Sheij Qomi

Hujjat al-Islam Mohsen Mojtahedzadeh, known to his audiences as Sheij Qomi (Sheikh Qomi), is an Iranian Shia cleric from the seminary (hawza) of Qom who teaches Islam in Spanish. He spent about nineteen years as a missionary preacher in Latin America and now, based in Iran, reaches Spanish-speaking audiences through YouTube, podcasts and social media.

Education As a high-school student he regularly attended the lectures of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, which drew him toward religious study with an international focus. He enrolled at the Shahidayn seminary in Qom, a school that required students to learn two foreign languages. After Arabic, most of his classmates chose English, but he chose Spanish, struck by how many people speak it and how little attention Iranian seminaries had given it. He began in 2004, organised Spanish classes for fellow seminarians, and, at the suggestion of the school's director, set up an independent group outside the school. They started with a small collection of books and dictionaries, then moved on to preaching in online chat rooms, and later travelled to Latin American countries.

Missionary work in Latin America His work took him to Chile, Colombia and other countries of the region. He has recounted that in 2007, while working in Chile, he was stopped and searched by airport security, where officials struggled to pronounce his name. After that experience he adopted the name "Sheij Qomi" (the Sheikh from Qom), which Spanish speakers could say easily.

He founded what Iranian media describe as the first specialised centre for training Shia missionaries for Latin America, established around 2006, and the Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq seminary in Colombia. He has organised around 23 study trips that brought new Muslim women from Latin America to Qom. He has spoken about the social pressures new Muslims face in the region, where Muslims are a very small minority, and about the practical and cultural side of wearing the hijab there.

Online teaching Sheij Qomi presents himself as an Iranian Muslim theologian and aims, in his own words, to teach Islam as conveyed by the Prophet Muhammad through the Ahl al-Bayt. His Spanish-language lecture series include "La Historia Sin Censura del Islam" (The Uncensored History of Islam), "Muhammad en la Biblia" (Muhammad in the Bible), "Las Llaves de la vida Islámica" and "La Sabiduría del Corán" (The Wisdom of the Qur'an). He regularly broadcasts live classes and question-and-answer sessions, including talks on Imam Husayn, Ashura and Arba'een, and broadcasts from shrines such as that of Fatima Masuma in Qom. His lectures are also published as the podcast "Las Charlas del Sheij Qomi", and his Telegram channel offers a free Islamic library of more than 2,000 books and presentations. In 2025 a video of him reciting Surah al-Fatiha in Spanish went viral on Iranian social media.

He drew wide attention in Iranian and diaspora media, reported in early 2024, after two domestic newspapers described him, inaccurately by his own account, as director of the Qom seminary and attributed to him a remark about bringing the chador to Western women; he later explained his approach as inviting women to experience the chador freely rather than imposing it.

Family life He is a father of five and shares glimpses of family life on his channel. He has described his grandmother as the mother of three martyrs: two of her sons were killed before the 1979 revolution for distributing Imam Khomeini's writings, and a third was killed defending Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. For a time he raised poultry and pheasants before deciding to devote himself fully to teaching Islam.