حافظ فرمایان، ۱۹۲۷-۲۰۱۵

M. R. Ghanoonparvar, “Hafez Farmayan,” Iran Nameh, 30:4 (Winter 2016), CXLVI-CXLIX.

Hafez Farmayan

M. R. Ghanoonparvar

Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin.

Hafez Farmayan, Professor Emeritus of History and Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, passed away on Saturday, July 4, 2015. Only two days earlier, on July 2, after a telephone conversation in which he informed us about his failing heath, my wife and I visited him at his home, in his library. For the couple of hours that we were there, he was our usual cheerful Hafez. He reminisced about the past, about the good times we had when his wife Jody was alive; the time after her death when we persuaded him to accept the invitation of his brother, Manuchehr, to the three of us, my wife and I and Hafez, to visit him in Venezuela; and all the other times in the course of almost forty years we had become close friends and colleagues. From the very first day when I met Professor Farmayan, the only word that came to my mind to describe him was “a gentleman.” He was a gentleman in every sense of the word, but also a gentle man. He was kind to and treated everyone with respect, even those who were unkind to him. And from the very first day, I regarded him not only as a generous friend, but also a mentor. He was a generous friend and mentor to all his colleagues and students. And he was not only a gentleman, but a great scholar.

M. R. Ghanoonparvar is Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely on Persian literature and culture in both English and Persian and is the author of Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (1984), In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction (1993), Translating the Garden (2001), Reading Chubak (2005), and Persian Cuisine:Traditional, Regional and Modern Foods (2006).

Professor Farmayan was a pioneer in the scholarly study of Qajar Iran and among the first historians to point out the significant social and cultural change taking place during the Qajar period. He was born in 1927 to a distinguished family in Tehran. He was the son of Prince Abdolhoseyn Farmanfarma, the grandson of Abbas Mirza, Fath’ali Shah Qajar’s son and crown prince. With the transition from the Qajar to the Pahlavi dynasty, Professor Farmayan’s father, who had served in important administrative positions, including governorship, commander-in-chief of the armies, and premiership, essentially withdrew from political life, devoting much of his time to the rearing and education of his thirty-two children. After their basic education in Iran by private tutors and in public schools, Farmanfarma made sure that they continued their education, in many cases abroad; and Hafez, who was one of the youngest, was sent to the United States during World War II to continue his education. He travelled by land to Bombay, and then by an American troop ship to the United States, where he arrived in 1944. At Stanford University, where he began his undergraduate education, he initially intended to study engineering, but soon decided on history and Western civilization. In 1949, he completed his B.A. and a year later, in 1950, his M.A., the same year in which he married his wife Jody, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute and an accomplished artist.

A year later, Professor Farmayan began his Ph.D. education at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., where he worked with many distinguished historians including his dissertation supervisor, a Russian immigrant, Cyrille Toumanoff, who specialized in Sasanian and Byzantine history. While working on his Ph.D., at the request of the Library of Congress, he compiled one of the first bibliographies of scholarship on Iran, called Iran: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. He wrote his dissertation on “The Fall of the Qajar Dynasty” and received his Ph.D. in 1953.

Professor Farmayan was a great admirer of Dr. Mosaddeq, whom he had met earlier in Washington D.C. Every visitor to his office at the university or at home would first notice a large signed photograph of the late prime minister above his desk. Although devastated by the fall of the government of Dr. Mosaddeq, on the evening of the day he received his degree, he told his wife that he was going to buy a ticket to go back to Iran, and in fact, he went back in September 1953, just over a month after the overthrow of Dr. Mosaddeq. Even though after some difficulty with an Iranian visa, he was able to have Jody join him in Tehran. In the wake of the tumultuous events, he was unable to secure a position at the university, living mainly on his family income. Eventually, through the Point Four project for introducing modern public administration to Iran, in a competitive program, Professor Farmayan was chosen as a candidate to

return to the United States to study for another Ph.D., in public administration at the University of Southern California, a degree he completed in 1957. Upon his return to Iran in 1958, he was appointed assistant professor of public administration at the University of Tehran, where he also became the director the new Library and Research Program of the Institute of Public Administration. In the meantime, on the initiative of Professor Ehsan Yarshater, along with his lifelong friend, Iraj Afshar, Professor Farmayan became involved in the founding of a book society and The Journal of the Book Society of Persia, the chief editor of which was Iraj Afshar.

In the following year, on the recommendation of Professor Sa’id Nafisi, who had been impressed by Dr. Farmayan’s knowledge of modern historical methodology, he was appointed associate professor of history in the Department of History of the University of Tehran, where he taught European history and published Europe in the Age of Revolution in 1965 for his promotion to full professorship. It was during this time that, persuaded by Professor Nafisi, Professor Farmayan changed his scholarly focus to Iranian and Islamic history, a change that eventually led to his groundbreaking idea of looking at the Qajar period as the time in which modernization began in Iran. To this end, he undertook the uncovering, editing, and publishing of a number of important 19th century memoirs and travel diaries, including the Travel Diary of Hajji Pirzadeh and the Memoirs of Aminodowleh.

Even though by the early 1960s Professor Farmayan had become a highly recognized scholar, teacher, and administrator, and a notable figure among the intellectual elite in Iran, he gradually came to the realization that the political and bureaucratic atmosphere of the University of Tehran was becoming unbearable to him and not suitable for his teaching and scholarship; especially when Jahanshah Saleh became the president of the university, Professor Farmayan decided to abandon all he had accomplished and leave for the United States, where he received several offers from various universities. Before coming to The University of Texas, Professor Farmayan taught at Columbia University and the University of Utah. In addition to teaching at the Department of History at The University of Texas, Professor Farmayan played a pivotal role in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, for the establishment and development of which he had been instrumental. Similar to his efforts in Iran, Professor Farmayan continued his scholarly efforts toward a reassessment of Qajar history. His groundbreaking articles, including “The Forces of Modernization in Nineteenth Century Iran: A Historical Survey” published in 1968; “Observations on Sources for the Study of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Iranian History,” published in the International Journal of Middle 

Eastern Studies in 1974; and “Portrait of a Nineteenth Century Iranian Statesman,” published in the same journal in 1983, gave a new direction to the field of Qajar studies, not only in Iran and the United States, but internationally.

Among all of his many accomplishments, Professor Farmayan was most proud of himself for being a dedicated, caring, effective, and inspiring teacher. He was devoted to his students, whether in lecture classes with several hundred undergraduate students or in his graduate seminars. He supervised and trained several dozens of doctoral students who now have important positions in universities and elsewhere on every continent. They include scholars such as Elton Daniel, Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the former editor of Encyclopedia Iranica with whom together they published A Shi’ite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885-1886: The Safarnameh of Mirza Mohammad Hosayn Farahani in 1990.

Professor Hafez Farmayan will be remembered fondly and greatly missed by his children, Mahan and Salar (Salty); his grandchildren; and his extended family, friends, colleagues, and students.