Iran still has not formally announced the identity of its new supreme leader. The new guy will be, according to Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, “an unequivocal target for elimination.” Israel’s success in this department raises the possibility of certain efficiencies for Iran’s cash-strapped government: serving, as in Hamlet, the remains of the new supreme leader’s inaugural banquet as cold leftovers at the same man’s funeral the next day. Most likely, the Assembly of Experts charged with appointing the supreme leader will delay the announcement in order to consider how best to protect the designee’s life and prepare for smooth succession if it cannot.The choice the group makes will determine a great deal about Iran’s future as a theocratic state. So far, the name that has been mentioned most often is that of Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated in a joint U.S.-Israeli operation on Saturday after ruling Iran since 1989. Some have suggested that Mojtaba might be a modernizing autocrat, ready to consolidate power brutally but institute much-needed reform. That is pure fantasy. Last month, before the outbreak of war, one acquaintance of Mojtaba’s told me that he was “the most dangerous man in the world” and considerably more violent and ideological than his father.[Karim Sadjadpour: The death of Khamenei and the end of an era]One thing Mojtaba is not is a religious scholar, fit to lead a country whose founding revolutionary purpose was to place the state under the total authority of the most distinguished Shiite jurist. His father came up short on this score too—but not as short as Mojtaba. Upon appointment, Ali was a hojjat al-Islam, a journeyman jurist, one grade below ayatollah. (In elevating Ali, the Assembly of Experts passed over Hussein-Ali Montazeri, a grand ayatollah, whose scholarly chops eclipsed Khamenei’s but who had recently fallen out with the regime.) Mojtaba has studied religion but is not even a hojjat al-Islam. The typical currency of clerical power is the number of people who freely choose to follow your guidance when you deliver rulings on what Islam commands, whether in personal matters or political ones. Very few deferred to Ali Khamenei in matters of Islamic law when he was elevated, and no one at all cares what his son has to say on these issues. Many fear Mojtaba, but they fear his secular clout. In U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, Iranian sources complained even 18 years ago that Mojtaba had grown too strong and was running his father’s office. (They also claimed that he traveled repeatedly to London for impotency treatment.)Being the son of the previous leader is, if anything, a drawback. The Islamic Revolution that toppled the shah mocked the idea of hereditary succession, and boasted that scholarship alone—religious merit—determined their choice of leader. In their system, Shiite scholars never designated their sons as anything but office managers. “Sons don’t succeed their fathers,” the historian Meir Litvak told me before the war. “Appointing Mojtaba would violate this taboo.” He suggested that the Islamic Republic could sidestep the taboo by appointing some decrepit nonagenarian ayatollah to occupy the supreme leadership for a couple of years, then let Mojtaba take over. Perhaps none of this matters, because whoever leads Iran next will have a life expectancy measured in weeks or even days. But the appointment of someone who has no religious credentials at all would be a final act of self-delegitimation for a regime that already lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most Iranians.The regime could look for a real ayatollah to succeed Khamenei. But if they want an ayatollah whose views are compatible with the hard-liners’, and who is himself a true believer in the Iranian theocratic system, the options are few. “The cupboard is bare,” David Patel, an expert on political Shiism at Harvard, told me. But he said that no matter which cleric Iran’s leaders choose, a reckoning is coming for Shiism. Iran’s most famous cleric’s death will soon be followed by the actuarially imminent death of Iraq’s most famous cleric, 95-year-old Ali Sistani. This moment of turnover will be a generational shift, an opportunity for younger clerics to assert themselves as candidates to replace them. “If I were an aspiring second-tier ayatollah, I might see my chance to stake out positions, either reformist or jihad-against-America,” Patel said.[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s unauthorized war]Other candidates for the job of supreme leader include the interim supreme leader, Ayatollah Alireza Arafi. He is an academic administrator and might have the authority to keep these upstarts in line. Having a religious lightweight like Mojtaba in charge would mean even more space for these younger clerics to innovate and take unusual positions. Whether the current war will change Iran’s regime is still unclear. But it has already changed, or at least accelerated, the dynamics of the clergy.