MODERN ISLAMIC POLITICAL THOUGHT

Hamid Enayat was born in 1932 into a middle-class religious family in Tehran. After completing his primary and secondary education in his place of birth, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Tehran University from which he graduated first in his class in 1954. Two years later he went to England to continue his studies at the London School of Economics. After working for a couple of years for the BBC World Service in London, Enayat spent the 1965-66 academic year as a lecturer in Islamic political thought at the University of Khartoum, Sudan. In 1966 he returned to Iran to take up an appointment at Tehran University. After the 1979 revolution he once again returned to England where he became a fellow of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University. In 1980 he succeeded the eminent historian Albert Hourani (1915-1993) as the second university lecturer in modern history of the Middle East at Oxford. However, his scholarly career in Oxford was cut short by his sudden death on 25th July 1982 of a heart attack during a flight from France to England. Competent in Arabic, English, French, German and Persian, Enayat translated several important works into Persian. Among these were Aristotle’s Politics, parts of Immanual Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, parts of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization and David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion.