Being his father’s son has apparently been Mojtaba’s whole life. The Islamist revolutionaries of 1979 might have brought down centuries of monarchical rule, but the entire basis of their Shiite faith is the hereditary succession of religious leadership (the Shiites’ progenitors broke from Sunnis in the seventh century because the Sunnis believed that the community’s leaders should be selected by the elders, whereas Shiites chose to follow the descendents of the Prophet Mohammad.) Sons of clerics have often played important roles in running their father’s household, but Mojtaba used his status to build ties with the country’s security forces. One place where his name has always appeared is in the complaints of many losers of the regime’s internal fights: The former speaker of the Parliament Mehdi Karroubi, former Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh, and the former head of the state broadcaster Mohammad Sarafraz have all publicly attested to Mojtaba’s outsize influence over the security forces’ handling of the cases against them.