Related Resources

Middle East Institute is honored to host Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi to discuss the “Situation in Iran.” Yazdi was born in 1931 in the northern Iranian city of Qazvin. He studied Pharmacology in the University of Tehran and was a student leader in the National Movement of Iran led by Dr Muhammad Mussadegh. After the coup in 1953, Yazdi joined the underground National Resistance Movement of Iran. In 1960, Yazdi traveled to the United States to continue his education and political activities. He was a founding member of the Freedom Movement of Iran, Abroad, in 1961 along with Mustafa Chamran, Ali Shariati, and Sadegh Qotbzadeh.

In 1975 Yazdi was tried in absentia in an Iranian military court and condemned to ten years imprisonment, with orders issued for his arrest upon return to Iran. He remained in the United States until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. While in the US, he participated in the founding of several Muslim and Iranian student associations, including the Muslim Students Association and the Islamic Medical Association of the United States and Canada. A long-time resident of Houston, Texas, Yazdi was a faculty member at the Baylor College of Medicine.

After the victory of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ebrahim Yazdi served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the interim government of Mehdi Bazargan. Yazdi led the Iranian delegation to the 6th Summit of Non-Aligned Nations in Havana, Cuba, in 1979, and to the United Nations 34th General Assembly in 1979.

After the attack in the US embassy in November 1979, Yazdi and the entire cabinet of the Interim Government resigned in protest. After resignation he ran in elections for the first post-revolutionary parliament and was elected as a representative of Tehran, serving from 1980 to 1984. In subsequent elections in Iran for president, parliament, and city councils, Yazdi and other members of the Freedom Movement filed for candidacy but were barred from running by the Guardian Council.

Ebrahim Yazdi lives in Tehran with his wife, and presently serves as Secretary-General of the Freedom Movement of Iran.

Recent Profile in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/world/asia/16yazdi.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=...