Khomeini also tapped Shi’i tradition to construct a novel political doctrine: that government power properly belonged in the hands of the world’s single chosen representative of the Hidden Imam, a chosen one who could be recognized by his immense religious learning and the reverence that other learned scholars had for him. Such a man was a faqih, a leader with authority to legislate, and in the modern world, Khomeini suggested, he was that man.
