Obituary: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani died on January 8th

IN DEATH as in life, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani defied categorisation. He was a stalwart of a regime dubbed an exporter of terror and heresy. Yet regional arch-foes such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia mourned his passing, as did the Great Satan itself, via a State Department press briefing. At home, embattled reformists felt they had lost their prime protector.

Ruthless guile was his hallmark. During his early years in power, the death penalty was applied freely to dissidents, communists, Kurds and Bahais. Foreign countries blamed Mr Rafsanjani for ordering murders of émigrés in Paris, Berlin and Geneva, and terrorist attacks on a Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 and on American forces in Saudi Arabia in 1996.

Though a pragmatist to the point of cynicism, his career was rooted in zealotry. His greatest political asset was his friendship with Ayatollah Khomeini, the instigator of the Islamic revolution of 1979. As memories of that upheaval faded, his ability to assert confidently what the great man would have thought became ever-handier.

Other credentials were shakier. He had studied at the great seminary in Qom, but he...