Raisi's Rising Elite: The Imam Sadeghis, Iran's Indoctrinated Technocrats

The administration of Iran’s new president, hardline Islamist cleric Ebrahim
Raisi, is now crystallising. A student and loyal follower of Iran’s Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Raisi was groomed to become president
to ‘purify’ the Islamic Republic. For Khamenei and his hardline followers,
purification is necessary to advance the next stage of the Islamic Revolution
– the creation of an idealist Islamic state – which, they believe, has not yet
been achieved.1
As well as cleansing the system of Western influences, one of the goals of
an Islamic state is to make the Islamic Republic more efficient by reversing
decades of government mismanagement. To advance this goal, Iran’s clerical
regime is aware that it requires trained technocrats and bureaucrats who can
implement the regime’s policies.
However, Khamenei and his close circle believe that running an Islamic
state requires ideologically devoted technocrats equipped with both modern
knowledge and religious-ideological training. The supreme leader and his
allies blame decades of mismanagement in the Islamic Republic not on
corruption and a lack of technical expertise but on Western-oriented and
-educated technocrats not having undergone the ideological-religious
training they believe is required to run an Islamic state. As Ayatollah Ahmad
Alamolhoda, the supreme leader’s representative to Iran’s eastern Khorasan
Razavi province and Raisi’s father-in-law, asserted in October 2020, “Belief
in the [Islamic] Revolution is the difference between classical and jihadi
management styles … if this jihadi management style, which genuinely
believes in the revolution and God, enters our social and political life, all the
problems can be solved.”2
In lockstep with the views of Khamenei and Alamolhoda, Raisi is replacing
the Islamic Republic’s old cohort of specialists – faces familiar to the West
like Javad Zarif, a former foreign minister, and Ali Akbar Salehi, a former
head of Iran’s atomic energy agency – with new, so-called jihadi and
hizbullahi technocrats who have undergone years of intensive ideological
indoctrination alongside their skills training. These changes, the first of their
kind in 42 years, are shifting the power equilibrium in Iran’s regim