Mehdi Bazargan
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Mehdi Bazargan (مهدی بازرگان In Persian) (September, 1907? - January 20, 1995) (also spelled Mahdi Bazargan) was head of Iran's interim government, virtually Iran's first prime minister after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He was one of the architects of the Iranian revolution.
Bazargan was educated in thermodynamics and engineering at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris.
A pro-democracy activist and devout Muslim, Bazargan came back from France and became the head of the first engineering department of Tehran University in the late 1940s. In 1951 with the leadership of Dr. Mossadegh, Iranian parliament nationalized the Iranian oil industry (National Iranian Oil Company) and removed it from British control. Mr. Bazargan served as the first Iranian head of National Iranian Oil Company under command of Prime Minister Mossadegh.
After the fall of the Mossadegh government, he co-founded the Liberation Movement of Iran, a party similar in program to Mossadegh's National Front. He was jailed several times by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi for political reasons.
On February 5, 1979, after the revolution forced the Shah to leave Iran, Bazargan was appointed prime minister of Iran by the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was seen as one of the figureheads of the democratic and liberal revolutionaries and came increasingly into conflict with theocratic religious clerics including the leader of revolution Ayatollah Khomeini. Although pious, Bazargan disputed the name Islamic Republic, wanted an Islamic Democratic Republic. He had been a supporter of the original revolutionary draft constitution, and opposed the Assembly of Experts for Constitution and the theocratic constitution they wrote that was eventually adopted as Iran's constitution. Bazargan resigned along with his cabinet on November 4 following the the US Embassy takeover and hostage-taking. Though it was considered to be a protest against the hostage-taking and his inability to free the hostages, it was also clear that his liberal views and resistance to the clergy had already convinced him that he could not make the democratic changes he had planned.
Bazargan was a member of the first Parliament (Majles) of the newly formed Islamic Republic. He died of a heart attack on January 20, 1995 while travelling from Tehran to Zurich, Switzerland.
[edit] Research works and viewpoints
In 1992, Mehdi Bazargan expressed a new theological opinion on one of the most important issues that has been the concern of Muslim thinkers and interpreters of the Quran: the purpose of the mission of the prophets. He said that the only purpose of the prophetic mission was to inform people about God and the afterlife, and that religion is for securing the happiness of human beings in the next life. [1]
Bazargan’s intellectual production can be divided into two periods. In the first period, he tried to prove that the main mission of the prophets was to direct people’s affairs in this world. In the second period, which consists of the last 8 years of his life, Bazargan changed his mind and took the following opinion: the main mission of prophets was to inform people about God and the next life. It was not the prophets’ mission to teach people how to manage society, or what kind of government to have. That is to say, it is not necessary for Muslims to refer to the Quran in order to discover laws for politics, economics and society, or theories of mathematics or natural sciences, and so on. To discover these laws, Muslims, like non-Muslims, must refer to collective reason; that is, to rely on achievements in the fields of science and philosophy.[2]
[edit] Quotes by Mehdi Bazargan
Imam [Khomeini] wants Iran for Islam and we want Islam for Iran.
[edit] See also
Preceded by Shapour Bakhtiar |
Prime Minister of Iran 1979 |
Succeeded by Mohammad Ali Rajai |