Mohsen Foroughi narrates from his father, Mohammad Ali Foroughi, that “When I became the first representative in the League of Nations and went to Switzerland, Atatürk told all the ambassadors and ministers living in Ankara, “The greatest person who is a member of this assembly, Ambassador Foroughi It is Iran. I have never seen such a comprehensive, patriotic, and informed man. I wish my country also had aa Foroughi.”Perhaps this comment of Atatürk caused me to be elected president of the League of Nations.”
The collected essays of Mohammad Ali Foroughi not only present a portrait of the multifaceted and complex character of one of the most influential cultural, academic, and political figures of modern Iran, but also depict the cultural issues and political and social conditions of the country during the turbulent years of Foroughi’s cultural and political life—from the first Constitutional Assembly to the early years of the reign of the second Pahlavi. Mohammad Ali Foroughi was among the most brilliant figures of a generation of Iranian scholars, historians, men of letters, and researchers who emerged from the Constitutional Revolution. During the tumultuous years of that revolution, World War I, and throughout the two-decade reign of the first Pahlavi monarch, they published their works and were so rich and creative in their fields that, apart from perhaps one or two exceptions, no one in later generations managed to take their place.
