About Mesbah Yazdi Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi (Persian: محمد تقی مصباح یزدی) (born 31 January 1934 in Yazd) is a hardline Iranian Twelver Shi'i cleric and politician who is widely seen as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's spiritual advisor. He is also a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for choosing the Supreme Leader, where he heads a minority ultraconservative faction. He has been called "the most conservative" and the most "powerful" and "influential ... clerical oligarch" in Iran's leading center of religious learning, the city of Qom. Mesbah Yazdi advocates Islamic philosophy and in particular (Ishraghi or Ishraqi). He believes Iran has strayed from the values of the 1979 Iranian revolution and strongly opposes democratic rule and the Reformist movement in Iran.