About This Archive
The Khamenei Speech Archive is an independent, non-commercial research archive of 1,818 speeches, sermons and messages by Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran from June 1989 until his death on 28 February 2026. Every speech is available in English and Arabic, with the original Persian transcript on the same page.
No new speeches are expected. The archive may still grow when an earlier speech is located or an existing one is translated into another language.
Who was Ali Khamenei?
Sayyid Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad in 1939 and trained as a Shia cleric in Mashhad and Qom. He was active in the clerical opposition to the Shah and was arrested several times before the 1979 revolution.
After the revolution he served on the Revolutionary Council, became Tehran's Friday prayer leader in 1980, and survived a bomb attack in June 1981 that permanently impaired his right arm. He was elected president later that year and served two terms, until August 1989.
On 4 June 1989, the day after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's death, the Assembly of Experts chose him as Supreme Leader. He held the post for almost 37 years, which makes his speeches one of the longest continuous records of how the Islamic Republic's highest authority framed domestic politics, foreign policy, religion and society.
What the archive contains
The collection covers meetings with officials, military commanders, clerics, students, workers and visiting delegations; Friday and Eid prayer sermons; annual Nowruz addresses; and written messages on national and religious occasions. Each speech is dated in both the Gregorian and the Iranian (Solar Hijri) calendars and tagged with three to six topics, giving 262 topic pages in total.
Speeches are listed in chronological order and can be browsed by decade, by topic or through full-text search.
Sources
Every transcript comes from the Persian speech archive of leader.ir, the website of the Office of the Supreme Leader. Each speech page links to its original source page, and the Persian text can be opened on the page itself, so any translated sentence can be checked against the original.
How the translations were made
The English, Arabic and Turkish texts are machine translations of the Persian transcripts, made with a large language model. They have not been reviewed line by line by human translators, and the short summaries and topic tags were also produced with machine assistance.
The translations are meant to make the content searchable and readable. They are not authoritative. Before quoting a passage in published work, check it against the Persian original.
Recurring political and religious terms are translated consistently, for example “global arrogance” (استکبار جهانی), “the Islamic Republic system” (نظام جمهوری اسلامی) and “Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist” (ولایت فقیه).
Editorial principles
Speeches are reproduced in full, without abridgement or commentary. Titles follow the official titles used by the source. The archive does not rank, rate or interpret the speeches, and it adds only factual context such as dates, the sitting president and links to speeches from the same period.
How to cite
Cite the speech with its original date and the archive URL, and note that the text is a translation. For example (APA):
Data access
The full metadata index can be downloaded from the Data page and reused under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.
Speeches by decade
Disclaimer
This is an independent research archive. It is not affiliated with the Government of Iran, the Office of the Supreme Leader or any political organisation, and it is not funded by any of them. Including a speech is not an endorsement of its content.