Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i

Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i (1903-1981) — widely known by the scholarly honorific "Allamah," meaning a deeply learned man — was a leading thinker of modern Twelver Shia Islam, the largest branch of Shi'ism. (A sayyid is a recognized descendant of the Prophet Muhammad; his family of Tabriz had produced scholars for generations.) He is best remembered as a philosopher, a gnostic (practitioner of 'irfan, Islamic mysticism), and above all as a Qur'an exegete.

Born near Tabriz in northwestern Iran, he studied there before traveling, around 1925, to Najaf in Iraq, then the foremost center of Shia learning. There he trained in Islamic law, philosophy, and mathematics under noted teachers, and received private instruction in 'irfan from his relative Sayyid 'Ali Qadi Tabataba'i. Financial hardship forced him back to Tabriz in 1935, where he spent roughly a decade farming his family's land. In 1946 he settled in Qom, the great Iranian seminary city, where he taught for the rest of his life.

His most celebrated work is Tafsir al-Mizan, a multi-volume Arabic commentary on the Qur'an composed between roughly 1954 and 1972, in which the Qur'an is largely interpreted through the Qur'an itself. He also revived the teaching of Islamic philosophy in Qom and held a long-running dialogue with the French scholar Henry Corbin. His students included Morteza Motahhari and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. He died in Qom and was buried at the shrine of Fatima al-Masumeh.