Dr. Mohammad Khazaeli, MP

BIOGRAPHY

(In what follows, I will tell my father’s life story with Iran and America weaved into it.)

Early Life

Rahim Mokhtari was born in 1944 to Ahmad Reza Mokhtari and Khanoomagha Mohammed Javad in Isfahan, Iran. He was the fourth of eight siblings in a family more tightly knit than any I have ever seen in my life. His father supported the family working as a truck driver. Their home was modest but comfortable and filled with warmth and signature Isfahani humor put forth from parents and children alike.

He was born with congenital cataracts and glaucoma resulting in in him having limited vision (legally blind) throughout his life. Although he attended elementary school, as the print used in middle school became smaller, his parents could not find a secondary school that could accommodate his disability. He stayed home with his mother as his siblings went to school for several years. He had a short-wave radio through which he listened to the news including BBC Persian and local programing as a teenager. He developed strong speaking and composition skills and helped his siblings with composing sentences for their homework involving essays despite not being in school himself. His teenage years also included experimentation with religion and considerable time at the mosque. In his twenties however, he gravitated away from religion, later stating that he increasingly found that what clerics were preaching “simply did not add up for him.”

At some point during his teenage years spent at home, he heard a radio interview with a blind member of the parliament, Mohammad Khazaeli who spoke of the importance of people with disabilities being integrated into society. Rahim immediately contacted Dr. Khazaeli and scheduled an appointment to seek guidance from the MP. He learned of a school for people with vision disabilities in Tehran founded by Dr. Khazaeli where he could earn his high school diploma. His father rented a small studio for him in Tehran to accommodate his son’s aspiration to resume his education. His younger brother often visited him and helped by reading and recording lessons for him and Rahim earned his diploma soon thereafter.

Dr. Khazaeli also helped Rahim get his first job as an operator in the Ministry of Communication. When his brother also landed a job at the ministry, he found that Rahim was well-known and very popular in the ministry due to his congenial demeanor and use of niceties in his interactions with any ministry officials requesting a phone line to use.

Rahim decided to participate in the national college entrance exam. He had always wanted to study law but there was an eligibility age limit of twenty-five for the law program he missed by several months. He received a top score on the college entrance exam to study education and psychology at the University of Isfahan, supported by a full government (Queen Farah) scholarship. He met a student from the Kurdish town of Kermanshah in the university orientation who was to become his best friend to his death. They took most of the same classes and his friend would read their study materials out loud in regular study sessions throughout their college years.

After graduation, he became a deputy in Iran's national agency for the blind where he helped run Iran's first vocational rehabilitation program to help people with vision disabilities. It was in this position that he met his wife who was a translator at the organization.

(to be continued…)