A Scholar for Our Times: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Shahrokh Meskoob

by Abbas Milani (ed.), C. Ryan Perkins (ed.)

Shahrokh Meskoob was an Iranian writer and intellectual, who was born in Babol, on the Caspian coast, in 1924 and died in Paris in 2005. Imprisoned in the mid-1950s for leftist activities, he was forced to leave the country following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, after publishing two critical articles in the Ayandegan newspaper in Tehran. Meskoob’s literary analysis of the Shahnameh and the poetry of Hafez, and his book Iranian National Identity and the Persian Language , all translated into English, demonstrate his view that national identity meant cultural identity and that modernity in Iran should be based upon an understanding of the best of Iranian culture. This book celebrates Meskoob’s life and work in eight essays by prominent Iranian scholars and in a selection of facsimiles of his papers, now archived at Stanford University. CONTENTS
Building an ArchiveStanford Libraries and the Papers of Shahrokh Meskoob, by C. Ryan Perkins
Sixty-Three Years of Friendship, by Hassan Kamshad
The Final Question, by Ahmad Meskoob
Some Recollections, by Gita Ostovani
Shahrokh Meskoob and the Question of Iranian Cultural Identity, by Ali Banuazizi
Meskoob’s Reading of Iranian Mythology, by Bahram Beyzaie
A Contemporary Voice Who is Still Contemporary, by Reza Farokhfal
Translating Meskoob In Pursuit of Iranian Cultural Identity, by M.R. Ghanoonparvar
“Leaving, Staying, Returning” The Concern for Form in Three Narrative Texts of Shahrokh Meskoob , by Sorour Kasmaï
Meskoob’s Modernity, by Abbas Milani
Shahrokh A Bibliography of Major Works
A Selection from the Meskoob Collection at Stanford
Index

228 pages, Hardcover

Published March 21, 2022