At a glance
- Roles
- Scholar · Philosopher · Politician
- Region
- Persia & Central Asia
- Identifiers
- Wikidata
- Review
Life in time
Place in the story
Unknown (unknown)
Roles are dated and sourced; the museum describes the act and attributes the judgement.
Early life and formation
He was born at Ardakan in Yazd province, the son of Ruhollah Khatami, and studied at the seminaries of Qom and Isfahan before taking degrees in philosophy. The Persian article presents him as a reformist politician and the fifth president of the Islamic Republic; the Urdu article gives his birth erroneously as 12 October 1931, a date no other edition supports and which is not followed here. 1 2 3
Career and presidency
Khatami headed the Islamic Centre in Hamburg in the late 1970s, was elected to the Majlis in 1980, and served as minister of culture from 1982 to 1992, when he resigned under conservative pressure. Elected president in 1997 with about seventy per cent of the vote and re-elected in 2001, he proposed the Dialogue Among Civilizations, which the United Nations adopted for the year 2001, and he later came to lead Iran's reformist camp; the Arabic article's infobox names Rafsanjani as his predecessor and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as his successor. 4 5
Religion
His faith is recorded as unknown, and the reason is stated plainly. Only one independent text attests an affiliation for him personally: the English article's lead calls him a Shia cleric. The Persian and Arabic texts name no affiliation (the Arabic infobox gives Islam in general), the Urdu text calls him a scholar and cleric without naming a tradition, and its categories file him under Shia headings — a filing, not a text. Wikidata carries Shia Islam in general. Branch-supporting context exists — a seminary-formed cleric, son of a Grand Ayatollah, president of a republic whose constitution establishes Twelver Ja'fari Shi'ism — but the museum's mapping rule requires two independent texts attesting "Shia", and only one does, so the attestation and the context are preserved here without a recorded value. 4 1 5 3
Sources
- The defined source entities cited above, recorded in
data/source/. - Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.
Connections
- Predecessor of
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- Successor of
- Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
People and things also explored
Ali Khamenei· Hassan Rouhani· Ruhollah Khomeini· Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani· Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Sources
- Mohammad Khatami — Persian Wikipedia
- Mohammad Khatami — Urdu Wikipedia
- Mohammad Khatami — Wikidata Q180795
- Mohammad Khatami — English Wikipedia
- Mohammad Khatami — Arabic Wikipedia
Cite this page
islam.museum contributors. “Mohammad Khatami”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/person/mohammad-khatami/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-10-27.