Mahmoud Mar'ashi Najafi

Mahmoud Mar'ashi Najafi or Seyyed Mahmoud Mar'ashi Najafi (born 1941) is an Iranian librarian, Bibliographer and manuscript expert. He is the director of Mar'ashi Najafi Library, which he says is one of the largest libraries in Iran and the world.

Life and education Seyyed Mahmoud Mar'ashi Najafi, the eldest son of Shahab ud-Din Mar'ashi Najafi and the grandson of Seyyed Shamsuddin Mahmoud Mar'ashi Najafi, was born in 1941 in Qom, Iran. After elementary and high school in Qom, he started learning Islamic seminary sciences, studied the basics and first levels with prominent professors such as Fazel Lankarani, Seyyed Mahdi Lajevardi, Abutaleb Tajlil Tabrizi, Mohammad Sadegh Nasiri Sarabi, Mohammad Taghi Sotoudeh and Seyyed Ahmad Varamini. He then learned the highest level of seminary lessons from his father, who was a distinguished professor, and until the last days of his father's life, he was his disciple. In addition to studying religious sciences, Mar'ashi studied books and treatises of the ancients and the late in these fields due to his great interest in the sciences of rijal, genealogy, bibliography and codicology. In this way, he used his father's instructions and experiences a lot and gradually became an expert. He has received many permissions from many professors and elders. He then entered the academic sciences in the field of sociology. Mar'ashi continued his studies in sociology, first at the University of Tehran and then at the University of London, and in 1985 received a doctorate in sociology from the University of London.