Bangladesh, May 27 -- Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is now eighty-one years old. While his health remains a closely guarded secret, his past medical history, age, and the deaths in recent years of other senior leaders have led Iranians to start considering what a post-Khamenei Islamic Republic might look like.

There are two main contenders to succeed Khamenei: Khamenei's fifty-one-year-old son, Mojtaba, and Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi. Neither can campaign openly but the nature of the Iranian system is that the Assembly of Experts, the institutional power center which officially promotes the next supreme leader is a rubber-stamp body, and so the informal campaign is more important than the formal.

Raisi's supporters may have just fired ...