Mehdi Bazargan
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, where he also joined the
French Army and fought against
Nazi Germany.
A pro-
democracy activist, Bazargan came back from France and become 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 and was jailed several times by
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Bazargan was appointed to the prime ministership by
Ayatollah Khomeini on
February 5,
1979 after the revolution forced the Shah to leave Iran. Bazargan was seen as one of the figureheads of the democratic and
liberal revolutionaries and increasingly came into conflict with the religious clerics including the leader of revolution
Ayatollah Khomeini. He was against the formation of the
Assembly of Experts and disputed the name
Islamic Republic.
Bazargan resigned with his
cabinet on
November 5,
1979, immediately after the
US Embassy takeover and hostage-taking on
November 4. Though it was considered to be a
protest to the hostage-taking crisis, 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.
In1992 , 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]
Imam [Khomeini] wants Iran for Islam and we want Islam for Iran.*
Intellectual Movements in Iran
