Ayatollah Motahari was considered right hand and one of the most literate scholars trusted by Imam Khomeini. Motahari always considered himself a pupil of the great Imam and undertook serious efforts to spread genuine objectives of the Islamic Revolution and stood by the Islamic movement through all stages.
Motahari also introduced the pure teachings of Islam and stood against any type of superstitious and wrong beliefs.
Ayatollah Motahari wrote assiduously and continuously from his student days right up to 1979, the year of his assassination.
He wrote at least 60 books and treatises before his life was cut short by a terrorist assassin’s bullet at the age of 60 years.
He served in the Tehran University as the Head of the Department of Theology and Islamic Learning's. At the time of his assassination he was the president of the Constitutional Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a member of the Revolutionary Council.
Imam Khomeini issued a following historic message on the occasion of his martyrdom.
In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful
Truly we are from God and we will return to Him
“Hereby I would express my condolences as well as my congratulation to Islam, the Islamic nation, especially to the resisting nation of Iran for this disaster of loosing the honorable Professor Haj Sheikh Morteza Motahhari (May his spirit be sanctified).
Condolence because of the martyrdom of the one who dedicated his precious life to Islamic aims and he campaigned against the deviations, condolence because of the martyrdom of the man who had no counterpart on Islamology and the other branches of Islamic techniques and those of the Holy Quran.
I have lost a very dear child of mine and I mourn for him who was among the figures who were my life achievement.
Although I have lost a very dear son of mine who was part of my soul, I am proud of such devoted children in Islam.
Terrorists can not terror the personalities of the Muslim brave men. Islamic plans had been so far mixed with the martyrdom. Killing the enemies of God is among the guidelines of the Islamic planning.
Martyr Morteza Motahhari was a great intellectual who through his works, speeches and books, played a pivotal role in spreading the Islamic teachings and awakening the political and social conscience of the Iranian people during those repressive days of the foreign-installed Pahlavi regime. He indeed possessed a dynamic mind and instilled in the youth, women, and all sections of the society a profound awareness of Islam and their duties in life.
Martyr Motahari considered freedom to be vital and necessary for all live creatures in order to facilitate proper growth and perfection. For instance, a sprout needs fertile soil to grow and turn into a tree, and similarly it is freedom that facilitates the progress towards perfection, since man has been endowed by God with intellect, willpower, and speech.
He divided human freedom into two social freedom and spiritual freedom. Regarding social freedom, he has said: Social freedom means that human being should not be exploited by others. Others should not create obstacles in his path of growth or exploit his intellectual and physical capacities to their own benefit. One of the goals of the Prophets of God was to make people aware of social freedom, in order to rid minds of slavish attitudes.
According to Martyr Motahhari, Prophets were sent by God to teach man to achieve spiritual freedom by preserving human dignity, intellect and conscience, through abstention from carnal desires and selfish attitudes. And to achieve this, a person should control his/her anger and strengthen the willpower to reject the temptations of unlawful earnings. Then only a person could be considered free in the real sense of this word.
Ayatollah Motahhari made it clear that for achieving spiritual freedom, self-purification is necessary, as taught by all Prophets, especially the Last and Greatest of God’s Messengers, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH). He wrote: The main program of Prophets is spiritual freedom, while the main loss of our era is that we always speak of social freedom but we do not speak of spiritual freedom of human being. In our era, the manmade schools of thought speak no word regarding spiritual honesty, whereas social freedom is impossible to achieve without spiritual freedom.
Imam Khomeini trained several scholars like Motahhari who contributed to intellectual growth of the Iranian nation and entire Muslim world.