Dariush Shayegan Talks about the Golden Age of Iranian Culture and How to Revive it (Global Dialogue Prize 2009's Speech)

Dariush Shayegan

Dariush Shayegan (born in 1935 in Tehran) (Persian: داریوش شایگان) is one of Iran's prominent thinkers, cultural theorists and comparative philosophers.

Shayegan studied at Sorbonne University in Paris. He was a Professor of Sanskrit and Indian religions at Tehran University.

He wrote a novel "Land of Mirage" in French which won the ADELF award presented by the Association of French Authors on December 26, 2004. According to the Persian daily Aftab, Shayegan is well known in France for his books in the field of philosophy and mysticism.

Shayegan, who studied with Henry Corbin in Paris, also did many pioneering works on Persian mysticism and mystic poetry. He was a founding director of the Iranian Center for the Studies of Civilizations. In 1977, Shayegan initiated an international symposium on the "dialogue between civilizations," a concept that has been selectively appropriated by the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. In 2009 Shayegan was awarded the inaugural Global Dialogue Prize, an international award for "outstanding achievements in the advancement and application of intercultural value research", in recognition of his dialogical conception of cultural subjectivity.