Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari - Education and Career

Education and Career

As a student in Qom, Shabestari studied with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Allameh Tabatabaei. He was influenced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's idea that "Islamic ethics was not limited" to "personal relationships", but should be "reflected in the state and its form of government."

He stayed in the seminary for seventeen years, achieving both degrees of Ijtihad (religious adjudication) and Doctor of Philosophy.

In the spirit of the political Shia in 1960s and 1970s Iran, Shabestari also felt closely associated with the thinking of religious intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, as well as the politically motivated cleric Morteza Motahhari.

From 1970-1978, Shabestari served as director of the Shiite Islamic Center in the Imam Ali Mosque in Hamburg, Germany. He followed in this position Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti (who was to become one of the main architects of the Islamic revolution of Iran) and was later succeeded in this position by future president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, hojatoleslam Mohammad Khatami.

During the period he spent in Hamburg, Shabestari strongly supported the Christian-Islamic dialogue and extended the mosque’s scope of influence by opening it up to all Muslims. He also learned German and was able to pursue his interest, already evident in Qom, in Western philosophy and Christian, especially Protestant, theology. He studied the writings of theologians such as Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and Karl Rahner, as well as the thinking of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Upon his return to Iran, he served as a member of the first parliament (Majles of Iran) after the revolution, but distanced himself from politics afterwards.

Shabestari was a full professor of Islamic philosophy at the University of Tehran from 1985-2006, where he also taught comparative religion and theology. He regularly organized international conferences on the theme of Christian-Muslim dialogue.

He is one of the editors of the Great Encyclopedia of Islam, published in Tehran, and chairs the department of Theology and Sects of the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia. So far 16 volumes have been published of the encyclopedia, covering the first five letters of the alphabet.