Ayatollah Mohammad Ishaq Fihr, one of the leading Shia maraji’ and a distinguished religious scholar from Afghanistan, passed away at the age of 96 in the city of Najaf, Iraq. His office in Kabul confirmed the news on Thursday, June 4th, through an official statement.<\/p>\n
The statement from his office highlighted that he devoted his blessed life to serving the pure religion of Islam, teaching Islamic sciences, training scholars and experts, and spreading the knowledge of the Ahl al-Bayt. In recent days, his affiliated offices and religious schools had announced the deterioration of his health.<\/p>\n
Ayatollah Fihr was born in 1930 (1309 Hijri Shamsi) in the village of Subah in the Jaghori district of Ghazni province, Afghanistan, into a farming family. He began his early religious education in local maktabs, and after mastering religious studies in Afghanistan, he traveled to Mashhad to continue his studies. Around the age of 18, he moved to Najaf, where he remained until the end of his life.<\/p>\n
He was a distinguished student of Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei and attended his advanced seminars in jurisprudence and principles of Islamic law for over fifteen years. Later, he compiled the lecture notes of his teacher into the collection “Lectures in the Principles of Jurisprudence,” which is considered a significant reference in Shia seminaries. Ayatollah al-Khoei described him as an “erudite and meticulous scholar” in the preface of one of these works.<\/p>\n
Starting in the 1970s, Ayatollah Fihr began teaching advanced courses in jurisprudence and principles in Najaf, attracting hundreds of seminary students and researchers over subsequent decades. For many years, he was also a member of Ayatollah al-Khoei\u2019s fatwa council, responsible for responding to religious queries from followers across various countries.<\/p>\n
He was one of the few Afghan Shia scholars to attain the status of marja’ al-taqlid (source of emulation) and was known not only for his scholarly achievements but also for his support of educational, religious, and charitable activities. During Iraq\u2019s difficult years, alongside other Najafi maraji’, he emphasized maintaining social calm, unity, and the avoidance of violence.<\/p>\n
Following the death of this Shia authority, several religious and political figures in Afghanistan and other countries issued condolences. Mohammad Aref Rahmani, a former member of the Afghan House of Representatives, described him as “one of the pillars of the Najaf seminary’s scientific community” and called his passing “a heavy loss for the Islamic world and the followers of the Ahl al-Bayt school.”<\/p>\n
Ayatollah Mohammad Ishaq Fihr was regarded as one of the prominent figures of Shia marja’iyya in Najaf, alongside Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi, and Ayatollah Saeed al-Hakim. He had a large following among Shia Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Gulf countries, and other parts of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ayatollah Mohammad Ishaq Fihr, a leading Afghan Shia cleric and scholar, died at 96 in Najaf. He was known for his religious scholarship and community leadership.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-religion-thought","category-secondary-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}