Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani: Founding Father of the Islamic Republic and Pragmatic Power Broker
A memorial ceremony at the Hazrat Abdul Azim shrine in southern Tehran on 28 May 2026 honoured the anniversary of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's death, drawing figures from across the Islamic Republic's political establishment to a site traditionally associated with the commemoration of martyred families of the revolution. Photographs from the shrine showed attendees gathered at the burial site of the late Ayatollah, a founding father of the Islamic Republic whose career spanned its entire four-decade history. The ceremony, captured by photographer Mohammad Hassan Aslani and reported by Iran's Fars news agency, unfolded nine years after Rafsanjani's death in January 2017 — a milestone that has sharpened both the nostalgia of his admirers and the silence of those who find his legacy inconvenient.
Rafsanjani was, in the language of Iranian politics, a "pragmatist" — a term that understates the central role he played in building the Islamic Republic from its revolutionary origins. He was among the small circle of clerics who stood beside Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the 1979 revolution and who then assumed the task of constructing state institutions under the new constitution. As speaker of parliament through the formative 1980s, he shepherded legislation through a legislature dominated by revolutionary ideologues, negotiating between factions that often had irreconcilable visions of the state's direction. His tenure overlapped with the Iran-Iraq war, a conflict that consumed enormous portions of the Islamic Republic's early energy and resources. Rafsanjani served as parliament speaker until 1989, when Khomeini died and the task of succession fell to a leadership council — from which Rafsanjani emerged as the figure who would lead Iran through its most consequential decade.
The presidency that followed was defined by an attempt to reconcile the Islamic Republic's revolutionary rhetoric with the practical demands of a country recovering from war and isolated by international sanctions. Rafsanjani oversaw the reconstruction of infrastructure damaged during the Iran-Iraq conflict and pursued policies designed to open Iran's economy to limited foreign investment. He argued publicly that Iran could not sustain a posture of total confrontation with the outside world and advocated for what he described as pragmatic engagement — a position that brought him into sustained conflict with hardliners who viewed any accommodation with Western governments as a betrayal of revolutionary principle. His two terms, from 1989 to 1997, produced measurable improvements in economic stability, though they also entrenched a system of patronage and political compromise that his critics — then and later — identified as a source of corruption and stagnation. The tension between his ambitions for Iran's global standing and the constraints imposed by hardline factions would define his relationship with power for the remainder of his life.
The years after his presidency did not reduce Rafsanjani's political importance; they reshaped it. Removed from executive authority but retaining deep institutional reach through the Expediency Discernment Council, which he chaired for much of the period from 1989 to his death, he became an indispensable broker between competing centres of power in Tehran. He positioned himself as a voice for measured reform — supporting cautious liberalisation of the economy, advocating for greater space for civil society, and periodically signalling openness to direct talks with the United States. Each of these positions brought him into friction with hardliners who controlled the judiciary, the security apparatus, and the Guardian Council, the body responsible for vetting candidates for public office. When reformist candidates were disqualified from elections, when newspapers were closed, when protesters were detained, Rafsanjani's public responses were calibrated — supportive of stability, critical of excess, but never breaking with the supreme leader. That balance proved increasingly difficult to maintain as the political environment in Tehran grew more rigid over the course of the 2000s.
The 2009 presidential election and the mass protests that followed represented the most severe test of Rafsanjani's political identity. His own candidacy that year was disqualified by the Guardian Council — an exclusion that placed him, at least temporarily, on the outside of the political establishment he had helped to build. The protests that erupted after the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were met with a security crackdown that killed dozens and imprisoned hundreds. Rafsanjani wrote letters to the supreme leader expressing concern about the scale of repression; he later allowed his sons to associate publicly with reformist figures, a decision that extended the political damage to his family. When he was eventually permitted to return to the political arena — running for the Assembly of Experts in 2016 — it was on a platform that explicitly called for greater oversight of the supreme leader's authority. The bid was read, both in Tehran and in Western capitals, as an attempt to reopen questions about the structure of power that the Islamic Republic had largely closed since 2009. Rafsanjani died on 8 January 2017 before those questions could be resolved.
The memorial ceremony held on 28 May 2026 at Hazrat Abdul Azim shrine unfolds within a political environment transformed by the years since his death. The nuclear negotiations with the United States that Rafsanjani quietly advocated for produced an agreement in 2015 that collapsed by 2018, and Iran has since accelerated its nuclear programme in ways that have brought new rounds of international sanctions. The regional architecture of the Middle East has shifted dramatically — with Iran's ally networks across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen reshaping the politics of the entire region. Within Tehran, the political landscape has narrowed rather than expanded: reformist voices are marginalised, and the institutions Rafsanjani once navigated have consolidated around more conservative leadership. That the memorial ceremony takes place at a shrine associated with the families of the revolution, rather than at a secular state facility, reflects a choice to frame Rafsanjani's legacy in religious and commemorative rather than political terms — a framing that manages his significance while containing its more disruptive implications. Photographs from the shrine show that attendance remains significant, suggesting that the constituency he built during his decades in power has not dissipated. The question his memorial raises is not whether his legacy will be honoured — it plainly will be — but whether any figure capable of occupying his particular political space, bridging hardliner and reformist constituencies while retaining the confidence of the supreme leader's office, remains to inherit it.
The sources consulted for this article do not include Western wire reporting on the memorial ceremony or on Rafsanjani's legacy, and readers seeking independent verification of attendance figures or political statements made at the event should consult those outlets directly. Monexus has based this coverage on the Fars news agency report and photographic record of the 28 May 2026 ceremony at Hazrat Abdul Azim shrine.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/farsna/98765