Eventually, referring to the Islamic Republic as a complicated political system in and of itself misses the point. You can analyze its strategy, its regional behavior, and its internal factions, but that only gets you so far. At the center of the system is a claim about authority that is not only political; it is theological, and it shapes how the regime actually functions. If you leave that out, you’re not explaining the system; you’re describing what’s on the surface.

Everything turns on the problem of occultation. In Twelver Shiʿi thought, the Imam hasn’t disappeared in the ordinary sense. He’s still there, but he’s not available. His authority hasn’t lapsed, but no one can exercise it the way he could. That leaves you in a bind. The law is still supposed to govern, but the one person who has the right to enforce it isn’t present. So you’re stuck between two things that don’t quite fit together. You can’t abandon the law, but you also can’t straightforwardly claim that someone else has taken the Imam’s place.

This is where wilāyat al-faqīh comes in. Ruhollah Khomeini’s move was to say that the jurist has to take responsibility for maintaining the system by protecting the law, enforcing it, holding things together. On one level, that sounds like a limited, even cautious claim. The jurist is not the........

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