Personal life Kashani had 3 wives and 19 children, including 7 sons and 12 daughters. According to British intelligence, around this time two of his sons were involved in a lucrative business buying and selling import-export licenses for restricted goods. One of Kashani's children,
Mahmoud Kashani, went on to become head of the Iranian delegation to the
International Court of Justice in
The Hague, Netherlands, in Iran's case with the United States and a presidential candidate in the
Iranian presidential elections of 1985 and
elections in 2005. His second son is
Ahmad Kashani, a former member of the
Iranian parliament.
Political life and death Abol-Ghasem expressed
Anti-capitalist leanings from early on in his career and opposed what he saw as "
oppression,
despotism and
colonization." Because of these beliefs, he was especially popular with the poor in Tehran. He also advocated the return of Islamic government to Iran, though this was most likely for political reasons. Due to his pro-
Nazi positions, Ayatollah Kashani was arrested and exiled by the British to
Palestine in 1941. He continued to oppose foreign, especially British, control of Iran's oil industry while in exile. After he returned from exile on 10 June 1950, he continued to protest. Angered by the fact that the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company paid Iran much less than it did the British, he organized a movement against it and was the "virtually alone among the leading mujtahids in joining" nationalist Prime Minister
Mohammad Mosaddegh, in his campaign to
nationalize the Iranian oil industry in 1951. Kashani served as speaker of the
Majles (or lower house of Parliament), during the oil nationalization, but later turned against Mosaddeq during the
1953 Iranian coup d'état. Documents later released by the U.S. State Dept. in 2017 revealed that the American Embassy had secretly handed over large sums of money to certain influential people, to organize street protests against Masaddeq; Kashani is mentioned in passing, though is not specifically named as a recipient. His participation in rallying public support in favor of the coup is cited by others as reason to believe his involvement was secured with CIA backing. Kashani protected the violent Islamist group
Fada'iyan-e Islam, led by
Navvab Safavi, after their expulsion from the
Qom seminary by
Ayatollah Hosein Borujerdi in 1950. The group then engaged in public assassinations in Tehran in the early 1950s. On 17 February 1956, a month after the execution of the Navvab Safavi due to his killing of senior figures Kashani confessed to an army prosecutor his role in these murders stating "I issued the
Fatwa to kill
Razmara, for I was a qualified
Mojtahed." Then Kashani was detained and following his release from the prison he retired from politics. He died on 14 March 1962. ==References==