Most Iranians remember Shahroudi as the head of the country’s notorious judiciary between 1999 and 2009, a period spanning Mohammad Khatami and then Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s diametrically opposed governments. During this time, Shahroudi presided over a witch hunt against reformist parliamentarians and newspapers, students and intellectuals, human rights activists and, at the end of his tenure, the pro-reformist Green Movement protesting against the fraudulent elections that handed Ahmadinejad a second term. [...]
On the other hand, Shahroudi was also credited with introducing some reforms, including reinstituting the separation between judges and prosecutors abolished by his predecessor Mohammad Yazdi, suspending stoning as capital punishment, and proposing a bill granting more legal protection to minors. Around the time of his death, reformist-leaning newspapers such as Shahrvand depicted him as an “iconoclast judge of judges” (qazi ol-qazat-e sonnat-shekan), and official government media outlets including the Islamic Republic News Agency-owned Iran called him “progressive.” [...]
Shahroudi, who like Khomeini and Khamenei wore the black turban marking him as a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, didn’t just possess the required religious scholarship to become supreme leader, the sort that placed one in high standing in Tehran and Qom’s politically charged environment, if not in Najaf. Instead, his unique selling point as potential supreme leader lay as much in his cross-factional appeal among the Iranian establishment as in the continuity he represented—two assets critical to Iran’s future political stability. Unlike Khamenei and many hard-liners, Shahroudi maintained reasonably good ties with all four of Iran’s existing factions: conservatives, neoconservatives, moderate conservatives, and reformists. This was reflected in his 2011 appointment to head a custom-created, five-man body known clunkily as the Supreme Council for Dispute Resolution and Regulation of Relations Among the Three Branches of Government, a response to the spiraling tiffs between then-President Ahmadinejad and an increasingly irate parliament. While an undisputed conservative of the cloth, he was also open enough to earn the grudging respect of the conservatives’ rivals. [...]
But the hard-liners’ longtime stranglehold on the key levers of military, judicial, media, and clerical power will now leave little room for Iran’s reformists and moderates, among them current President Hassan Rouhani, to weigh in on the succession process. Shahroudi’s death thus paves the way for hard-line candidates, notably from the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council, the Assembly of Experts, and the judiciary’s top ranks. Barring the 91-year-old ultraconservative head of both the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts, Ahmad Jannati, two other candidates stand out: outgoing judiciary chief and newly appointed Expediency Council head Sadeq Larijani and, of late, Ebrahim Raisi—the current custodian of Mashhad’s powerful Astan Quds Razavi foundation, a 2017 presidential contender, and the rumored next chief of judiciary. Compared to Shahroudi, both clerics have far less patience for their moderate and reformist rivals, who in turn are less likely to accept them in Khamenei’s wake.
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