Murtaḍā Muṭahharī

مرتضی مطهری

1919–1979 · Iran · Philosopher, theologian, cleric, revolutionary

Murtaḍā Muṭahharī was born in 1919 in Fariman, a village near Mashhad in north-eastern Iran, into a clerical family. After early study in Mashhad he moved to the seminary of Qom in the 1940s, where his teachers included Ayatollah Burujirdī, Ruhollah Khomeini, and above all the philosopher ʿAllāma Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī, whose lectures on realist philosophy he later published with a long commentary.

In the early 1950s Muṭahharī settled in Tehran and taught Islamic philosophy and theology at the University of Tehran for more than two decades. He was one of the founders of the Ḥusayniyya-yi Irshād, a lecture hall that became a centre of religious debate in the late 1960s, though he later broke with it over the direction taken by ʿAlī Sharīʿatī. His public lectures and essays addressed educated lay Muslims, engaging Marxism, Western philosophy and secular nationalism while defending the traditional sciences of the seminary.

His writing combined Islamic philosophy, jurisprudence and social commentary. Divine Justice treats the problem of evil; The Rights of Women in Islam and The Islamic Modest Dress responded to debates over family law and veiling; Islam and Iran: A Historical Study of Mutual Services argued against nationalist readings of Iranian history; and a multi-volume introduction to the Islamic worldview set out a systematic alternative to materialism. He is often seen as the leading clerical intellectual who gave the 1979 revolution a philosophical vocabulary rooted in the seminary rather than in lay ideology.

A close associate of Khomeini, he headed the Council of the Islamic Revolution in early 1979. On 1 May 1979 he was shot dead in Tehran by members of the Furqān group and was buried in Qom. His collected works run to dozens of volumes and remain widely studied in Iran and across the Shiʿi world.

Photo: varesoon.ir, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Archived 14 October 2026 · Biography sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · al-islam.org

Works

Books 22

BOOK 1953 · Persian

The Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism (commentary) اصول فلسفه و روش رئالیسم

Mutahhari's extensive commentary on the philosophical lectures of his teacher ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī, defending a realist Islamic philosophy against dialectical materialism.

Archived 14 October 2026 · Source: not yet recorded

Cite

Muṭahharī, Murtaḍā. The Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism (commentary). 1953. Archived 14 October 2026 in Islamic Internet Archives: Archive of Modern Islamic Thought. https://islamicarchives.org/authors/mutahhari/#mutahhari-the-principles-of-philosophy-and-the-method-of

No free copy online

COLLECTION 1960 · Persian

Anecdotes of Pious Men داستان راستان

A collection of short moral narratives drawn from the lives of the Prophet, the Imams and early Muslims, written for a general and young readership.

Archived 14 October 2026 · Source: Al-Islam.org (English translation)

Cite

Muṭahharī, Murtaḍā. Anecdotes of Pious Men. 1960. Al-Islam.org (English translation), https://www.al-islam.org/anecdotes-pious-men-murtadha-mutahhari. Archived 14 October 2026 in Islamic Internet Archives: Archive of Modern Islamic Thought. https://islamicarchives.org/authors/mutahhari/#mutahhari-anecdotes-of-pious-men