I still can't believe he's gone, forever.

Ahmad Bourghani Farahani died in Tehran on Saturday at the age of 48, from a heart attack. He is best known as a former liberal member of parliament from Tehran and one of the most open-minded deputy culture ministers in charge of media affairs during Mohammad Khatami's first presidential term.

I met Ahmad years before his brief political career. He was a senior editor at the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) when I joined the English section in March 1980. I still remember his friendly, playful, welcoming smile the first time we met. His gentle nature, grounded character, sense of fairness and aversion to dogma made him widely loved and respected -- these were qualities not commonly associated with revolutionaries in position of authority.

We did not interact very much in those years (1980-90), since we worked in different news departments. But I always looked up to Ahmad as an older brother, rather than a colleague. I once bought him a book written by a reformist Islamic thinker vaguely about the separation of religion and politics. At the time, in the late 1980s when Khomeini was still alive, questions about the legitimacy of absolute clerical rule were just beginning to surface in books and articles from religious circles. I wanted to impress Ahmad with my "progressive" beliefs :o)

My religious beliefs did not last too long. I left for the U.S. in 1990. But two years later I got a call from Ahmad, who had become the chief IRNA correspondent at the UN headquarters in New York. He had brought one reporter with him from Tehran (Mahmoud Ilkhani) but needed someone for English reporting and translation. He offered me a job. Even though I didn't want to go back to working for IRNA, I was transferring to a university in New York and badly needed a job. At the same time I really liked the idea that someone as open-minded as Ahmad was going to be my boss. I took the job.

For the next two years or so Ahmad and I worked in a two-room office in a mid-town Manhattan high-rise on the corner of 42nd St and 3rd Ave. Mahmoud was based at the UN building itself and covered international news. I would mostly scan major newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post... to find mostly news about Iran and translate them into Persian. Ahmad would do a final edit on the reports and fax them to Tehran, as well as writing his own analytical pieces on U.S. policy for the news agency.

It was during this time that I saw a gradual transformation in Ahmad. If he had any doubts, or misunderstandings about the nature of American society as the pinnacle of Western civilization, his stay in New York seemed to have changed them to appreciation, and understanding. He did not surrender his own identity, faith and culture. He did not stop opposing and criticizing American foreign policy. But by the time he went back to Tehran around 1994, his perception had been greatly modified by the very experience of living among Americans.

The gentle giant left us way too soon >>> Song dedication [1]