A cleric, politician, and judiciary, Who is Ibrahim Raisi, the eighth president of Iran?

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Iranian media and state television mourned, at dawn today (Monday), President Ebrahim Raisi and his accompanying delegation after the authorities announced that the helicopter they were traveling in had been found following an accident yesterday, Sunday, in a rugged mountainous area in East Azerbaijan province.

President Raisi was heading to the city of Tabriz, northwestern Iran, after returning from the Azerbaijani border, where he opened the Qiz Qalasi and Khodavarin dams.

Iranian state television confirmed the death of the president and his foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, in the crash of the helicopter that was also on board the imam of the Tabriz Friday prayer, Al Hashem, the governor of East Azerbaijan, Malek Rahmati, Brigadier General Seyed Mehdi Mousavi, head of the Iranian President’s Protection Unit, a member of the Revolutionary Guard, and the pilot. , co-pilot, and technical officer.

Religious upbringing

Ibrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric, was born in 1960 in the Nogan neighborhood of Mashhad, studied at the seminary in Qom, and obtained a doctorate in law from Shahid Motahhari University.

He began his career in the judiciary in 1980 when he was still young, and quickly rose in the judicial profession, becoming Assistant Public Prosecutor in Tehran at the age of 25.

Corridors of justice

He served as chief prosecutor in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, then the position of public prosecutor in Karaj in the same year, and in 1985 he assumed the position of deputy public prosecutor in Tehran, and rose from the position of public prosecutor in the capital in 1994 to president of the Supreme Court by 2019.

Raisi also served as head of the General Inspection Service in Iran between 1994 and 2004.

During the period between 2004 and 2014, Raisi held the position of First Vice President of the Judiciary, and during that time he was elected in 2006 as a member of the “Leadership Experts Council,” which is responsible for appointing or removing the Supreme Leader of the Revolution. Two years later, he assumed the position of Vice President of the Council.

Raisi rose through the ranks of the judiciary to become the Prosecutor General in Tehran, reaching the Prosecutor General of Iran in 2014, and he remained in this position until March 2016, when he took over the management of one of the richest and most important religious institutions in Iran, which is the Imam Reza Foundation, which bears the name “Astan Quds Razavi.” ", and overlooks the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad.

Conservative presidential candidate

Ebrahim Raisi ran as a conservative candidate in the Iranian presidential elections on April 6, 2017, and lost in the electoral race to Hassan Rouhani, who managed to win a second term.

He ran again in the Iranian presidential elections of 2021, and won the presidency of the Iranian Republic in June 2021, in the thirteenth edition of the presidential elections, succeeding Hassan Rouhani, after obtaining 62% of the votes, and from that time he became the head of the judiciary and the eighth president of the republic in Iran. He officially assumed the presidency of the country on August 4 of the same year.

Since assuming the presidency, Raisi has given priority to foreign policy and relations with neighboring countries, and he has also set his sights on addressing the economic and social crisis that is mainly due to the sanctions imposed on his country.

Raisi sought to improve Iran's economic situation by strengthening economic relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and neighboring countries, by establishing an economic system that protects Iran's economic growth from American political options, and enhances its trade exchange with Russia and China.