In Memoriam: Heshmat Moayyad, 1927-2018 Frank Lewis University of Chicago My friend, mentor and Doktorvater, Heshmat Moayyad passed away on Monday 25 June 2018 in Northbrook, Illinois, at the age of 90. Heshmatollah Moayyad Sanandaji began a long and full life in Hamadan, Iran, where he was born on 28 November 1927 into a Baha’i family of Jewish origins – a double minority. His father, Yaʽqub Moayyad, was a contractor with a background in Sanandaj; his mother, Masʽudeh, was a homemaker. He had two older broth- ers, Nosrat and Enayat, who went into medical practice and pharma- cy before Heshmat had finished college – as well as three younger siblings, two sisters, Parvaneh and Parvin, and a brother, Saʽid. After completing primary school in Hamadan, he went to Tehran for high school; during his third year there, the Allied powers deposed Reza Shah. Heshmat began his studies in Persian Literature at the Univer- sity of Tehran at the end of the Second World War. At the age of 21, he interrupted those studies for one full year from the winter of 1948 to 1949 in order to do community organizing among the smaller Baha’i communities in cities, towns, hamlets and districts scattered across Iran. His travelogue, a 320-page handwritten manuscript tak- Franklin D. Lewis <
[email protected]> is an Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature, and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. CXLII Iran Namag, Volume 3, Number 2 (Summer 2018) en down at the time and eventually published in 2015 details those visits through the provinces of Arāk (Markazi), Khuzestan, Bushehr, Hormozgan, Fars, Kerman, Isfahan, Qazvin, Qom, and Azerbayjan.1 Perhaps the most memorable leg of his journey was to Bahrain, to see the writer Abu’l-Qasim Faizi (1906-1980), whom the young Hesh- mat Moayyad looked upon as a saintly spiritual guide.