Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Al-Sistani Biography by Maualna Ali raza Rizvi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_al-Sistani Early life Edit Sistani was born in 1930 to a family of religious clerics; his father was Muhammad Baqir al-Sistani. Sistani himself claims to have been born in Mashhad , Iran , [4] however there are disputes as to whether or not he was born in Mashhad or in Sistan and then moved to Mashhad as a child due to Iran not issuing birth certificates in its eastern provinces (now known as Region 5 ) until decades later. [ citation needed ] Sistani began his religious education as a child, first in Mashhad in his father's hawzah, and continuing later in Qom . In Qom he studied under Grand Ayatollah Houssein Broujerdi . Later in 1951, Sistani traveled to Iraq to study in Najaf under Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei . Sistani rose to the Usooli clerical rank of ' mujtahid ' in 1960. [5] At the unusually young age of thirty-one,
