The family claims agnatic descent from Muhammad's daughter Fatimah, through her great-grandson, Zayd, carrying the honorific title of Sayyid.
He was born in Golpayegan to Agha Mir Muhammad-Ali Golpayegani (1788–1875), a contemporary of Murtadha al-Ansari, who moved to Tehran on the orders of Shihab al-Molk, and died there, and was buried in the Golshan Hammam mosque.
[2] Golpayegani travelled to Iraq to study in the religious seminaries of Karbala, Najaf, and finally Samarra, becoming a disciple of Mirza Shirazi.
He left Iran for Iraq in 1936, after the Kashf-e Hijab decree, and died there and was buried in the Wadi al-Salam cemetery, near the tombs of Prophets' Hud and Salih.
Their great ancestor was imamzadeh Muhammad al-Mahrooq, the great-grandson of the fourth Shia Imam, Ali ibn al-Husayn.
In 1967, Muhammad-Taqi al-Modarresi established a religious activist group, known as the Risali Movement (Arabic: الحركة الرسالية) under the jurisprudential guidance of his maternal uncle, Muhammad al-Shirazi.
Before the Iranian revolution, the group remained a secret organisation, working on raising religious awareness in the Middle Eastern region.
[8][9] However, during the second half of the 1980s, the Modarresis influence began to wane as more moderate clerics like Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani came to the fore.