On Ramin Jahanbegloo

BBC News confirms the bad news circulating in the past few days. Ramin jahanbegloo is arrested. On charges of spying and posing a security threat, Fars News adds. Kayhan also furthur elaborates.

He has an impressive profile. Aside from his CV on his official website, his biorgraphy on openDemocracy says:

Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran and studied at the Sorbonne University, Paris. He currently heads the department for contemporary studies at the Cultural Research Bureau, Iran. Prior to this, he was a post-doc at Harvard University. Among his twenty books in English, French and Persian are Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (Phoenix, 2000), and (as editor) Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (Lexington Books, 2004)

But a lot my Torontonian friends and I personally know him because he'd started a series of weekly meetings on Saturday afternoons at the University of Toronto, in which he and others would present something about different topics each week. He, before I ever got to Toronto, was personally teaching theory and philosophical history.

What I liked about him was his ability to talk about theory without making you feel stupid, his casual attitude towards the group (everyone was calling him by his first name at his own request, which is quite unusual among Iranians who have an obsession with long titles and formal respect.) His energy in persuading everyone to work in the group was admirable. So was his positive energy.

Last time I saw met him was last June in Iran. It was a big surprise. He was married and they were expecting a baby. He seemed very proud of returning to Iran and starting a family life.