Kader Abdolah

Kader Abdolah is the pen name of Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Farahani, an Iranian-Dutch writer, poet and columnist born in Arak in 1954. ¹ A former left-wing activist who fled Iran and settled in the Netherlands in 1988, he writes in Dutch and is best known for The House of the Mosque (2005). ¹

Abdolah was born in Arak, Iran; the English and Dutch articles give 12 November 1954, while the Arabic article and Wikidata give 12 December 1954, and the museum follows November as a debated date. ^{1 2} He grew up in a religious family in a region where Islam was strictly observed. ³ He studied physics, graduating in 1977 — the English article names Arak College of Science, while the Dutch and Arabic articles place his degree at the University of Tehran — and served his military service in the Iranian Navy. ^{1 3} During the revolution he joined the left-wing movement opposing first the Shah and then Khomeini, wrote for illegal journals, and published two clandestine story collections in 1980 under the name Kader Abdolah, a pen name honouring two executed friends and fellow party members. ^{1 2} He fled Iran in the mid-1980s and settled in the Netherlands as a political refugee in 1988. ^{1 2}

Writing in Dutch, Abdolah made his debut with De adelaars (The Eagles) in 1993, the year's bestselling debut. ¹ The House of the Mosque (2005) carried him onto the Dutch bestseller lists and was voted the second-best Dutch novel ever in a 2007 national survey. ¹ In 2008 he published a two-volume work pairing a narration of the life of Muhammad with his own Dutch translation of the Qur'an. ¹ From 1996 to 2011 he wrote a weekly column for de Volkskrant under the name Mirza. ² He was made a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2000, a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2008, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen in 2009. ¹

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