Ali-Akbar Sa'idi Sirjani

Yesterday was the birthday of Ali-Akbar Sa'idi Sirjani (12 December 1931 – 28 November 1994). He was an Iranian writer, poet, and journalist who conducted significant research on Shahname and cooperated with the Encyclopædia Iranica.

He died in prison under mysterious circumstances after being arrested for openly criticizing the government. He wrote letters to Iran's supreme leader and openly criticized him; later on, he was forced, perhaps after injections of different medications, to sit in front of the camera and confess to crimes he never did! You can find a governmental TV program about him and other Iranian intellectuals HERE.

In that program, Encyclopædia Iranica and several great Iranian intellectuals were seriously criticized and mentioned as troublemakers. Later on, many of them were beheaded inside and outside Iran, such as Prof. Dr. Ahmad Tafazzoli, the great Iranian scholar of Middle Persian who was killed in the west of Tehran, and Dr. Fereydun Farrokhzad, who was beheaded in Bonn, Germany.

Once, I was walking on Enghab street in Tehran, I could buy accidentally one of Sa'idi's famous books, Zahhāk-i mārduš, which had a signature of him on its first page. You can find HERE a documentary about him in which great scholars of Iranian studies such as the late Prof. Dr. Ehsan Yarshater talked about him, it also contains parts of his TV confessions and has English subtitles.