Shahrokh Meskoob and His Vision Beyond Ideological Boundaries Shahrokh Meskoob (1924-2005) occupies a special, and in many ways unique, place among the Iranian intellectuals of his generation. While the principal focus of his work was the study of Persian literary traditions, language, and cultural identity, he was also preoccupied with questions about Iran’s encounter with the West and modernity, the place of ethics in politics, and various aspects of Iran’s political culture. He explored these questions with candor, a keen awareness of Iran’s cultural traditions, and free from the ideological scaffolds that dominated the discourses of Iranian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper presents an analysis of Meskoob’s initial attraction to the Tudeh Party’s communist ideology, his abandonment of the party in the mid-1950s after several years of active membership and later imprisonment; his aversion to the popular anti-Western discourse of “Westoxification” (gharbzadegi) in prerevolutionary Iran, and finally his reflections on the Islamic Revolution.

Hamid Ashraf (1946-1976) was a key revolutionary figure in the 1970s and a unique personality among revolutionary activists of his generation. Born in Tehran and educated in prestigious Tehran University, he was also an avid athlete engaging in mountaineering and swimming. As opposition to the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi went through generational cange and became more radical in t1960s, Ashraf joined political activists such as Bizhan Jazani and Hassan Zia-zarifi in preparing to launched armed struggle against it. As one of the youngest among the early activists, Ashraf soon showed great aptitude for organization and development of tactics suitable for an underground organization. When in late 1967 many members of the group he was working with were arrested by the security forces, he played a pivotal role in reorganizing the remnant of the group, open negotiations with another underground organization under the leadership of Masud Ahmadzadeh and Amir Parviz Puyan, help to launch the first guerrilla attack in February 1971 which led to the founding of Organization of People’s Fada’i Guerrillas (OIPFG) a few months later. By 1971, with the death of Ahmadzadeh and Puyan, and with Jazan and Zarifi in prison, Ashraf became the undisputed leader of OIPFG, and the main tactician of guerrilla warfare until his death in 1976. This paper examines the life and legacy of Hamid Ashraf based to his own writings, and available information on him and his time, especially recently published documents on his relationship with other Marxist underground groups and on the manner of his entrapment and death.

The motivation for this paper is twofold. One is using the vehicle of biography against the backdrop of the political, geopolitical, cultural and intellectual climate of the period to shed light on aspects of Iranian history that tend to hinder a lucid understanding of the past -- the modus operandi of Pahlavi during its founding and formative phase, which had a marked impact in forging the mantra of statecraft adopted to the end of that dynasty, obscurities such as Pahlavi's purported rupture with the past (Qajar era) and the motivation of its rapprochement with the Third Reich despite its intimate relationship with the British. Thus, historical inquiry through the lens of an interdisciplinary biography is one motivation. This has required tapping into primary sources — archival materials (Pahlavi, Weimar, Comintern), interviews with personalities who had collaborated with the protagonist, collected works of the protagonist (2000 pages scattered in private collections and libraries in several countries), family archives (made available by the offspring of his sisters), and interdisciplinary history within a transnational context (Iran and Germany).   The second motivation is to develop a deeper understanding of the protagonist’s principal political conception — existential modernization as opposed to autocratic modernization attributed to the founder of Pahlavi (Reza Shah), a collision of conceptions that led to the demise of the protagonist in Reza Shah’s prison — a refreshing concept which as it turns out has not only the ability to provide a versatile rendering of what it means to uphold an agenda of the left (pacifism in the interwar context as a pillar of foreign policy while domestically focusing on equitable distribution of wealth and intensification of means for long-term production of wealth, as in appropriation of knowhow in fundamental science and technologies linked to mercantilism), but can also provide a framework for interpreting the long-cycle behavior of Iranian history (its civilizational seesaw corresponding in its apogee to periods when the existential mantra was most assiduously pursued by ruling orders and dynasties, notably in terms of maritime strategy, such as during peak phases of Achaemenid, Sassanid, and Safavid rule). 

Fatemeh Sayyah: Twentieth-Century Iran’s Forgotten Scholar, Public Intellectual and Women’s Rights Advocate This presentation will focus on the previously unstudied life and intellectual contribution of Fatemeh Sayyah (1902-1947), Iran’s first female university professor and diplomat, as well as public intellectual and advocate of women’s rights. Despite her stellar accomplishments, Sayyah is marginally known in Iran and remains unknown in non-Persian scholarship. Iranian intellectual history is a new field, so far remaining preoccupied with male “master thinkers.” None of the few existing monographs on the subject pay serious attention to women’s intellectual contributions. Another reason for Sayyah’s marginalization appears to be to her affiliation with Iran’s communist (Tudeh) party. Moreover, Sayyah passed away at the young age of forty-five, just as she was becoming a noted national figure during the mid-century’s new political and intellectual contestations. Sayyah was born from Iranian parents in Russia, where she completed her education with a doctorate in European literature from Moscow University. Returning to Iran, she overcame opposition from the Ministry of Culture to become the country’s first female faculty at the newly established Tehran University (1937). She already had received intellectual recognition by defending the moral character of modern fiction in a public debate with Ahmad Kasravi, the country’s leading historian and nationalist thinker. In addition to her path-breaking academic career, she became the country’s first female diplomat by representing Iran at the annual meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva (1937). After the fall of Reza Shah’s dictatorship, Sayyah quickly emerged as the most articulate champion of Iranian women’s rights. She served as the general secretary of the Women’s Party, publishing its organ and launching a principled and carefully calibrated campaign for women’s enfranchisement. She also travelled to Turkey and France, where she was Iran’s only spokesperson in international cultural and political forums pertaining to women’s rights. She was the only female member of both Soviet and British cultural institutes in Tehran and presented papers at the celebrated First Congress of Iranian Writers in 1946. Going beyond a simple biography, my paper will analyze Sayyah’s intellectual contribution to the cultural and political context of 1930s-1940s Iran, as well as probing into the question of why this unique woman has been so grossly overlooked in mainstream Iranian historiography. The paper is based on new Persian archival material, in addition to the only existing collection of primary sources on Sayyah’s life and works.