Winners Honored at First National ‘Zayen al-Aswat’ Quran Competition in Qom

IQNA - The closing ceremony of the inaugural “Zayen al-Aswat” Quran competition was held Thursday in Qom, where top participants were honored.

The event took place at the Imam Kazem Hall of Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi Cultural Complex. It was organized by the Al al-Bayt (AS) Institute and attended by senior clerics, including Ayatollah Seyyed Jawad Shahrestani, representative of Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iran, Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, director of Iran’s seminaries, and Ayatollah Seyyed Hashem Hosseini Bushehri, Friday prayer leader of Qom.

The ceremony began with a recitation by Mohammadreza Haghighatfar, an international Quran reciter from Tehran who also won first place in this competition. Names of the winners in each category were then announced.

In tahqiq recitation, the top five were Mohammadreza Haghighatfar (Tehran), Mohammadreza Zeinali (Isfahan), Masoud Mohahedi Rad (Khorasan Razavi), Mohammadamin Nowrouzi (Tehran), and Ali Kabiri (Tehran).

In imitative recitation, the winners were Amir Taha Ghahremanpour (Ardabil), Sobhan Abdollahi (Khorasan Razavi), Mohammadreza Poursafar (East Azerbaijan), Mohammadamin Nabilou (Tehran), and Mohammad Hossein Azimi (Mazandaran).

In the duo recitation category, the top pairs included Masoud Sharifi and Mohammad Mohammadi (Markazi), Mohammadreza Faghihinia and Erfan Hassanzadeh (East Azerbaijan and Tehran), Ali Esfahani and Ahmadreza Ashouri (Isfahan), Mohammad Hossein Rabieian and Mohammadreza Abbasian (Tehran), and Mohammad Esmaeili with Behnam Rahmani (Ardabil).

More than 1,600 applicants from all 31 provinces had registered, with 94 reaching the final stage. Participants, aged 14 to 24, competed in different forms of recitation under the supervision of international judges.

The competition, held under the slogan “Quran, the Book of the Faithful,” was organized by the Al al-Bayt Institute’s Quranic Affairs Center with support from cultural and Quranic organizations. All recitations were recorded and will be published through the institute’s media platforms.

The ceremony closed with tributes to the winners, marking the conclusion of the first national “Zayen al-Aswat” Quran competition.