Our Mission

01 — The Absence

The Absence

Western education celebrates Greece, Rome and Egypt as the pillars upon which human civilisation was built, and rightly honours the contributions of these ancient cultures to philosophy, governance, architecture and the arts, yet there exists a fourth pillar of comparable antiquity and arguably greater influence that remains largely absent from the curricula, a civilisation that flourished for three millennia, that gave humanity its first declaration of universal human rights, that pioneered advances in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, literature and law which shaped the trajectory of the modern world, and that civilisation is Persia.

The average Western student can name Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates without hesitation, yet cannot name Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the Persian mathematician who gave them algebra and from whose name the very word algorithm derives, nor Abu Bakr al-Razi, the Persian physician who founded clinical medicine and paediatrics and whose works were standard texts in European universities for five hundred years, nor Cyrus the Great, whose declaration of universal rights predates the Magna Carta by two thousand years and whose cylinder was studied by Thomas Jefferson and the American Founders as they drafted documents that would shape the modern conception of liberty.

This absence is not incidental. When scholars bearing names prefixed with "al" are routinely described as Arab despite hailing from cities deep within the Persian heartland, when the codifier of Arabic grammar itself was a Persian from Shiraz, when the overwhelming majority of the scholars celebrated as luminaries of the Islamic Golden Age prove upon examination to have been Persian in origin, one begins to perceive not mere oversight but a pattern of misattribution so thoroughgoing that it demands a name, and that name is erasure.

02 — Beyond Politeness

Beyond Politeness

Democracy is not merely a political system but a commitment to the dignity and worth of all peoples, a commitment that in our time has too often been reduced to politeness, to a surface courtesy extended automatically and without discrimination, requiring nothing of us beyond basic human decency and demanding no knowledge of another's history, no appreciation of their contributions and no understanding of their origins.

Politeness is the minimum that civilised people owe one another and it is not to be disparaged, yet it remains incomplete without something deeper, something that requires effort and study and genuine engagement with cultures other than one's own, and that something is recognition.

Recognition asks that we understand who others are, not merely that they exist but what they have built, what they have given and what they have endured. Recognition transforms the stranger into a colleague in the long human project of civilisation. Recognition makes possible the kind of durable cooperation and mutual respect upon which lasting peace depends. Without recognition, international relations remain transactional at best and adversarial at worst, for one cannot truly respect what one does not know and one cannot build genuine relationship upon a foundation of ignorance.

If Persian contributions have been systematically excluded from the Western canon for centuries, then equal treatment in the present means continued absence, for to treat an empty chair the same as an occupied one is not equity but the perpetuation of injustice by other means. Corrective recognition is therefore not a favour extended to Persia, nor charity offered to a civilisation in need, but rather the repayment of an intellectual debt long overdue and the restoration of a balance essential to any workable conception of international understanding and social cohesion.

03 — What We Do

What We Do

The Mehr Heritage Foundation exists to move the world beyond politeness toward recognition through a programme of education, publication, distribution and advocacy designed to illuminate the Persian contribution to human civilisation and ensure that this contribution is represented accurately and prominently wherever history is taught and wherever cultures meet.

We produce scholarly publications and educational materials that document Persian achievements in science, law, medicine, mathematics, philosophy and the arts, creating accessible works suitable for schools, universities, libraries and the general public, works grounded in rigorous scholarship yet written with clarity sufficient to reach any reader of goodwill.

We distribute these materials together with museum quality replicas of Persian artefacts to embassies, foreign ministries, cultural institutions and international bodies throughout the world, ensuring that the physical presence of Persian civilisation accompanies the intellectual case for its recognition.

We advocate within educational institutions and governmental bodies for the inclusion of Persian history and Persian contributions within curricula that have for too long presented an incomplete account of human achievement, working not to diminish other civilisations but to ensure that the full picture is presented and that students emerge with knowledge commensurate with the truth.

04 — An Invitation

An Invitation

We invite embassies, cultural foundations, educational institutions and all bodies committed to cross-cultural understanding to partner with us in this work. Such partnership might take the form of receiving educational materials and replica artefacts for display, of co-sponsoring lectures, exhibitions and scholarly programmes, of supporting the development of curricula that include Persian contributions or of funding the translation and distribution of materials in languages that will carry them to new audiences.

The scale of the task is considerable but so too is the opportunity, for we live in an age when information travels freely, when scholarship can reach millions and when the correction of historical imbalances is not merely possible but increasingly expected by publics who have grown impatient with partial truths and inherited omissions.