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Iran's unprecedented political crisis is transforming the core of the Islamic Republic beyond recognition. Its possible collapse and the absence of a coherent opposition conjure up a nightmare scenario of conflicting agendas fragmenting the country: disparate Khomeinist Leftists struggling with returning exiles, communists, Marxists, religious nationalists, members of the MKO, royalists and ethnic secessionists all grappling with each other in a power vacuum stretching across a country the size of western Europe and hemmed in by warzones on its eastern and western flanks.

Alternatively, were the Green movement to be quashed, the militarization of political life started by President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad when he appointed former Revolutionary Guardsmen to ministries, ambassadorships and provincial governorships will accelerate. The supreme leader's once-absolute authority will continue eroding until the position becomes honorary.

Much like the Turkic warrior castes that swept down from Central Asia from the tenth century on, first to defend the Abbasid Empire as mercenaries but eventually amassing power and spawning a dynasty, so may the supreme leadership become as irrelevant as the caliph. Valuable for the religious legitimacy vested in him as the defender of Islam, the lineage was retained to lend the state religious credibility.

Already, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei lacks the religious authority of his predecessor and founder of the Islamic Republi... >>>