Yesterday, a coincidence (or as it is called in Persian, “tavard”) happened. A friend asked me about a book by Franz Fanon and which translation of Fanon’s books is better. I replied that I haven’t read any of Fanon’s works because the anti-Western ideologies of Fanon and his nationalist supporters, such as Ali Shariati and Ahmad Fardid, did not appeal to me. However, I suggested to my friend that if he is looking for good translations of Fanon, he should find and read the two titles published by Khwarazmi Publications. Although I had not read those two titles myself, my argument was that a book published by Khwarazmi is most likely to have reliable translations.

After this conversation, I suddenly found myself thrown back into my teenage and young adult years, which were filled with books from Khwarazmi Publications. The nostalgia of those days and those books immediately engulfed me. I remembered how in those days of youth, the yellowed pages of Khwarazmi books enchanted me, with their well-crafted letters and elegant text that was more beautiful than the writing in many other publishers’ books. The smell of paper and book covers, the simple yet eye-catching design of the covers, which featured the famous Persian carpet design and were the result of Mahmoud Javadi Pour’s taste, and the captivating titles of the books… all of these elements created countless moments and hours of intoxication, infatuation, excitement, and inspiration. Later, when I became familiar with the publishing industry, I applauded the precise selection of the fixed cover design, which was uniform for all books but still maintained its own charm. It is rare to find a publisher who

Barry, we first found and read many eternal works in the form of Khwarazmi books, many blessed and beloved names, such as Nikos Kazantzakis, Kafka, Plato, Sophocles, Gramsci, Shahrokh Maskub, Russell, Popper, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky, Jasper, Hannah Arendt and many others, through these publications.

When I became a student, one of my favorite places was the beautiful Khwarizmi bookstore on Enghelab Street, across from the University of Tehran. This bookstore was one of the oldest and most reputable bookstores in Tehran, with an area of 200 square meters in the best location for bookstores. It was founded in 1348 with the Khwarizmi publishing house and was managed by Majid Taleghani for forty years until it was closed down. During my student days, even when my pockets were empty, I would wander and explore the shelves of this store and my excitement would rise at the sight of the book titles. Khwarizmi publishing house and bookstore were a nostalgic reminder of my youth. Now, with my friend’s question, I was suddenly thrown back thirty years to the inside of Khwarizmi bookstore, with its yellowed pages and the world of novels, authors, and translators.

After that conversation with my friend, I got up from my seat and went to the front of my bookshelf. I pulled out two or three volumes from this publishing house, reminiscing about my youth and perhaps even my adolescence, and flipped through them, smelling their pages. I thought to myself, what treasures we had and didn’t know their worth, what inheritance we didn’t appreciate, what valuable service the caretakers of this publishing house provided for us and we were unaware. With what open-mindedness they published the best works, from leftists like Brecht and Gramsci to liberals like Russell and Popper and Isaiah Berlin, from ancient works of Plato to modern Kafka, and didn’t want to be limited to just one intellectual movement; it seemed that for them, only the quality of the work mattered and its value. If you take a look at the list of works from this publishing house, you will be amazed by its diversity and also by the passion and taste of the professionals in

I was drowned in memories of my wandering in Khayyam bookstore and the smell of books and the yellow pages and so on, when I read a news on my laptop: Khayyam bookstore was closed down…!

What a coincidence! Just as you remember Khwarazmi and all the forgotten treasures of memories, you hear the news of his stores being sealed. I read that the Islamic Advertising Organization is behind this issue, the same organization that, with sheer unlawfulness, confiscated Amir Kabir Publications and replaced the most successful publications of the country with loss-making institutions. It seems that the story was that in the 1940s, after the bankruptcy of Khwarazmi Publications, the late Abdolrahim Jafari, the manager of Amir Kabir Publications, saved it by buying a portion of Khwarazmi’s shares. With the passing of the late Alireza Heydari, the CEO of Khwarazmi Publications, on February 21, 1983, the Islamic Advertising Organization, under the pretext that apparently 20% of Khwarazmi’s shares belong to Amir Kabir Publications (and the current owner or rather usurper of Amir Kabir Publications is the

I remember in the late 1990s when I was a journalist, the late Abdolrahim Jafari, the managing director of Amir Kabir Publications, who was a genius in the printing and publishing industry, wrote detailed letters of complaint about the confiscation of Amir Kabir Publications by threats, torture, and force from Ayatollah Jannati and delivered this court order to every newspaper in the country. It’s natural that no newspaper had the courage to publish the letter of this oppressed publisher during those cursed years. As a twenty or twenty-one-year-old journalist at the time, I not only couldn’t convince the editor-in-chief to publish the letter, but I couldn’t even steal the text of Jafari’s letter from the cultural editor of the newspaper. It’s as if this letter was a blasphemous text. Abdolrahim Jafari later wrote about this in his three-volume book…

In search of morning.

The story of the arrest and intense pressure for signing a forced peace agreement and then describing his own lawsuits, which did not receive permission to be published in Iran. It should be noted that the court had repeatedly ruled the confiscation of Jafari’s assets as illegal, but the Islamic Advertising Organization, under the leadership of Ayatollah Jannati, disregarded these rulings and caused damage to the Amir Kabir publications and stores, which were considered the most successful publishing institution.

Yes, the concept of Islamic advertising is also good for us, Islamic advertising means confiscation of people’s property, means force and lawlessness and looting, means destruction of culture, means destroying the nostalgia of the people of the Book. Curse on the thinking that wants to destroy culture, curse on the thinking that has tied our youth’s waist to the murder of nostalgia.