Hussein-Ali Montazeri

Hussein-Ali Montazeri was born in 1922 in Najafabad, near Isfahan, to a poor rural family. He began his seminary studies in Isfahan and moved on to Qom, where he studied under Hossein Borujerdi and Ruhollah Khomeini and later taught there himself. He joined the clerical opposition to the Shah, was imprisoned by the security services and held in Evin prison from 1974 until he was released as the revolution gathered force in 1978.

After the revolution he chaired the assembly that drafted the constitution of the Islamic Republic, and in 1985 he was named Khomeini’s deputy and designated successor. He broke with Khomeini over the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988, which he condemned as contrary to Islamic law, and was removed from the succession in 1989. From the late 1990s he was kept under house arrest in Qom after criticising the unaccountable authority of the supreme leader, and in his last years he was a leading clerical voice for reform and, in 2009, for the protest movement that followed the disputed presidential election. He died in Qom on 19 December 2009.

Montazeri was a prolific scholar of jurisprudence. His best-known academic work is the four-volume Arabic treatise Dirasat fi Wilayat al-Faqih (1988), a detailed study of the doctrine of guardianship of the jurist that favours a limited, supervised form of it. Later he wrote on rights, religion and government, issued legal rulings in the form of istifta’at collections, and left memoirs.