For more than a century and a quarter the Shirazi family...

For more than a century and a quarter the Shirazi family, so called because of the long association of their ancestors with the city of Shiraz in south-western Iran, have played an outstanding role as religious scholars (‘ulama’, sing. ‘alim) jurists and maraji‘. A famous member of the family is Mirza Muhammad Hasan Shirazi, known as al-Mujaddid ("the renewer") because of his outstanding learning, who played a leading role in the so-called "Tobacco Rebellion" of 1890-1.

His son Mirza ‘Ali Agha was also a marja‘. Another Shirazi and a leading marja‘ Mirza Muhammad Taqi, the maternal uncle of Ayatollah Shirazi’s father, was, along with his son Muhammad Rida, in the vanguard of the revolt of 1920 against the British occupation of Iraq. A brother-in-law of Ayatollah Shirazi's father, Mirza ‘Abd al-Hadi al- Shirazi, was an ‘alim and well-known poet who became a marja‘ briefly after the demise of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Burujirdi in 1961.

Sayyid Muhammad was born in Najaf in Iraq in 1928. He was the son of the renowned marja‘ Grand Ayatollah Mirza Mahdi al-Shirazi. His mother was Alawiyya Halima, a distant cousin. At the age of nine, the family moved to Karbala’, 50 miles to the north. There at the Hawza (Religious Academy, plur. hawzat) he went through the various stages of the traditional education necessary in order to become a mujtahid (one competent to make independent juridical decisions).

Among his principal teachers at the highest stage called Bahth al-Kharij numbered his own father, and the Grand Ayatollahs Sayyid Muhammad Hadi al-Milani (the future renowned marja‘ of Mashhad in Iran), Shaykh Muhammad Rida al- Isfahani, Shaykh Muhammad al-Khatib and Sayyid Zayn al-‘Abidin al- Kashani.

The young Sayyid Muhammad excelled in his studies to such an extent that before he had reached the age of 20 he had become a mujtahid (one competent to make independent juridical decisions) and, not yet 30, he began to teach Bahth al-Kharij. After his father’s death, in February 1961, he published his own collection of juridical edicts (his risala ‘amaliyya), a necessary step if one wishes to be a marja‘, and soon afterwards he was recognised as one.

Not long after the Ba‘th Party had gained supreme power in Iraq, the first of the ‘ulama’ to be arrested for their outspoken criticism of the regime was Shirazi’s brother Ayatollah Sayyid Hasan who, in the spring of 1969, was imprisoned in Baghdad and savagely tortured.