Of Les Miserables, Of Ali Khamenei

If you believed Ali Khamenei to be what the Western world has made of him, you are into an oversimplified war of perceptions. If perception wars are to be taken too seriously, all discourses would collapse. The first casualty will be Gods, angels and prophets. The second rung will be filled by all pious persons. Marx wouldn’t have written about Prometheus to be the first martyr-saint of philosophy. Just as our rebel Prometheus who stole fire from the Greek God Zeus and gave it to humanity, Ali Khamenei too stood up for those who don’t want to become ‘the Playboy (Epsteins) of the Western World.’ My apologies to the Irish playwright John Millington Synge who wrote a play with the same title in which it is society that creates and destroys its heroes.

After the assassination of Ali Khamenei by the United States and Israel, the world will no longer remain the same. Much like Palestine today, West Asia may descend into chaos, hunger, and prolonged instability. In many ways, the world could return to the age of Karl Marx and Victor Hugo- two figures who lived in the same era yet remained unaware of each other, even as they shaped global thought in profoundly different ways. German Marx revealed to the world a path out of the chains of wage labour, while French Hugo helped shape humanity’s moral imagination. Marx challenged the authority of God; Hugo, instead, held God morally accountable. Marx wrote ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ while Hugo produced his most celebrated novel- Les Miserables.

The moral axis of Les Miserables is all about a very small crime- the theft of a loaf of bread. Its protagonist, Jean Valjean, steals the bread to feed his sister’s starving children, a desperate act that ultimately condemns him to 19 years of brutal imprisonment. When Victor Hugo wrote the novel, he could not have thought by any stretch of his imagination that its ethical core would traverse beyond France and across historical and linguistic boundaries.

In Persian political discourse after the 1979 revolution, such imagery appeared in the construct of Mustazafin (the dispossessed and downtrodden). Ali Khamenei read Les Miserables with utmost curiosity and described it as an important intellectual anchor in his life. He often pondered over how wars bring chaos, how capital resurrects human beings as labour and how dispossession accumulates over time. In his speeches, particularly when addressing younger people, he would frequently invoke passages from the novel and urge them to read. Once he remarked, ‘although the story takes place in nineteenth-century France, the realities it describes exist in many societies.’ Probably, this predilection for literature made him so soft spoken. The way he spoke Persian, it made the language more honeyed.  

He also engaged with the sociological interventions of Ali Shariati, who radicalised Islamic imagination by placing the narrative of Karbala at the centre of the struggles of the oppressed and the poor across the world. The only difference is that Khamenei’s contribution lay in institutionalising aspects of Shariati’s liberationist discourse within the framework of state power. This trajectory bears certain parallels to Mahatma Gandhi’s critique of industrial modernity and Oscar Romero’s spiritual commitment to the liberation of the oppressed in the Latin America. Gandhi and Romero were assassinated by right-wing extremists, whereas Khamenei’s transpired within the broader dynamics of geopolitical and military-industrial power.

Although Ali Khamenei was an avid reader, well versed in works such as The Divine Comedy, Shahnameh,Gulistan, the poetry of Rumi, and One Thousand and One Nights, he regarded Les Miserables by Victor Hugo as an achievement in itself, even describing it as a miracle in the history of the novel and a profound book of love and feeling. His admiration suggests that he saw literature not merely as aesthetic expression but as moral pedagogy. In Jean Valjean’s journey through suffering, exile and redemption, he himself envisioned as part of the Mustazafin (the dispossessed and downtrodden). Such identification reveals how literary imagination can become intertwined with political self-understanding, particularly in contexts marked by exile, revolution and war.

No matter what a section of Iranian society feels about him, and despite those who contumaciously argue for a cultural nationalism rooted in the glory of ancient Iran, Ali Khamenei presented a different vision of Islam to the world. Much of this vision was grounded in the Persian literary tradition as well as in devotional and hagiographical narratives. Such an intermingling of religion, literature and cultural memory is quite liminal and deserves further scholarly exploration.

As the noted scholar of Shia Islam Mazher Naqvi observes, ‘If Shia Islam had not made literature part and parcel of its life, it would have perished long before.’ Khamenei’s frequent invocation of literature in his speeches and writings reflects a broader cultural orientation within Iranian society today.

Despite multiple wars and decades of sanctions imposed by the United States, which have severely strained the economy of Iran, the country achieved remarkable educational outcomes, including literacy rates for women reaching 98 per cent. Even within such economic constraints, women in scientific and technical fields have increasingly outnumbered men in several STEM disciplines- an outcome that many observers see as a proof to the Iran’s emphasis on education and intellectual life.

When I watched ‘The Lion of the Desert,’ it was the final scene that stayed with me long after the film ended. As the protagonist Omar Mukhtar stood before execution, there was no dramatic spectacle. Only a quiet, devastating moment. A child held Mukhtar’s spectacles when he was being taken away. That image transformed the meaning of the film for me. The spectacles were no longer just an object; they became an optic- a way of seeing the world itself. Through them, history appeared not as distant events, but as lived resistance. An old man in the desert standing against the machinery of Italian colonial power.

The same history seemed to have repeated itself on 28 February, 2026. After the assassination of Ali Khamenie, we continue to hold onto fragments of his presence- his spectacles, his grey beard, his smile and his moral courage. And I argue that he was more Marxist than all of us. He is revolutionary not in doctrinal sense, but in the sense of symbolic defiance of oppression and imperialist hegemony. Now we know that what remains is not the man. He left behind a vision- held just like Mukhtar’s spectacles. I wish I were that small kid. or maybe we all are the ‘Mustazafin’ (the dispossessed), the moral universe of Les Miserables of Victor Hugo.

Dr. Rashid Ali teaches Media Studies at Central University of Jammu.

 Views expressed are personal