Michel Mazzaoui, professor emeritus at the University of Utah, died peacefully Dec. 5, 2013. He was 87.
Mazzaoui was born in Nazareth, Palestine, during the British Mandate. He graduated from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree. In 1966, he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in Oriental languages and literature. He then was at the Institute for Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal.
In 1972, he published his book on the origins of the Safavids, a branch of Islam, based on his Princeton doctoral dissertation. A few years later, Mazzaoui left Lebanon during the civil war for the University of Freiburg in Germany. Then in 1976 he came to the University of Utah, where he taught until he retired in 2009.
A leading scholar on Safavid Persian history, Mazzaoui was one of the first to undertake a reconstruction of the early history of the Safavids. His philological and historiographic research delved into the prehistory of the Safavids and their influence in Iran.
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