Mostafa Khamenei

Mostafa Hosseini Khamenei (; born 1965) is an Iranian Shia cleric. A member of the Khamenei family, he is the eldest son of the second Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and the elder brother of the third and current supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Early life

Mostafa Hosseini Khamenei was born in 1965 in Mashad as the eldest child of Ali Khamenei and Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh. His five siblings are Mojtaba, Masoud, and Meysam, his younger brothers, and Boshra and Hoda, his younger sisters. His paternal grandfather, Javad Khamenei, was a poor and low-income but deeply respected Shia cleric and scholar.

Khamenei has Persian ancestry, but to a lesser extent, Azerbaijani Turk, with his Azeri roots being traced back to Khamaneh, a small town in East Azerbaijan where his surname originated from, and he also has distant roots from Tafresh. His family traces its lineage to Husayn ibn Ali, the son of Ali, the first Shia Imam, and the maternal grandson of Prophet Muhammad, hence Khamenei's middle name Hosseini (spelled Husayni in Arabic; meaning "descendant of Husayn"). Khamenei is married to a daughter of Azizollah Khoshvaght.

Career