But Razavi died in 1936...

But Razavi died in 1936, before Mutahhari was old enough to participate in his classes, and partly because of this reason he left Mashhad the following year to join the growing number of students congregating in the teaching institution in Qum. Thanks to the skillful stewardship of Shaykh ʿAbdul Karim Haʾiri (q.d.s.), Qum was on its way to becoming the spiritual and intellectual capital of Islamic Iran, and Mutahhari was able to benefit there from the instruction of a wide range of scholars.

He studied Fiqh and Usul - the core subjects of the traditional curriculum - with Ayatul­lah Hujjat Kuhkamari (q.d.s.), Ayatullah Sayyid Muhammad Damad (q.d.s.), Ayatullah Sayyid Muhammad Riḍa Gulpayagani (q.d.s.), and Hajj Sayyid Sadr al-Din as-Sadr (q.d.s.). But more important than all these was Ayatullah Burujerdi (q.d.s.), the successor of Haʾiri as director of the teaching establishment in Qum.

Mutahhari attended his lectures from his arrival in Qum in 1944 until his departure for Tehran in 1952, and he nourished a deep respect for him. Fervent devotion and close affinity characterized Mutahhari’s relationship with his prime mentor in Qum, Ayatullah Ruhullah Khumayni (q.d.s.).

When Mutahhari arrived in Qum, Ayatullah Khumayni was a young lecturer, but he was already marked out from his contem­poraries by the profoundness and comprehensiveness of his Islamic vision and his ability to convey it to others. These qualities were manifested in the celebrated lectures on ethics that he began giving in Qum in the early 1930s.

The lectures attracted a wide audience from outside as well as inside the religious teaching institution and had a profound impact on all those who attended them. Mutahhari made his first acquaintance with Ayatullah Khumayni at these lectures: “When I migrated to Qum, I found the object of my desire in a personality who possessed all the attributes of Mirza Mahdi (Sha­hidi Razavi) in addition to others that were peculiarly his own.

I realized that the thirst of my spirit would be quenched at the pure spring of that personality. Although I had still not completed the preliminary stages of my studies and was not yet qualified to embark on the study of the rational sciences (ma ʿ qulat), the lectures on ethics given by that beloved personality every Thursday and Friday were not restricted to ethics in the dry, aca­demic sense but dealt with gnosis and spiritual wayfaring, ­and thus, they intoxicated me.