The West gave Iran a name — theocracy — and buried the reality beneath it. They never told you that Khomeini spent decades mastering one of the most rigorous legal traditions in human history, or that he built a constitutional republic ratified by 98% of the Iranian people in a free referendum. A nation of fanatics can be bombed with a clear conscience. A constitutional republic of 93 million people, founded by a supremely gifted jurist, is harder to dispose of.
Read what they did not want you to know.
What They Never Told You: Ayatollah Khomeini Was a Great Jurist, Not a Fanatic
By Lim Tean
I want to tell you something that may surprise you.
Iran has a constitution.
It has an elected parliament. It has a president chosen by popular vote. It has a supreme court. It has a body analogous to a constitutional review council. It has institutional checks between competing centres of power. And the entire edifice was founded not by a raving fanatic, but by one of the most rigorously trained legal scholars the Islamic world produced in the twentieth century.
None of this fits the cartoon. So the cartoon persists — and the reality is quietly buried.
The Word They Chose — And What It Conceals
The Western establishment gave Iran a label: theocracy. It is a word chosen with care, because it does the work of a thousand propaganda campaigns without requiring a single argument. Say theocracy, and the images follow automatically — wild-eyed mullahs brandishing the Quran, irrational zealots governing by religious hysteria, a people held captive by medieval fanaticism. The word is designed to foreclose thought, not invite it.
But here is what that word conceals. Every system of government rests, ultimately, on a foundation of law and values. The United States rests on constitutional liberalism and common law tradition. France rests on the Napoleonic code and republican secular principles. The Islamic Republic of Iran rests on the traditions of Islamic jurisprudence — one of the oldest, most sophisticated, and most demanding legal traditions in human history. To call this theocracy, and to deploy the word as an insult, is not analysis. It is a deliberate smear, designed to make a constitutional system appear illegitimate so that it may be isolated, sanctioned, and bombed with a clear conscience.
For decades, the Western press and the Washington establishment have presented Iran through a single, flattening lens: a state run by crazy, Quran-thumping mullahs, governed not by law but by religious hysteria, hostile to reason, allergic to modernity, and therefore — crucially — unworthy of the basic respect we extend to other sovereign nations and their peoples.
I believed this once. In my younger years, I absorbed this narrative as most people do — through newspapers, television, the casual assumptions of educated opinion. It seemed self-evident.
Then I began to read seriously. And what I found was not merely a more complicated picture. It was an almost complete inversion of what I had been told.
The Great Jurist, Not the Fanatic
To understand the Islamic Republic of Iran, you must begin where it begins — with a concept, and with the man who gave it modern form.
The concept is velayat-e-faqih. It translates, with reasonable accuracy, as the guardianship — or governance — of the Islamic jurist. When I first encountered this phrase, I was struck by a single word: jurist. Not guardian of the mullahs. Not rule of the clerics. Guardianship of the jurist — a person learned in the law. The choice of that word is not incidental. It is the entire point.
Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic, was not primarily a preacher. He was a faqih — a master of Islamic jurisprudence. But to say only this is to dramatically understate the scale of his scholarly achievement. Khomeini's ascent through the clerical hierarchy of Shia Islam was one of the most rigorous intellectual journeys any scholar of the twentieth century could undertake.
He moved to the holy city of Qom in 1922, studying under Ayatollah Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi, the legendary scholar who re-established Qom as the intellectual capital of Shia scholarship. By his mid-thirties, Khomeini had received his certification of Ijtihad — the formal qualification of independent legal reasoning. This made him a Mujtahid: a jurist capable of deriving new legal rulings directly from Islamic primary sources — the Quran and Hadith — rather than merely following the rulings of earlier scholars.
But Khomeini did not stop there. Beyond law and jurisprudence, he distinguished himself by teaching philosophy, ethics, and Islamic mysticism — irfan. By the 1940s and 1950s, he was a highly sought-after professor in Qom. Hundreds of students packed his lectures. He was teaching not merely the rules, but the complex logic behind how laws were made.
His rise to Grand Ayatollah — Marja' al-Taqlid, or Source of Emulation — was the ultimate recognition of his scholarly mastery. This is not an appointed or political office. It is a peer-recognised status achieved organically when a scholar is deemed by the community of believers and fellow scholars to be al-a'lam: the most learned of his time. Following the deaths of Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi in 1961 and Grand Ayatollah Hakim in 1970, Khomeini was recognised by millions of believers and fellow scholars as their Marja'. His legal authority was so massive that his word was considered binding by his followers, even while he remained in exile.
During his years of exile under the Shah — first in Turkey, then in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf, one of the most ancient and revered centres of Islamic scholarship in the world — Khomeini produced an extraordinary body of juristic work. He authored the multi-volume Kitab al-Bay' (The Book of Sale), a massive technical work on Islamic commercial and contract law that cemented his reputation among the clergy as a serious, rigorous jurist and not merely a firebrand activist. He produced Tahrir al-Wasilah, a comprehensive two-volume compendium on traditional and contemporary legal issues. And in 1970, he delivered his foundational Najaf lectures that became Hukumat-i Islami — Islamic Government — the work that introduced his doctrine of velayat al-faqih to the world.
The 1963 arrest episode is particularly revealing. Following an incendiary speech against the Shah, Khomeini was arrested and faced a potential death sentence for treason. To save his life, senior clerics — including Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari — invoked a provision in the 1906 Iranian Constitution granting senior religious leaders immunity from execution. The clerical establishment united to formally declare Khomeini a Grand Ayatollah, forcing the Shah's regime to commute his sentence to exile instead. This extraordinary episode simultaneously confirmed his immense scholarly stature and demonstrated that constitutional thinking was already embedded in Iranian governance long before 1979.
In total, Khomeini authored over 40 books on jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and mysticism. To call him a mullah in the dismissive Western sense — to place him in the same category as a village preacher with a rudimentary religious education — is the equivalent of calling a professor of constitutional law at Cambridge a parish vicar. It is not merely imprecise. It is a deliberate erasure of intellectual substance, designed to make serious engagement unnecessary.
The People Chose This — 98% of Them
Here is a fact that Western discourse buries with remarkable consistency.
In March and April of 1979, the Iranian people were asked in a national referendum whether they wished to establish an Islamic Republic. The turnout was overwhelming. The yes vote was 98.2% — a margin of popular endorsement that almost no constitutional act in modern history can match.
This referendum was no different in principle from the Brexit referendum of 2016, when the British people voted to leave the European Union. Brexit was contested, bitterly debated, and — crucially — accepted as a legitimate democratic act by the international community, however much individual commentators disagreed with the outcome. The Iranian referendum of 1979 was a cleaner, larger expression of popular will. Yet the world was invited to treat it as the imposition of a theocratic tyranny.
The Iranian people exercised that right in 1979. And the West — which had spent twenty-six years propping up a Shah who had never been chosen by anyone, and whose throne had been restored by a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 — responded by refusing to recognise the legitimacy of what the Iranian people chose for themselves.
A Constitutional Architecture
The constitution Iran adopted in 1979 — revised in 1989 — is a document of genuine institutional sophistication. Its Supreme Leader is a constitutionally defined position, selected by an Assembly of Experts that is itself elected by the people. Iran has a directly elected President, an elected parliament of 290 members — the Majlis — that passes legislation and holds the executive to account, and a Guardian Council of jurists who review legislation for constitutional compatibility, performing a function directly analogous to the US Supreme Court or France's Constitutional Council. These are not the institutions of a fanatical mob. They are the architecture of a constitutional system — imperfect, contested, but real. The tensions within it are the tensions of governance, not the absence of it.
The Comity of Laws — A Lawyer's Perspective
I was trained as a lawyer in the British common law tradition — the legal system that undergirds the legal orders of the British Commonwealth, the United States, and much of the developed world. It is a tradition I know intimately, and one I respect deeply. But my respect for the common law has never led me to conclude that legal systems different from my own are inferior to it. That would be an error of both logic and jurisprudence.
The principle relevant here is the doctrine of comity of laws: the recognition by one legal system that the laws and legal traditions of another jurisdiction deserve respect, and should not be dismissed merely because they differ from one's own. This is not moral relativism. It is the foundation of international law and of civilised coexistence between sovereign nations.
Let me give you a personal illustration. Around the year 2000, a client told me something that surprised me: in Italian criminal trials, defendants are not required to give evidence on oath. This is dramatically different from the common law system, where all witnesses in court — including defendants who choose to testify — must give evidence under oath, and where a witness who lies on oath can be charged with perjury and imprisoned. My client told me that Italians, as a matter of social understanding, expect defendants to defend themselves as vigorously as possible without being held to an oath of complete truthfulness.
Now, I found this interesting. I found it different. But I did not find it inferior. Italy is a deeply Catholic country with an ancient legal tradition stretching back to Roman law — arguably the foundational legal tradition of Western civilisation itself. The Italians have obviously concluded, through centuries of legal experience, that such an approach is best suited to their society and their understanding of justice. Who am I to contradict that judgment?
This is precisely the wisdom that Oliver Wendell Holmes — one of the greatest jurists the American common law tradition has produced — captured in his famous pronouncement: "The life of the law is not logic, it is experience." Law does not emerge from abstract universal principles applied with cold consistency. It grows from the particular experiences, values, history, and social circumstances of a people. Different peoples, with different experiences, will produce different law. That is not a failure. It is the very nature of living legal systems.
Islamic jurisprudence — fiqh — is a legal tradition of extraordinary depth and antiquity, developed over fourteen centuries by some of the finest legal minds the Muslim world has produced. It has its own principles of legal reasoning, its own jurisprudential schools, its own sophisticated debates about the interpretation of sources and the derivation of rulings. Whatever differences one may have with its substantive conclusions, the intellectual tradition itself commands respect under the doctrine of comity. The West's refusal to accord it that respect is not a principled legal position. It is intellectual contempt dressed up as civilisational superiority.
The Mirror America Should Hold Up
Americans are rightly proud of their constitution. But Americans who invoke that tradition to dismiss Iran might pause to recall that at the United States' founding, enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, women had no vote, and it took nearly two centuries for the promise of equal citizenship to approach meaningful reality. None of this invalidates the American tradition. But it should produce some humility about judging a constitutional experiment that is less than fifty years old.
Iran's Islamic Republic is forty-six years into its existence. It emerged from a revolution against foreign-backed autocracy. It has survived a devastating eight-year war, decades of crippling sanctions, and sustained covert warfare against its institutions. That it has institutional problems and democratic deficits — that the Guardian Council's vetting of candidates constrains electoral choice, that the space for dissent is too narrow, that the treatment of minorities and women falls short of universal standards — all of this is true and worth saying. But it must be said with honesty about what Iran actually is — not what Western propaganda has decided, for strategic convenience, to call it.
Law as the Foundation
Here is what I want you to take from this piece.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is, in its own terms, a society founded on law. The law it is founded on is Islamic jurisprudence — a legal tradition of extraordinary depth and antiquity, developed over fourteen centuries by some of the finest legal minds the Muslim world has produced. Its constitutional architecture was designed by a man of profound and rigorously attained legal mastery — a Grand Ayatollah who spent decades in the seminaries of Qom and Najaf before proposing that qualified Islamic jurists should not merely advise the state, but actively govern it. That architecture was ratified by 98% of the Iranian people in a democratic act of popular sovereignty. And it has functioned — however imperfectly — as the governing framework of a nation of ninety three million people for nearly half a century.
This does not mean it is beyond criticism. No system is beyond criticism — least of all systems that restrict political freedom, limit women's rights, and suppress dissent.
But criticism requires honest engagement with what a thing actually is. And what Iran actually is — as opposed to what decades of Western propaganda have told you it is — is a constitutional republic, grounded in a sophisticated legal tradition, with institutions that carry genuine democratic legitimacy, founded by a legal scholar of the first rank.
The West has found it strategically convenient to deny this. Because a nation of fanatics governed by chaos can be dismissed, isolated, sanctioned, and bombed with a clear conscience. A constitutional republic of ninety three million people — ratified by 98% of its founding voters, built on a legal tradition stretching back a millennium, and established by one of the most learned Islamic jurists of the modern age — is considerably harder to dispose of.
So the cartoon persists. And the reality waits — patiently, as civilisations do — for the world to look more honestly at what is actually there.
For those who wish to explore Iran's constitutional and legal architecture seriously, I recommend Hamid Algar's translations of Khomeini's political writings, and Said Amir Arjomand's The Turban for the Crown, which remains the most rigorous scholarly account of the Islamic Republic's institutional foundations.
