The ayatollah peered over us during our most banal and our most intimate moments. He was on the wall when I married in a notary office and when I checked into the hospital to have my son. He was on the wall of the office where I received my first press card to report my first story in Iran.

It was July 1999, a decade into his supreme leadership. In the middle of a summer night, plainclothes police officers and militiamen raided a dormitory at the University of Tehran. Students earlier that day protested the closure of a reformist newspaper, and for that they were punished. The militiamen broke into their rooms, set their beds and belongings on fire and threw several of the students out of windows. Four were killed, and hundreds were wounded or detained.