Abdul Karim Paz

Argentine Shi'a sheikh, born Santiago Ricardo Paz Zuberbühler Bullrich. Raised in a traditional Argentine family and educated at the Catholic school San Martín de Tours, he converted to Islam at 18 while studying philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), after being introduced to Arab and Islamic culture by a college professor. He earned a Licentiate in Philosophy from UBA (1987) and later spent five years at Al-Mustafa International University in Qom, Iran, earning a Master's in Islamic Theology.

He was mentored by Mohsen Rabbani, the Iranian cultural attaché who founded Buenos Aires's At-Tauhid Mosque in 1983 and later became the architect of Iran's Shia missionary network across Latin America. Paz worked alongside Rabbani as an Arabic/Persian-Spanish translator, and after a period living in Chile — where he founded an Islamic cultural center in Santiago — he returned to Argentina and succeeded Rabbani as imam and director of the At-Tauhid Mosque in the Floresta neighborhood of Buenos Aires in 1993, a position he still holds. He also serves as a representative of the Organización Islámica Argentina and has been a leading recruiter of Latin American students for Al-Mustafa University's programs in Qom.

Paz has drawn scrutiny from Argentine and Israeli authorities over his ties to Rabbani, who was indicted in the 1994 AMIA bombing investigation. In 2015, Argentine federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman named Paz as Rabbani's "right hand" and a key facilitator of communications between Tehran and Buenos Aires in the complaint he filed shortly before his death; a 2025 Israeli government report on Iranian operative networks in Argentina likewise named him.