In October 2025, a leaked video of a lavish Tehran wedding, showing the daughter of Ali Shamkhani, former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, wearing a low-cut gown and entering a grand hall on her father’s arm, set off a wave of anger. The clip surfaced just as the government had deployed 80,000 new police to patrol the “morality” of Iranian women. The video exposed more than hypocrisy. It revealed how Iran’s revolution has hardened into a kinship system.
The marriage linked two well-connected families, part of a long tradition of elite unions that fuse security, clerical, and business circles. Sanctions and protests have only tightened these bloodlines, turning the state itself into an extended family, a republic of relatives, not citizens.
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How Kinship Networks Quietly Anchor Power in Iran
Research on nepotism within the Islamic Republic’s elite has long traced the family and clerical ties that quietly structure and bolster power. The leaked video showed how revolutionary virtue has aged into dynastic privilege and revealed a ruling class so interwoven by kinship that it can display its own immunity without fear.
Building on the foundational mapping of Iran’s post-revolutionary elite by academics Mehrzad Boroujerdi and Kourosh Rahimkhani in Post-Revolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook, newer research analyzing nearly 2,800 members of the Iranian political elite found that about 15% are linked by blood or marriage.
Examples range from the Shamkhani, Rafsanjani and Larijani families to the network surrounding the household of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. These interrelated families now occupy the upper tiers of government, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the semi-private conglomerates that dominate the economy. Kinship works as an informal institution, an unwritten constitution defining who may rise, who must defer, and who will never belong.
Nepotism is hardly exclusive to the Islamic Republic. Before the 1979 revolution, Iranians used to refer to “the thousand families” orbiting around the Shah. Under the Islamic Republic, however, what began as social overlap among supporters of the revolution has become political design. Kinship now does what ideology once did, binding commanders to clerics through marriage, patronage, and business. This guarantees loyalty, allocates privilege, and helps the regime absorb numerous setbacks and isolation.
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In theory, the revolutionary generation was supposed to pass the torch to a merit-based Islamic society. In practice, it handed it to its children. The same families that fought to end monarchy now reproduce its essence through marriage registries and corporate boards. What ideology once did through sermons, bloodlines now do through contracts. A son-in-law of a senior ayatollah becomes head of a major conglomerate, a brother of an IRGC commander secures energy concessions, the niece of a former president runs a foundation heavy with state funding.
Often, these connections lead to scandals.
In October 2025, Iran’s Central Bank shut down Ayandeh Bank, one of the country’s biggest private lenders, and folded what remained of its assets into Bank Melli, the country’s biggest state-run commercial bank. Iranian media reported that regulators had uncovered vast internal losses and a web of loans to affiliated companies. It was later confirmed that Ayandeh Bank concealed billions in insider lending and years of hidden debt.
At the center was Ali Ansari, the founder of the bank and the businessman behind the massive Iran mall in Tehran. His family came from the bazaar of Mashhad, close to clerical circles, but his success rested in the quiet deals that connect financiers to IRGC companies and ministries hungry for credit. His safety came not from family bloodlines but from the web of favors that bind money to power, the same web that shields businessmen from scrutiny and insulates political families from accountability.
Sanctions, paradoxically, have strengthened the very class they were meant to weaken. Every new restriction pushes resources back into trusted circles. To survive isolation, the state handed oil, construction, and import licenses to those bound by kinship or religious affinity. The result, documented by watchdogs and analysts, is a business culture where access replaces competence. In sector after sector, from fuel to pharmaceuticals, sanctioned networks controlled by relatives of top officials now dominate trade.
Even before the video of his daughter’s wedding leaked, Ali Shamkhani had faced scrutiny over the activities of his son, Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani. The younger Shamkhani was sanctioned in July 2025 by the United States Treasury as part of a network for transporting “oil and petroleum products from Iran and Russia, as well as other cargo … generating tens of billions of dollars in profit.” Sanctions have not isolated the regime; they have nationalized corruption.
While a sanctions-busting elite profits, ordinary Iranians suffer. According to the International Monetary Fund’s 2025 Outlook, growth in Iran is expected to contract by 1.7% in 2025 and 2.8% in 2026, while per capita GDP declines by 2.5% in 2025 and 3.6% in 2026. Inflation is projected to be close to or above 50%.
As sanctions grind on and external pressures grow, these networks of kinship will likely tighten further, turning state institutions into family estates. Reformers and technocrats who try to enter without lineage soon find that competence without connection is a liability. The regime’s endurance, once credited to revolutionary zeal, now rests on something older and harder to uproot, a clan instinct that cuts across factions but binds them in shared survival.
Public anger only reinforces the fortress. When demonstrations erupt, the elite read them not as warnings but as sieges, reminders to close ranks. The daughters of clerics marry the sons of commanders not for romance but for insurance. The wedding halls of Tehran are where the regime renews itself, quietly, generation by generation.
The irony is that this kinship republic now needs its own morality police
The state’s obsession with controlling women’s clothing hides its inability to control its own corruption.
For the public, the Shamkhani wedding captured this contradiction perfectly, luxury amid austerity, lineage amid disillusionment. The images spread faster than any official denial, reminding Iranians that the revolution’s promise of justice has been replaced by the politics of bloodlines. The outrage was not only moral but existential, an admission that there is no doorway into power for those outside the family.
The Islamic Republic began as a revolt against monarchy. It has become a monarchy of many households, united by fear, inheritance, and mutual dependence. In Tehran today, the revolution’s children rule not in their fathers’ names, but in their fathers-in-law’s.
Fatemeh Aman has written on Iranian, Afghan, and broader Middle East affairs for over 25 years and advised US and non-governmental officials. A former non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a writer, producer, and anchor at Voice of America, and a correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, her work has appeared in Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Jane’s Intelligence Review, and the Stimson Center’s Middle East Perspectives. Follow her on X: @FatemehAman.
The opinions presented here reflect the author’s personal analysis and experience, which may not fully align with the publication’s editorial outlook.