Iran's leader picks Ebrahim Raeisi to head powerful foundation

In a message of condolence for Saturday’s funeral of Ayatollah Abbas Vaez-Tabasi in Mashhad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said the departed cleric, who died the previous day aged 80, had been “a sympathetic brother…[and] comrade of difficult days”. 

But Khamenei lost no time in appointing Ebrahim Raeisi, the 55-year-old national prosecutor-general, to follow Vaez-Tabasi as chairman of Astan Quds Razavi, the foundation that manages the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad.

Raeisi is a close ally of Khamenei, and his appointment will strengthen links between the leader’s office and the shrine, whose annual turnover – based on endowments, property and companies – is many billions of dollars. The leader has chosen another ally, Ahmad Alamolhoda, as his representative for Khorasan province, a second post left vacant by Vaez-Tabasi’s passing.

Vaez-Tabasi was close to former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an ally of president Hassan Rouhani. Back in the 2005 election, the shrine backed Rafsanjani in his unsuccessful presidential bid, as did three of the city’s five parliamentary deputies. Raeisi, who holds the clerical rank of hojjatoleslam, is a different character. At last year’s 36th anniversary of the taking of the embassy hostages, which featured criticism of the Rouhani administration as well as denunciations of the United States as the “Great Satan”, Raeisi announced that the intelligence and security forces had “identified and cracked down on a network of penetration in media and cyberspace, and detained spies and writers hired by Americans”. Two years ago, Raeisi accused the westof promoting homosexuality around the world in the name of human rights, and he has also reportedly defendedthe amputation of the hands of thieves.

Since 2012 he has been prosecutor of the Special Court of the Clergy (dadgahe vijeh-ye rohaniyat), a body answerable to the leader that is outside the usual judicial process and has indicted several reform-minded clerics.

At the time of the 1988 executions of 3,000-5,000 political prisoners ordered by then leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, Raeisi was deputy prosecutor in Tehran, a role he had held since 1984-5. On his website Raeisi says after Khomeini asked him to investigate certain provincial cases in the Iranian year 1367 (1988-89), he then handed him and Jaffar Nayyeri “important cases”.

Nayyeri is described in Tortured Confessions, the 1999 book by leading historian Ervand Abrahamian, as a special assistant to the Tehran special commission, set up alongside others, wrote Abrahamian, “with instructions to execute Mojaheds [members of the opposition armed group, Mojahedin-e Khalq] and leftists asmortads (apostates from Islam)…it was dubbed ‘the commission of death’. Similar commissions were set up in the provinces.”