Biography

I was born in Arak, an industrial city in the centre of Iran, and grew up in a middle-class family. From high school onward, I gradually turned away from the sciences and found myself increasingly drawn to the humanities. That path eventually led me to philosophy at the University of Tehran. I entered the university during the rise of Iran’s reformist movement and experienced an active student life at a time when the memory and shadow of the government’s suppression of the Iranian student protests of July 1999, also known as the 18th of Tir and the Kuye Daneshgah Disaster, still lingered over the campus.

University opened a new world to me. It was a time of encountering ideas I had never imagined, discovering new philosophical traditions and schools, and finding new ways of thinking about art, literature, and life itself. I completed my undergraduate and master’s degrees in philosophy in Tehran.

With the rise of an increasingly repressive government in Iran in 2005, and after marrying my love, Fariba, we eventually decided that it was safer for us to leave Iran and build our lives elsewhere. We said goodbye to home. We became immigrants, though we did not truly know what that meant until we felt it deep in my bones. We exchanged the familiarity of home for the relative peace of another country, while carrying with us the weight of exile and the quiet ache of nostalgia.

In Canada, my second home, if I can claim to have a home at all, I continued my philosophical journey, completing another master’s degree and a PhD in philosophy. I eventually became a professor of philosophy at Cape Breton University. Along the way, two little angels, Kavan and Denna, came into our lives and brightened our journey.

If I were to summarize my life in a few words, they would be: love, philosophy, hard work, perseverance, and hope—a hope to see, and perhaps in some small way to help create, a world that is a little more just.