Mīrzā Muḥammad Khān Qazvini

The death of Mīrzā, Muḥammad Khān Qazvīnī is a great loss to scholarship, and will be felt most keenly in Persia itself, where men of such learning are rare to-day. I do not propose to say much here about the details of his life, for in 1924 he wrote a fairly full autobiography, which was published with four other lives as an appendix to The Bulletin of the Sciences of Finance and Economics, Tehran. This autobiography was reprinted in a collection of his articles called Bīst Maqāleḥ e Qazvīnī Vol. I (ed. Poure-Davoud, Bombay, 1928). More recently he wrote a shorter account of his life, which was published in the monthly periodical Yaghmā (Miḥr 1327/Sept. 1948). He died on 27th May 1949, when he was 72 years old, having been born in March 1877/Rabī’ I 1294. A moving obituary by his great fellow-scholar, S. H. Taqizādeh, appeared in the Ittilā‘āt, and The Times of London published an obituary notice a week later.Qazvīnī's father was a scholar of some repute, and one of the four jointauthors of the great Persian biographical work Nāmeh-e Dāneshvar¯n. Qazvīnī himself, who was born in Tehran, was educated under the traditional Eastern system, and learnt more by his own efforts than from formal instruction. He was orphaned before he was twelve, and soon afterwards became a student (ṭalaba) in one of the old religious colleges supported by charitable bequests; but like other zealous students he managed to attend the lectures of all the eminent masters of his time.