Memorabilia

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Rationalism in Iranian Philosophy (7 June 2009 UCLA)

The impassioned eulogies that Hossein Ziai’s friends, colleagues, and graduate students delivered at his memorial service echoed the sentiments of the nearly seven-hundred people in attendance at Forest Lawn on 3 September 2011.

In 1970, British theater director Peter Brook traveled with Arby Ovanessian and Anthony Page to a village in Khorasan to watch Ta’ziyeh Moslem—a Shi’ite ritualistic tragedy—the year before he presented Orghast I & II, “a work in progress” at the Shiraz Arts Festival جشن هنر شیراز.

In February 1985, with the enthusiastic backing of Professor Cary Welch, Hossein Ziai organized an exhibition titled, The Heavenly Court: Persian Poetry and Painting, at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.

As an undergraduate at Yale, Hossein Ziai was the art editor and an associate of the prestigious Yale Literary Magazine, the oldest literary review in the U.S. (founded 1836).

Hosts of birds drawn in simple brushstrokes fill the pages of Hossein’s sketchbooks, unsigned.

The late Professor Hossein Ziai’s interests focused on the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) tradition. Dedicated to his memory, this volume deals with the post-Avicennan philosophical tradition in Iran, and in particular the Illuminationist school and later philosophers, such as those associated with the School of Isfahan, who were fundamentally influenced by it.