City of Knowledge is an effort to celebrate the city of Shiraz and its people.

While the city is well known for its classical poets, mystics and scholars, not much has been written in English on Shiraz in the twentieth century.

It would have been impossible to compose a detailed narrative about all the poets, historians and scholars who have been active in the city in these last hundred years. So I was forced to choose a selected few. I hope people familiar with Shiraz will not be too disappointed with my choices.

The people I write about in the book, as it is often the case in anthropology, stand for a larger whole. While not necessarily “representative,” they stand for a way of thinking and acting I call “city of knowledge.”

Shiraz 1997 Setrag Manoukian ©