Moftizadeh was the son of the Mufti (religious leader) of the Iranian Kurdistan region, but decided by his own will not to assume the clerical role in the same capacity as his father.
Moftizadeh eventually took a 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 [REF].