Dariush Shayegan

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Dariush Shayegan (born in 1935 in Tehran) (Persian: داریوش شایگان‎ ) is one of Iran's prominent thinkers, cultural theorists and comparative philosophers.

Shaegan studied at Sorbonne University in Paris. He was a Professor of Sanskrit and Indian religions at Tehran University.^[1]

He offers the following thesis as to why the Iranian intelligentsia were uninterested in democracy in 1979. According to Shayegan, Iranian leaders profoundly rejected Westernization, even though this rejection was itself driven by Western ideas such as existentialism, antimodernism, and Marxist revolutionary ideology. Over the past twenty years, however, Iranians have become intensely aware of the importance of human rights and democracy. In Shayegan's opinion, secular democracy now seems inevitable, given the widespread rejection of revolutionary ideology and the diffusion of sentiment in favor of human rights. For Shayegan, the only remaining questions are when and by what means Iranians will decide to close the book on the Islamic Republic.

He wrote a novel "Land of Mirage" in French and it won the ADELF award presented by the Association of French Authors on December 26, 2004. According to the Persian daily Aftab, Shayegan is well known in France for his books in the field of philosophy and mystics.

Shayegan, who studied with Henry Corbin in Paris, also did many pioneering works on persian mysticism and mystic poetry. He was a founding director of the Iranian Center for the Studies of Civilizations. In 1977, Shayegan initiated an international symposium on the "dialogue between civilizations," a concept that has been eˆectively appropriated by the Iranian President Mohammad Khatami.^[2]