This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Iran's 1979 constitution places an office above its elected president and parliament that no voter chooses directly: the Supreme Leader, whose authority rests not on election but on velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. The doctrine holds that in the absence of the Hidden Imam, Twelver Shia Islam's awaited messianic figure, a qualified Shia jurist, a faqih, should hold supreme political authority over the state, standing in for the Imam's own rightful rule until his return. It is, among the political ideologies practiced by an existing government today, one of the most explicit in rejecting the premise that government answers to the people alone.
The doctrine's roots reach back within centuries of Shia jurisprudence over how, and by whom, political authority could legitimately be exercised during the Imam's absence, but it took its modern political form only in 1970, when Ruhollah Khomeini, then in exile in Najaf, Iraq, delivered a series of lectures arguing that establishing a genuinely Islamic state was a collective religious obligation incumbent on qualified jurists, published that same year as the book Islamic Government. Khomeini's own account went considerably further than most prior Shia jurisprudence had, from the position that a jurist could advise or check a ruler to the claim that the jurist should rule directly. Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah, that claim was written directly into Iran's new constitution: Article Five establishes velayat-e faqih as the state's governing principle, and Articles 107 through 112 give the Supreme Leader power to vet presidential candidates, dismiss a sitting president, and override legislation passed by the elected Majlis.
The result is a genuinely hybrid system: Iran holds real, competitive elections for its president and parliament, and both bodies exercise real day to day authority over ordinary legislation and administration, but every part of that elected structure operates beneath an unelected office whose holder can, and periodically does, overrule it. Iran's economic policy, set through ordinary legislation and multi-year development plans debated in the elected government and Majlis, illustrates the pattern precisely: real democratic deliberation happens, but always subject to the Supreme Leader's and the unelected Guardian Council's power to strike down any measure judged contrary to Islamic law. Few constitutions anywhere state as explicitly as Iran's own does that popular consent, while real, is not the final word.