Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi

Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi

Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi (Persian: محمد تقی مصباح‌یزدی‎; born 31 January 1934) is a hardline Iranian Twelver Shi'i cleric and politician who is widely seen as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's spiritual advisor. He is also a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for choosing the Supreme Leader, where he heads a minority ultraconservative faction. He has been called "the most conservative" and the most "powerful" and "influential ... clerical oligarch" in Iran's leading center of religious learning, the city of Qom.

Mesbah Yazdi advocates Islamic philosophy and in particular Sadra Mutahillin's Transcendent School of Philosophy (Hikmat-e Muta`aliya). He believes Iran has strayed from the values of the 1979 Iranian revolution and strongly opposes democratic rule and the Iranian reform movement.