Ali Dashti

Ali Dashti (Persian: علی دشتی, pronounced [æˈliː dæʃˈtiː]; 31 March 1897 – 16 January 1982) was an Iranian writer and politician of the twentieth century.

In 1975, he gave the papers for his book Bist O Seh Sal (Twenty Three Years) to professor of Persian and Arabic Frank RC Bagley and asked him to translate it, but not to publish it until after his death.

Frank RC Bagley kept his promise and, having translated and organised Ali Dashti's papers into a publishable format, the book was printed in 1985.

The stories in it are taken in identical or slightly modified forms from the lore of the Jews and the Christians, whose rabbis and monks Muhammad had met and consulted on his journeys to Syria, and from memories conserved by the descendants of the peoples of Ad and Thamud.

Seyr-i dar Divan-e Shams, on the lyric verse of the poet Mowlavi Jalal od-Din Rumi (1207–1273).this book has been translated by Sayeh Dashti, Ph.D. from Persian to English in 2003.

Ali Dashti sympathized with the desire of educated Iranian women for freedom to use their brains and express their personalities; but he does not present a very favourable picture of them in his collections of novelettes: His heroines engage in flirtations and intrigues with no apparent motive except cold calculation.

Nevertheless, these stories are very readable, and they provide a vivid, and no doubt partly accurate, record of the social life of the upper classes and the psychological problems of the educated women in Tehran at the time.

Ayyam-e Mahbas (Prison Days) (1922) Panjah o Panj (Fifty Five) criticism of Islam Edmond Demolins's A quoi tient La superiorite des Anglo-Saxons Samuel Smiles's Self-Help translated into Persian from Arabic Criticism on Ali Dashti dates back to the 1940s when Gholamhossein Mosaheb, founder of The Persian Encyclopedia, wrote a book named Ali Dashti's plots.