A life and career spanning multiple cultures
“A Persian story, unfolding in two countries.” Farian Sabahi, contemporary historian and senior researcher in contemporary history at the University of Insubria in Italy, tells of her life (and career) spanning several cultures. She says: “I was born and raised in Alessandria to a mother from Piedmont (Italy) and an Iranian father. My maternal grandfather was an industrialist in the automotive industry. We were an upper-middle-class family.” After graduating from high school, Sabahi studied business administration at Bocconi University, and did internships at IBM and JP Morgan. “Then I started an internship with a chartered accountant in Casale Monferrato, and stayed just long enough to realize that this was not my path,” she adds.
In search of a new direction, she found herself in Bologna. As she tells it: “I happened to be in the city where my father went to university. Walking under the porticoes, I looked into the course in Oriental History and realized that it would be useful to better understand my origins. I hadn’t been back to Iran since 1978: the 1979 revolution and the war with Iraq made the situation too dangerous. Meanwhile, my parents had divorced so I rarely saw my father.”
To learn more about her roots, she enrolled but was unable to attend classes because she had to work to support herself. Her second degree came in 1995, then a PhD in history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. “Between semesters, I would go to the Middle East as a freelancer for various Italian and foreign newspapers. In addition to a few scholarships, that was how I was able to earn the money I needed to pay my tuition fees and support myself in London,” she adds.
Speaking about her career, Sabahi describes it as a winding road; her studies at Bocconi were crucial milestones along the way. So much so that after her doctorate, she obtained a post-doctoral fellowship in Economics, with a special focus on oil contracts in Iran, and then a research fellowship at Bocconi on free trade zones in the Persian Gulf.
For all these achievements, perseverance played a fundamental role. Thanks also to the two strong women who were her role models: her grandmothers. “They were both born in 1921. Teresina was born in Refrancore, in the province of Asti, Italy. She managed to finish primary school in her village. Nothing frightened her, not even the bombing during the Second World War.” And then there was grandmother Mariam, born in Baku, Azerbaijan. “Her father had been arrested by the Bolsheviks who, after a period of imprisonment, forced him into exile. They crossed the border into what was then called Persia. Grandmother Mariam was illiterate and wore a chador to leave the house. My grandfather Sattar slept in his room, in a real bed, while Grandma Mariam pulled a mattress out of the cupboard in the next room. She slept on the floor, like a nomad.”
From her years of traveling and writing (reviews, news reports and historical essays), Sabahi also recalls the prejudices she encountered. “At a dinner with the Italian ambassador in Tehran, when I was almost thirty and a correspondent for Radio Swiss, the hostess took it for granted that I was the interpreter or the secretary.” Today, as a teacher and researcher in the field of contemporary history, Sabahi describes an exciting job: “I love multidisciplinarity: to decipher the Middle East, I use different tools, from history to geography, from economics to religious studies, from literature to cinema. To the young women of today, she says: “Study, travel, and do not be afraid to change your path.”
