Zarghami was born into a religious family in 1959. Despite his father never purchasing a television, Zarghami became a cinephile. While in high school, he was the classmate of Hassan Tehrani-Moghaddam, who is widely regarded as the father of Iran's domestic ballistic missile program: Tehrani-Moghaddam was killed in 2011. At the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Zarghami was a 20-year-old student in the civil engineering program at Amirkabir University. He took part in the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran, which ultimately lad to the severing of US-Iranian diplomatic relations. He eventually joined the newly-formed IRGC as a radio anchor during the Iran-Iraq War.