Mullā ʿAlī Kanī (d. 1888), also known as Raʾīs al-Mujtahidīn (“Chief of the Jurists”) was an influential Shīʿī jurist (faqīh) and religious scholar in nineteenth-century Iran.

Born in 1805 in the village of Kan, which is now part of the modern city of Tehran, Mullā ʿAlī pursued his religious studies in Tehran, Isfahan, and then Najaf. He was a student of Muḥammad Ḥasan Najafī (d. 1850), and Shaykh Ḥasan b. Jaʿfar Kāshif al-Ghiṭāʾ (d. 1846) granted Kanī his ijāza (“licence”) to perform ijtihād (independent legal reasoning). For some twenty years, he was also an associate of Sh…