A Scholar for Our Times: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Shahrokh Meskoob. Edited by Abbas Milani and C. Ryan Perkins. Bethesda, MD: Mage Publishers, 2022. Pp. 228, with bibliography, selection of archival materials, and index. $50.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781949445343.
Shahrokh Meskoob (1924–2005) occupies a distinctive place in the intellectual and literary history of modern Iran. A writer, critic, translator, and essayist whose intellectual formation was inseparable from the political upheavals of twentieth-century Iran, Meskoob was imprisoned in the 1950s for his activities in the Tudeh Party and, following the 1979 Revolution, eventually made his life in exile. Yet politics, in the conventional sense of political commentary or ideological commitment, does not adequately describe his work. Across his writings on the Shahnameh, Hafez, Persian language and national identity, literature, myth, and exile, Meskoob returned to the question of how Iranians might understand themselves through their cultural inheritance without turning that inheritance into an immutable nationalism. For him, the classical tradition was neither a monument to be revered nor a past to be discarded in the name of modernity. It was a living resource through which questions of identity, ethics, language, and belonging could be reconsidered. This combination of literary criticism, political experience, and self-interrogation helps explain his continuing relevance.
Edited by Abbas Milani and C. Ryan Perkins, A Scholar for Our Times brings together personal recollection, literary criticism, intellectual history, translation, bibliography, and archival documentation. The volume grew out of a conference held in October 2020 marking the launch of Meskoob’s archive at Stanford University Libraries.
Perkins recounts the building of the Stanford archive, which includes hundreds of letters, thousands of pages of notes, manuscript drafts, and other records of Meskoob’s personal and intellectual life. Importantly, he distinguishes preservation from endorsement: an archive makes evidence available to future researchers, including those who may challenge its subject. This is an important distinction for a volume that describes itself as a “celebration,” and it is one the book mostly honors—the essays that follow are not hagiography, even when they are personal.
The personal Meskoob emerges in Hassan Kamshad’s account of their sixty-three-year friendship, Ahmad Meskoob’s “The Final Question,” and Gita Ostovani’s recollections. Kamshad follows Meskoob from their school years through youthful enthusiasm for the Tudeh Party, imprisonment, exile, and decades of friendship. Alongside the public intellectual emerges a witty, self-deprecating man suspicious of intellectual solemnity. Ahmad Meskoob’s account of his uncle’s final illness contains an equally revealing scene: a conversation about Hafez seems momentarily to restore the seriously ill Meskoob’s energy. Literature here was plainly more than a scholarly subject. Ostovani’s description of his room, its walls lined with books in Persian, English, French, and German, gives physical form to the multilingual world in which his thinking took shape. These recollections also expose how precariously the archive survives at all: Ahmad Meskoob recalls papers lost or deliberately destroyed during moves, and writings burned because of the dangers associated with Meskoob’s political activities. The papers at Stanford are therefore not simply the accumulated output of a writer but the surviving remainder of a record repeatedly subjected to the pressures of twentieth-century Iranian history.
The critical essays turn to Meskoob’s central intellectual concerns. Ali Banuazizi examines Meskoob’s understanding of Iranian cultural identity and his emphasis on Persian as a carrier of poetry, myth, and collective belonging across generations. Banuazizi notes that this emphasis did not entail the disappearance of Iran’s other languages, which Meskoob expected to coexist alongside Persian— though the claim stands in some tension with his location of Persian at the center of Iranian historical continuity, a tension that perhaps deserved further elaboration. Bahram Beyzaie complicates the image of Meskoob as celebrant of a fixed national past: in his reading, the Shahnameh becomes a text through which power, defeat, justice, and collective memory can be interrogated, since Meskoob’s relationship to tradition depended on the freedom to argue with what one inherited. Ghanoonparvar’s essay on translating Meskoob and Kasmaï’s discussion of his formal preoccupations are more narrowly focused contributions. The former traces Meskoob’s movement between culturally specific sources and larger questions of human existence, while the latter usefully recovers his insistence on the essay as a form of thinking rather than merely a vehicle for scholarship. Together they help explain why Meskoob fits uneasily within conventional disciplinary categories.
Reza Farokhfal’s “A Contemporary Voice Who Is Still Contemporary” begins with the Persian yād—memory or remembrance, but also, in the Hafezian usage he invokes, something brought forth from memory—to ask not whether Meskoob remains relevant but what it means to call anyone contemporary at all. Drawing on Meskoob, Nietzsche, and Agamben, he describes a contemporaneity that requires distance from one’s own time, and finds it in Meskoob’s disillusionment with communism: rather than abandoning the idea of justice, Meskoob relocated it alongside truth and beauty, treating literature as an alternative to the ideological certainties of his youth. His turn to the Shahnameh was accordingly not a retreat into an idealized past but an encounter with a text capable of entering new relations with successive presents. Farokhfal extends the argument through yād-a-yād, the accumulation of memory within language itself—words carrying prior associations and uses, so that language becomes a shared space between writer and reader, a space Meskoob needed all the more in exile, thinking and writing in Persian outside Iran. The phrase “poeticality of analysis” that Farokhfal coins for Meskoob’s method could equally describe his own essay.
Abbas Milani’s “Meskoob’s Modernity,” his sole substantive contribution to the volume beyond the short preface, approaches this territory from another angle: how one could be Iranian and modern without either Orientalist assumptions of backwardness or the certainties of nationalism. Milani reads Meskoob’s rejection of Leninist authoritarianism not as an abandonment of justice but as a redirection toward individual freedom, plurality, and self-knowledge. His emphasis on modernity and political self-criticism overlaps at points with Farokhfal’s account of Meskoob’s break with ideological certainty, but places that trajectory more explicitly within twentieth-century Iranian intellectual history.
What holds a genuinely heterogeneous volume together—friend, activist, exile, translator, diarist, critic, essayist, none of these labels sufficient alone—is the recurring question of what survives and how. Family and friends carry personal memory; the critics work through literary and cultural memory; the archive preserves the material trace from which both can be reconsidered later. Farokhfal’s account of writing as a space where memory survives gives this structure its clearest justification: if Meskoob asked how the voices of Ferdowsi and Hafez remain available through reading, the Stanford collection poses the parallel question of what must survive for Meskoob himself to remain available to future readers. The connection between Farokhfal’s argument and Perkins’s archival frame is left largely implicit—the volume would have been strengthened by an editorial afterword drawing the two together explicitly.
For readers of MELA Notes, the history of Meskoob’s papers is particularly instructive. Meskoob’s papers reached Stanford after portions of the record had already been destroyed, dispersed, or carried across borders—a history far from exceptional in Middle Eastern collections, where political repression, censorship, and exile shape not only what intellectuals write but what later survives for libraries to collect. The Meskoob archive also raises the broader question of what it means to build Middle Eastern collections in diaspora: such archives are not simply fragments displaced from an original national setting, but objects whose routes to Stanford, Toronto, London, or elsewhere are themselves part of their history. Their preservation requires linguistic and cultural expertise, relationships of trust with families and communities, and sustained investment in description and access well beyond acquisition.
As a work of scholarship, the volume is uneven in the way edited conference proceedings often are: some contributions are more substantial than others, and the personal and critical pieces do not always sit easily beside one another. Yet the book’s significance exceeds the strength of any individual essay. By placing recollection, criticism, bibliography, and archival materials alongside one another, it records the passage of Meskoob from living intellectual to archival subject without pretending that this passage fixes the meaning of his work. For librarians and scholars of the Middle East, that may be its most enduring contribution. The archive preserves not a settled legacy but the materials from which new readings can be made—and, in Farokhfal’s sense of yād, from which Meskoob can continue to be brought forth into presents other than his own.
Mahdi Ganjavi
University of Toronto