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Mohammad Ghazvini (1877–1949) made his way to Paris by way of London at the age of 26. He was informed by his brother, who also lived in London, about the reservoir of Persian classic manuscripts in British libraries. He arrived in London in 1904, and soon thereafter met Edward G. Browne, a great British orientalist and expert in Persian literature who also introduced Ghazvini to the Gibb Memorial Trust. Ghazvini wrote an introduction for Browne’s edition of renowned Iranian historian Muhammad Aufi’s book [book name] and an article about the Iranian poet Masoud Saad Salman. His job was interrupted by the start of World War I and he was forced to leave Paris for Berlin, where he found a chance to meet German Orientalists and associate with respeted Iranian intellectuals such as Hassan Taghizadeh and Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh. He then returned to Paris in 1920 to continue his editing job. During his time in Paris he met more famous French orientalists including Hartwig Derenburg, a scholar in Arabic manuscripts, and Barbier De Maynard, a scholar on Islam. Ghazvini participated in their classes in the Louvre Museum and the Sorbonne. Some of the highlights in his long list of works in Paris include editing the Persian literary classics Čahār maqāla and Marzbān-nāma. In addition to his editing work, he made great contributions to the preservation of Persian literature through his careful analysis, copying, and photography of ancient Persian texts that were being kept in European libraries and therefore unavailable to most Iranians. Ghazvini’s admirers knew him as Allameh (erudite) because of his mastery and vast knowledge of Persian and Arabic language and literature.
This post is also available in: فارسی (Persian)