My friend and mentor Ayatollah Sayyid al-Milani, who has died aged 80, belonged to that rare breed, a traditionally trained Muslim cleric who was also a trailblazer in the advancement of inter-religious understanding.
Milani’s open-mindedness, forward thinking and widely recognised status as the spiritual leader of the UK’s 100,000-plus Shia community allowed him to provide guidance to British Muslims in difficult times, notably after 9/11, at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq and during the rise of Islamic State.
He came to the UK from his homeland of Iraq in 1987, and was imam at the Al-Khoei Islamic Centre in north west London from 1989 until his death. He was also one of the founders of the Al-Khoei Foundation, a charity that looks after the education and social welfare of Shia Muslims around the globe. For many years he was the UK representative of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Abualqasim al-Khoei.
A passionate believer in religious pluralism who objected to intolerance and conflict, Milani took part in various initiatives and conferences promoting dialogue between religions, including the Social Doctrine of the Church symposium at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan in 2014. The following year he hosted the Dialogue and Peaceful Coexistence conference at the Al-Khoei Foundation in London.
Milani was born in the holy Shia city of Karbala in Iraq to Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Abbas Hossaini Milani and his wife, Agha Begum Qazwini. After attending al-Muntada al-Nashr school in Najaf, he went on to the Najaf Seminary before becoming a teacher there of jurisprudence and theology, and writing a six-volume work on jurisprudence that is still studied in Iraq.
Over time, however, he came under threat from Saddam Hussein, and three of his brothers, Mahmud, Hosayn and Mohsin, were killed by Saddam’s regime. In the mid-1980s he and his family fled to Iran and then to Syria, where he continued to be monitored and harassed by Saddam’s agents, until he was allowed to settle in the UK.
Aside from Milani’s work as an imam and with the Al-Khoei Foundation, he undertook a period of study at Oxford University, obtaining a PhD in comparative philosophy in 1999. Later he was influential in making sure that the GCSE curriculum in British schools covered Shia Islam, and he also became a consultant with the Religious Education Council and the Christian-Muslim Forum.
An expert on Islamic law, he wrote several books on the topic, including Islamic Commercial Law (2021) and Islamic Theology (2016). His many lectures were collected on his own website, almilani.com.
Milani also took a great interest in the arts, including by co-producing my ethnomusicological film, Ten Days (2007), and the composer Roxanna Panufnik’s classical work Abraham (2011).
He is survived by his wife, Malihe Shahid Abdullah Hosseini, whom he married in 1962, eight children, 28 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
