Assalaamu ‘alaikum!
I have just received the news of the death of my dear elder brother, the beloved Ayatullah Haeri Shirazi, who has died in the Iranian city of Qom at the age of 81.
I met him, for the first and only time, when I visited him at his humble residence in Qom earlier this year. I had travelled from my Caribbean island of Trinidad to Teheran to attend a conference on Palestine, and when the conference was over I stayed on in Iran for another week in order to deliver a few lectures and to meet some of my dear friends who are resident in Teheran. But I was also keen to use the opportunity to meet with Ayatullah Haeri since I had heard in a previous visit, and to my great happiness, that he had denounced the paper-money monetary system as exploitative, and hence Haram. The only other Ayatullah I was honored to meet in Iran, who held similar views, was Ayatullah Binazaade Shirazi, who I met in the city of Shiraz during an earlier visit to Iran. Indeed Ayatullah Binazaade did not mince words. He denounced paper-money as the ‘root of all evil’ in Iran!
I climbed, with some pain in my knees, to the top floor of Ayatuallah Haeri Shirazi’s humble home in Qom, where we were invited to sit on the floor on ever-beautiful Iranian carpets. I was received in the room by several of the senior students of the Ayatullah who were keen to witness the meeting and exchange of views between two scholars of Islam who had similar views on the monetary system.