There is now an interim successor to the slain Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, killed on Saturday by US airstrikes in Tehran, the country’s capital.
He is Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, appointed as acting Supreme Leader.
This came after Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council elected Ayatollah Arafi as the jurist member of the Guardian Council in the Leadership Council.
The Leadership Council is responsible for carrying out the duties of the Supreme Leader until the Assembly of Experts selects a successor.
The 67-year-old cleric, who serves on the powerful Guardian Council, was confirmed as part of the three-member body by the Expediency Council.
Arafi will serve alongside President Masoud Pezeshkian and Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei on the Interim Council, which is mandated by law to oversee leadership responsibilities during the transition period.
Arafi was born in 1959 in Maybod, Yazd, to an ethnic Persian family. His father, Mohammad Ibrahim al-Arafi, was a close friend of Iran’s legendary first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which ushered in the current leadership structure in Iran, he was a preacher and writer.
Despite his lack of participation in the written test by the Guardian Council to participate in the Assembly of Experts, he was confirmed to the Assembly in the elections of 2015, thanks to Article III of the Law regulating the Assembly of Experts elections in Iran, which allows a discretionary approval by the Supreme Leader of Iran to overrule the requirements of the Guardian Council.
*PHOTO CAPTION: Ayatollah Arafi.
