Bashir al-Najafi
Iraqi Grand Ayatollah
Grand Ayatollah Sheikh Basheer Hussain Najafi (Arabic: آية الله العظمى بشير النجفي) (born 1942) is a Pakistani Twelver Shia Marja' and one of the Four Grand Ayatollahs of Najaf, Iraq. He was born in Jalandhar, a city in then-British India. He resides in Najaf, Iraq & Gujranwala Pakistan now.
Migration to Pakistan
After the partition of British India into the Dominion of India and Dominion of Pakistan in 1947, his family moved to Pakistan and settled in the city of Gujranwala, Punjab. In Gujranwala he had his initial education in religion. He was then able to move to Iraq for studies in the early 1960s. He is one of many individuals from South Asia and one of the few Pakistanis to have ever been elevated to the highest rank of Grand Ayatollah in Shia Islam. He was one year senior to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
Al Najafi was attacked on 6 January 1999 by a group of armed men, reportedly members of Fedayeen Saddam, while he and members of his seminary were performing religious duties. The attack, which included use of a hand grenade, resulted in the death of three persons and injury to a number of members of the seminary, including the Grand Ayatollah.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2033296. VIAF identifies the subject as 3217148574266224430009. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1947 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bashir al-Najafi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.