Periodically, I’ve heard it said that an excessive focus on Iran’s wretched President Ahmadinejad is a mistake. True, active promotion of Holocaust denial is his own innovation, but threatening to wipe Israel from the map was a favorite theme of Ayatollah Khomeini. Besides, when it comes to Iran’s bewildering power structure, is Ahmadinejad that significant?

There’s a common assumption that if someone carries the title “President,” he or she is the head of state. Not so in Iran, where the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reigns, well, supreme. In an illuminating article for Foreign Affairs, the Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji leans on the work of Max Weber to categorize Iran’s political system.

Ganji writes:

If any single person is to blame for Iran’s state today it is Khamenei, who over the course of two decades as supreme leader has secured a complete stranglehold on power in Iran. “Where domination is primarily traditional, even though it is exercised by virtue of the ruler’s personal autonomy, it will be called patrimonial authority,” Max Weber wrote in Economy and Society in 1922; “where it indeed operates primarily on the basis of discretion, it will be called sultanism.” Sultanism is both traditional and arbitrary, according to Weber, and it expresses itself largely through recourse to military force and through an administrative system that is an extension of the ruler’s household and court. Sultans sometimes hold elections in order to prove their legitimacy, but they never lose any power in them. According to Weber, sultans promote or demote officials at will, they rob state bodies of their independence of action and infiltrate them with their proxies, and they marshal state economic resources to fund an extensive apparatus of repression. Weber might have been describing Khamenei.

Iran today is indeed a neosultanate, not a totalitarian state, nor even a fascist one. Such regimes create single-voiced societies, and many different voices can be heard in Iran today. Contemporary Iran is still officially an Islamic theocracy, but no single ideology dominates the country. In the totalitarian Soviet state, there was nothing but Marxism and the official Bolshevik version of it at that. In Iran, liberalism, socialism, and feminism have all been tagged as alternatives to the ruling ideology, and many Iranians openly identify with these currents. Iran has no single all-embracing party in charge of organizing society. It has dozens of parties — such as the pro-reform Mosharekat (Participation) Party and the pragmatic conservative Kargozaran-e Sazandegi (Executives of Construction) Party — and although they are not as free or autonomous as parties in democratic countries, they represent views that deviate from the government’s. To some extent, too, Khamenei has to address their concerns. Facing an uproar over the continued killings of political dissidents in 1998, for instance, Khamenei was forced to address the public — and from a Friday prayer pulpit in Tehran — to blame the murders on rogue elements within the Intelligence and Security Ministry.

Nor does Islam run Iran. The ruling religious fundamentalists lack a unified vision, and fundamentalist, traditionalist, and modernist versions of Islam compete for attention among Iranians. Since the 1979 revolution, religion has served the Iranian state, not the other way around. Khomeini held a resolutely sultanistic view of Islam. “The state . . . takes precedence over all the precepts of sharia,” he wrote in 1988. “The ruler can destroy a mosque or a house if it impedes the construction of a road. . . . The state can temporarily prevent the hajj [the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, an important religious duty] when it considers it to be contrary to the interests of the Islamic state.” Although there are, of course, both fascists and fascistic readings of Islam in Iran, these do not make Iran a fascist state. Whatever the intentions and aims of the country’s ruling fundamentalists, it is the social facts on the ground that determine what kind of regime Iran really has.

One of these facts is that Article 57 of the Iranian constitution grants the supreme leader absolute power. It states that the “powers of government in the Islamic Republic are vested in the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive powers, functioning under the supervision of the absolute religious leader.” Moreover, the Council of Guardians, the constitution’s official interpreter, has ruled that this clause defines only the supreme leader’s minimum prerogatives. Khamenei has used his broad mandate to exercise control not only over all three branches of government but also over economic, religious, and cultural affairs, sometimes directly and sometimes through various councils or through the Revolutionary Guards. Such absolute sovereignty allows the supreme leader to arbitrarily intervene in the lives of his citizens. The fact that such broad power is granted by the constitution does not make its application any less discretionary.

Do read the rest of the essay, because it’s well worth it. What Ganji doesn’t address, though, is the issue of succession. Given the we may well be on the cusp of a major conflict with Iran, who succeeds the geriatric Khamenei is a critical question, especially as there are frequent and unconfirmed reports of his ill health.

A few names have been bandied about in recent years. Ayatollah Mohammad Mesbah-Yazdi, Ahmadinejad’s mentor, is one. Former President Aliakbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - a bitter rival - is another. When it comes to the nuclear crisis, if there is little chance of peacefully negotiating it towards closure under this Sultan, the outlook under the next would seem to be just as bleak.