Saturday, January 9, 2021

Iranian Entrepreneur and Industrialist Habib Sabet Pasal was a Baha'i of Jewish heritage

Habib with his wife Bahareh
SABET, HABIB (b. Tehran, 1903; d., Los Angeles, 1 Esfand, 1368/20 February 1990), Baha'i entrepreneur and industrialist, who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Iran in the late Pahlavi period. He owned, wholly or in partnership, some forty of the largest companies in Iran, in which more than ten thousand people were employed (for the companies founded by him, see Sabet, pp. 284-85). He also played a major role in introducing the accouterments of modernity to Iran. 

Both his maternal and paternal families were of Jewish heritage who were converted to the Baha'i faith. They were of the city of Kashan but had lived in Tehran for several generations, where Ḥabib’s father, ʿAbd-Allāh Sabet, was born. He was an uneducated but astute and hard-working cloth-merchant. His mother, Kešvar Arjomand, was from a family of prominent physicians. Although the family had modest means, his father scraped enough together to send Ḥabib and his sister to the Baha'i Tarbiat School. From the age of 13, Ḥabib attended the St Louis School (see FRANCE xv) in Tehran, tutoring his fellow-pupil, Ḡolām-Ḥosayn, the son of Moḥammad Moṣaddeq (the future prime minister), to help pay for his own education (Sabet, pp. 1, 28-31). 

Read more about him at encyclopedia Iranica