Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi is rising to become an ever more popular figure among the new generation of hard-liners in Iran, following the footsteps of hard-line cleric Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah Yazdi. Both men are waging a war against the present atmosphere at the Qom seminary — the theological center of Iran — charging that it is not sufficiently revolutionary.

Azghadi is a graduate of the Qom Seminary, where he studied Dars-e Kharij, an academic level perhaps best described as equivalent to a doctorate. Yet many academic figures and clerics have questioned his religious knowledge given that he has not published any academic work. He has responded to this by saying, "I have a postdoc in book reading." Of further note, Azghadi neither wears a turban nor traditional clerical garb such as robes.

Azghadi was not known to the wider public in Iran until a decade ago. Several factors have changed that. The state broadcaster — which is controlled by hard-liners — has notably offered him a platform that has allowed him to become a public figure. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, which is tasked with adopting macro policies on cultural and social matters. The council is chaired by the president but its members are chosen by the supreme leader. In 2007, Azghadi was appointed as a member of the Council of Representatives of the Supreme Leader in Universities, which led him to deliver more public speeches at various universities in order to find an audience among academics and students.

Born into an influential family in Iran in 1965, Azghadi has been striving to be recognized as a theoretician among hard-liners — and he appears to have been successful in that endeavor. He has also sought to portray himself as a new Ali Shariati, the prominent Iranian sociologist who had a unique view of Islam and Shiism, and at the same time as a new version of Morteza Motahari, a theoretician of the Islamic Republic who was killed in 1979, two years after Shariati died. What should not be neglected here is that Shariati and Motahari — who both had vast influence over the opponents of the Shah’s regime — were in disagreement over their approaches to Islam.