"Mousavi’s Long Struggle"

by Chris Bodenner

Abbas Milani looks at the life of Mir Hossein Mousavi Khamenei (who is, in fact, a distant relative of Ayatollah Khamenei):

By any measure, the rise of a little-known architect and newspaper editor to the highest ranks of the new regime was surprising, even meteoric. But, by the time of the revolution, Mousavi had built a reputation as a leading intellectual and man of unquestionable pieties. And, at that moment, the regime needed a façade that projected a spirit of inclusion, that could ballast its far-flung coalition. With both his demeanor and ideological roots in the Ershad, Mousavi exuded exactly those reassuring qualities.