several months of being monitored by Iran's secret police, SAVAK, Moftizadeh was arrested and became a political prisoner for his activities in the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran. He spent one year in prison where he was constantly tortured before being released but the SAVAK would continue monitoring his life for a number of years. Banned from any public positions after his release, Moftizadeh used his money to open a grocery store, which he quickly converted to a homeless shelter and resumed his work in activism. After several calls from his father's followers, he decided to move back to Iranian Kurdistan with his wife Khadijah and his son, Jiyan. Moftizadeh assumed his father's role in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj as the Friday prayer leader in the 1970s where he began to gather support among religious Kurds concerning the mistreatment of both the ethnic Kurdish and religious Sunni minority in Iran. He also drew support from religious Kurds that were dissatisfied with the current nationalist Kurdish movements in Iran through his preaching of nonviolence in response to Kurdish infighting throughout the region. His followers began calling him the “Ghandhi of Islam” for his advocacy of peaceful disobedience as a means to achieve political change. Moftizadeh and some of his supporters were imprisoned by the Shah's government in 1976 when his political activities in Sanandaj became known to the local authorities but were released less than a month later. The Shah was under immense pressure to release religious figures from prison. Leadership during Islamic Revolution By the time the Islamic Revolution swept Iran in 1978, Ahmad Moftizadeh had already developed his own faction of Kurdish followers that supported the notion of a unified Islamic and democratic state of Iran with special autonomy for the Kurdish people. In 1978, Moftizadeh founded the Maktabe Koran or the Quranic School of Thought in Sanandaj. As a leader of a large segment of people in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj, he drew opposition from communist and nationalist groups early on for supporting the notion of an Islamic state. However, despite a brief confrontation and continued heavy disagreements about the role of Kurds in the Islamic Revolution, Moftizadeh maintained a neutral relationship with other more influential nationalist factions such as the secular Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran. After multiple discussions with the leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, through intermediaries, Moftizadeh was reported to have said