He was born into a family of sayyids (descendants of the Prophet) in Khurāshā, a village near the town of Bujnūrd in the Iranian province of Khurāsān. Through his father, Āqā Buzurg, his lineage can be traced back to Ibrāhīm al-Mujāb, a grandson of Mūsā b. Jaʿfar al-Kāẓim, the seventh in the line of the Ithnā ʿAsharī Shiʿi imams, and his mother was also descended from the same imam (see Bujnūrdī, Muḥammad, ‘Sharḥ’, 1; Burūjirdī, 7).

At the age of fourteen, after completing his preliminary studies in Bujnūrd, he moved to Mashhad to continu…