Seyyed Hossein Emami, member of Fada’iyan-e Islam

Fadā’iyān-e Islam is a Shia fundamentalist group in Iran with a strong activist political and terrorist orientation. The group was founded in 1946, and registered as a political party in 1989. It was founded by a theology student nicknamed Navvab Safavi. Safavi sought to purify Islam in Homeland by ridding it of ‘corrupting individuals’ by means of carefully planned assassinations of certain leading intellectual and political figures.

The group was part of a “growing nationalist mobilization against foreign domination” in the Middle East after World War II, and has been said to presage more famous Islamist terrorist groups.Its membership is said to have been made up of youth employed in “the lower echelons of the Tehran bazaar.” Its program went beyond generalities about following the sharia to demand prohibitions of alcohol, tobacco, opium, films, gambling, wearing of foreign clothing, the enforcement of amputation of hands of thieves, and the veiling of women, and an elimination from school curriculum of all non-Muslim subjects such as music.