[custom_adv] Mehdi Bazargan (1907 – 20 January 1995) was scholar, academic, long-time pro-democracy activist and head of interim government, making him Iran's first prime minister after the Revolution of 1979. [custom_adv] He resigned his position as prime minister in November 1979, in protest at the US Embassy takeover and as an acknowledgement of his government's failure in preventing it. [custom_adv] He was the head of the first engineering department of University. A well-respected religious intellectual, known for his honesty and expertise in the Islamic and secular sciences, he is credited with being one of the founders of the contemporary intellectual movement. [custom_adv] Bazargan was born into an Azerbaijani family in Capital on 1 September 1907. His father, Hajj Abbasqoli Tabrizi (died 1954) was a self-made merchant and a religious activist in Bazaar guilds. [custom_adv] Bazargan went to France to receive university education through a government scholarship during the reign of Reza Shah. [custom_adv] He attended Lycée Georges Clemenceau in Nantes and was a classmate of Abdollah Riazi Bazargan then studied thermodynamics and engineering at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (École Centrale Paris). [custom_adv] After his graduation, Bazargan became the head of the first engineering department at University in the late 1940s. He was a deputy minister under Premier Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1950s. [custom_adv] Bazargan served as the first head of the National Oil Company under the administration of Prime Minister Mosaddegh. [custom_adv] Bazargan co-founded the Liberation Movement in 1961, a party similar in its program to Mossadegh's National Front. Although he accepted the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as the legitimate head of state, he was jailed several times on political grounds. [custom_adv] A well-respected religious intellectual, known for his honesty and expertise in the Islamic and secular sciences, he is credited with being one of the founders of the contemporary intellectual movement.
