Before the Iranian Revolution In 1938, he went to
Tehran to preach and lecture on Islam and was arrested and imprisoned the next year for opposing the regime of
Reza Shah. From 1948 onward, he held classes at
Hedayat Mosque in Tehran. Ayatollah Taleghani had the responsibility of educating revolutionary folks from the very beginning. He traveled abroad to Jordan and Egypt in 1951 and 1952, to the Peoples Muslim Congress in
Karachi, and twice to
Jerusalem as the head of an Iranian delegation to the annual Islamic Congress of Quds. He supported
Mohammed Mosaddeq's nationalization of the oil industry. Following the
1953 Iranian coup d'état that overthrew Mossaedegh and restored the Shah he was arrested and – according to the Islamic Republic's
IRIB website – "accused of hiding
Navvab Safavi, the founder and leader of the
Fadayan-e Islam" Islamist assassination group. Politically active from his student days, Taleghani was a veteran in the struggle against the
Pahlavi regime. He was imprisoned on several occasions over the decades, "as a young preacher, as a mid-ranking cleric, and as a senior religious leader just before the revolution," and served a total of a dozen years in prison. In his time in prison he met many leftist political prisoners and "was particularly fond of talking about his interactions with leftists." The influence of the left on his thinking was reflected in his famous book
Islam and Ownership (Islam va Malekiyat) which argued in support of collective ownership "as if it were an article of faith in Islam." In 1971, he exiled to
Zabol, a city in
Sistan and Baluchestan Province and then to
Baft, a city of
Kerman Province. Between 1964 and 1978 he spent nearly a decade in jail. Altogether he spent nearly 15 years behind bars. ==Opinions==