Sayyed Mohammad Hoseyni Beheshti (October 24, 1928-June 28, 1981) was an Iranian jurist, cleric, and politician who was known as the second person in the political hierarchy of Iran in the Islamic Revolution after Ayatollah Khomeini at the time. Ayatollah Beheshti is considered to have been the primary architect of Iran’s post-revolution constitution, as well as the administrative structure of the Islamic Republic. He is also known to have selected and trained several prominent politicians in the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Beheshti also served as the secretary-general of the Islamic Republic Party and was the head of the Iranian judicial system. He further served as chairman of the Assembly of Experts. Ayatollah Beheshti was fluent in English, German and Arabic.
Ayatollah Beheshti was born in Esfahan in 1928. At the age of four, he went to school and learned to read, write and recite the Quran. With the opening of modern schools, he was admitted to the Servat Primary School after passing an entrance exam. He then began his secondary education in Esfahan and continued until his second year. With the fall of Reza Shah and the reduction of the oppressive and authoritarian atmosphere, religious tendencies became more apparent. As a result, Ayatollah Beheshti took a keen interest in learning Islamic knowledge and eventually left high school and attended Sadr Seminary in 1942.
In 1946, Ayatollah Beheshti went to Qom and settled in the newly established Hojjatieh Seminary. A year later, he began high-level courses in Qom Seminary and attended the lectures of outstanding scholars such as Ayatollah Boroujerdi, Ayatollah Mohaqqeq-Damad, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khansari and Ayatollah Hojjat. He also completed his high school education in a short time, thereafter, moved to Tehran for a university degree. He was also admitted to take the British scholarship exam, but on the same day, at the recommendation of his friend Ayatollah Mortaza Motahhari, he attended the philosophy class of Allamah Tabatabai, in which, according to Ayatollah Beheshti himself, became fascinated with Allamah Tabatabai’s ethics and spirituality. For this reason, he withdrew from the scholarship abroad.
In the same year, he got into the Ministry of Education and became an English language teacher at the Hakim Nezami High School in Qom. In the following years, he kept on with his university studies and earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Tehran University in 1974.
Ayatollah Beheshti, who had sensed the lack of political order and organized forces to fight the Pahlavi government after the failure of the oil nationalization movement, founded Din-o-Danesh High School to train youth for political struggles in Qom and managed it for ten years.
Among Ayatollah Beheshti’s few press activities is the cooperation in the publication of the Maktab-e Eslam Magazine and the Maktab-e Tashayyo’ Quarterly, which received a great deal of popularity.
In 1960, in collaboration with some of his like-minded contemporaries, he founded the Islamic Association of Qom’s Students and Teachers to link the university students and the seminarians.
In 1963, he joined the Education Textbook Planning Organization and took charge of reforming religious textbooks. In this way, in a clever and farsighted move, he started to introduce genuine Islamic teachings to young men and women. In the same year, due to various political and cultural activities, SAVAK forced him to leave Qom. He moved to Tehran in the winter of that year and saw the capital as a vast field for his activities.
Since the early 1960s, Ayatollah Beheshti was involved in activities against the monarchical system and was arrested several times by SAVAK. He was arrested in 1963 after a protest speech against the Pahlavi regime at the Chaharbagh Seminary in Esfahan, and after his release in the same year, he departed to Germany at the request of the Hamburg Shi’ah Muslims and founded the Islamic Centre of Hamburg.
Between 1966 and 1971, Ayatollah Beheshti led the Islamic Centre of Hamburg where he was responsible for the spiritual leadership of religious Iranian students in Germany and Western Europe. His stay in Germany lasted five years. During this time, Ayatollah Beheshti expanded his activities beyond Hamburg and throughout Germany to Austria, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, and with the help of several Iranian students, established the “Union of Islamic Associations of Persian Language Students.” He became acquainted with the thoughts of Western thinkers and philosophers, as well.
In 1969, Ayatollah Beheshti travelled to Iraq and met with Ayatollah Khomeini, where he became part of Ayatollah Khomeini’s underground movement. Then came to Iran to handle his personal affairs, but SAVAK prevented him from returning to Germany.
Ayatollah Beheshti was arrested in 1975 and jailed for several days on the Joint Anti-Sabotage Committee. He was also a co-founder of the Tehran Fighting Clergy Society in 1978.
After the victory of the Islamic Revolution, in late February 1979, along with Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah Mousavi-Ardabili, Ayatollah Mohammad-Javad Bahonar, and Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani founded the Islamic Republic Party and was elected as its secretary-general.
Following the Islamic Revolution, he became one of the original members of the Council of the Revolution of Iran and soon its chairman. As vice-president, he played a particularly important role in promoting the principle of Wilayat al-Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurisprudent) as the basis for the new constitution. In the first post-revolutionary Iranian parliament, he led the Islamic Republic Party together with Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani. (He never campaigned for the parliament though, as he was already the head of Iran’s Supreme Judicial System). Ayatollah Beheshti was the founding member, first general secretary and a central committee member of the party. He was also planning to run for the presidency in the first presidential elections but withdrew after Ayatollah Khomeini said that he preferred non-clerics as presidents, which led to the Islamic Republic Party’s endorsement of Jalaloddin Farsi and then, Hasan Habibi as a candidate.
Ayatollah Beheshti had an important role in writing the constitution of Iran, particularly the economic section. He believed in cooperative companies (Ta’avoni) in the field of economy and partnership and cooperation instead of competition in economic affairs. According to him, in cooperative companies, there is no mediation between producer and consumer. He also asserts that in such companies, rights belong to humans rather than stocks. He claims the foundation of Iran’s Constitution to be Islamic, and that Iran’s revolutionary Islamic system is at the same time a people-oriented system according to the volition of the Iranian people. This system is designed for the betterment and evolution of humankind. According to Ayatollah Beheshti, one of the most important pillars of political thought is that humans could walk on the right path along with faith in the truth.
Ayatollah Beheshti was martyred in a bombing on June 28, 1981, when a bomb exploded during a party conference. The assassin was identified, per the official version, as Mohammad-Reza Kolahi, an operative of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI). According to some journalists, the Islamic Republic of Iran first blamed the Tudeh Party, SAVAK, and the Iraqi regime. Two days later, Ayatollah Khomeini accused the Mojahedin. Iran’s security forces blamed the United States and “internal mercenaries.”
After his death, Western writers described him as: “Mr. Beheshti’s managerial genius was the greatest endowment that, by his death, the Islamic Republic is deprived of.”
This event made his innocence more apparent and created a new wave of movement and awareness in the country. Along with Ayatollah Beheshti, many clerics, ministers, and officials also died. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini was reportedly very affected by Beheshti’s death. He said in a message on this occasion: “Ayatollah Beheshti was an oppressed man, lived innocently, and died innocently... was as a nation for us and a thorn in the side of the enemies of Islam.”
Ayatollah Beheshti authored a lot of books during his life which some of them are as follow: “God from the Viewpoint of the Quran” (his Ph.D. thesis), “Background of the Birth of Islam,” “Islamic Economy,” “What is Prayer?,” “Usury in Islam,” “Hajj in the Quran.”
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