With the advent of the despotic Baathist regime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, The al-Qazwini family and other Shia scholars and clerics increased efforts to educate the masses to combat the regime. Sayyid Mortadha al-Qazwini and his first cousin, once removed, Sayyid Mohammed Kadhim al-Qazwini were among the leading scholars in engaging in Islamic activism against the regime. After several years, the regime identified the al-Qazwini family as an ideological threat to his regime. In 1980, Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad-Sadiq al-Qazwini, was arrested and imprisoned by Saddam Hussein because he did not support the Baathist regime. Amnesty International deemed him as the oldest political prisoner in the world at the time. Following the few weeks after the collapse of the regime in 2003, the family found documents verifying his death in Saddam's prisons.