Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mohsin al-Hakeem Tabatabaie

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On 27th of the Islamic month of Rabi al-Awwal in 1390 AH, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mohsin al-Hakeem Tabatabaie passed away in the holy city of Najaf at the age of 84. Born in a religious family, he was a child prodigy, who after memorizing the holy Qur'an, strove to acquire higher degrees of knowledge and attained the status of Ijtehad. He taught jurisprudence and soon emerged as the leading scholar of the Najaf Seminary. In 1961, following the passing away of Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hussain Boroujerdi in Qom, Iran, he became the sole Marja or Supreme Religious Authority with worldwide following.
The hawza of Najaf grew immensely under his leadership. His historic opinion branding communism as kufr or atheism proved the beginning of the end of communism in Iraq. When the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), was exiled from Iran by the Shah’s regime and took up residence in Iraq in 1964, he welcomed him in holy Najaf and provided support to him. Grand Ayatollah Hakeem’s suggestions and advices on political and social issues were valued by the Muslim Ummah.
In 1967, following the defeat of Arab armies in the six-day war he wrote to the heads of Muslim states to put aside their differences and unite against the illegal Zionist entity. During the last year of his life, following the coup that brought to power the tyrannical Ba’th minority regime in Baghdad, he was subjected to persecution and finally passed away in 1970.
His sons and grandsons also emerged as leading scholars and were active on the political and social scenes. Many of them were martyred in a cowardly manner by Saddam and his henchmen, including son, Ayatollah Seyyed Mahdi in Khartoum, during an international conference in Sudan in 1987.
Another of his sons, Ayatollah Seyyed Baqer al-Hakeem was the Leader of the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SAIRI) and was martyred in 2003 in a terrorist bomb blast after leading the Friday Prayer in the holy shrine of Imam Ali (AS) in Najaf. The present leader of the Iraqi Islamic Assembly, Hojjat al-Islam Seyyed Ammar al-Hakeem, is the grandson of the Later Grand Ayatollah al-Hakeem.