Seyyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad

Seyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, born in 1945 in Qom, is a jurist, legal scholar, philosopher, and university professor. He is the son of Ayatollah Seyed Mohammad Mohaghegh Damad and the maternal grandson of Sheikh Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi, the founder of the Qom Seminary. He completed his seminary studies in Qom and received his degree of ijtihad from the scholars and authorities of the time in 1969. In jurisprudence and its principles, he benefited from masters such as Mirza Hashem Amoli and Morteza Haeri Yazdi, and in Islamic philosophy and wisdom, he attended the lectures of Morteza Motahhari.

Alongside his seminary education, Mohaghegh Damad studied law and Islamic philosophy at the University of Tehran, and then continued his studies in international law at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, where he received his doctorate in 1995. He is a professor of law at Shahid Beheshti University, a permanent member of the Academy of Sciences of Iran, and the head of the Islamic Studies group at the Academy of Sciences. He also served for a time as the head of the General Inspection Organization of Iran and has been a member of various scientific and cultural institutions.

Mohaghegh Damad's main areas of work are jurisprudence, principles of jurisprudence, Islamic law, Islamic philosophy, human rights, international law, religious ethics, and the relationship between religion and the contemporary world. In recent years, he has emphasized topics such as sacred ignorance, religious rationality, the environment, human dignity, enjoining good and forbidding evil, hudud, and the relationship between jurisprudence and justice.