Dariush Shayegan

Daryush Shayegan (Tehran, 1935 – 2018) was an Iranian philosopher, writer and cultural theorist, regarded as one of the most prominent comparative thinkers in Iran. His work moves between the philosophical and mystical traditions of the East and modern Western thought, and his central concern was how cultures with different ways of knowing and valuing the world relate to one another.

He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he completed his doctorate under Henry Corbin, whose work on Islamic philosophy and Sufism shaped much of Shayegan's research. He taught Sanskrit and the religions of India at the University of Tehran and founded the Iranian Center for the Studies of Civilizations. His early work, such as Hinduism and Sufism, examined points of contact between distinct religious traditions, while essays such as Cultural Schizophrenia analysed the strain between traditional societies and modernity. The phrase captured his idea of inherited and imported categories living uneasily side by side.

Shayegan argued that cultures are not sealed blocks and that dialogue between them requires acknowledging real epistemological differences rather than reducing them to a single form of reason. His call for a dialogue between civilizations, launched at a 1977 symposium, was later invoked in Iranian political debate. In 2009 he received the Global Dialogue Prize for his dialogical view of cultural subjectivity. His influence is felt most in studies of Persian mysticism and intercultural reflection, and he was one of the Iranian intellectuals most widely read in France.