My mother, Shireen Mahdavi Khazeni, who has died aged 87, was an Iranian-born, British-educated intellectual who eventually settled in the US following the Islamic revolution.
But she missed her home country. To nourish her longing, she undertook the study of Iran’s social history. In 1999 she earned her doctorate in Middle East history, jointly awarded by the University of Utah and London School of Economics (where she had completed her degree in the 1960s) under the supervision of Ernest Gellner. Her thesis, a study of one of her ancestors, Haj Muhammad Amin al-Zarb, a 19th-century Persian merchant, was published in 2018 under the title For God, Mammon and Country.