TEHRAN -- Top selected Iranian and foreign scholars attending the fourth edition of the Farabi International Festival were awarded during a ceremony held at Tehran’s Summit Conference Hall on Saturday.

The award-presentation ceremony was held in the presence of Presidential advisor Esfandiar Rahim Mashaii, Minister of Science, Research and Technology Kamran Daneshju and Vice President for Scientific Affairs Nasrin Soltankhah.
Organized by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, the one-day festival focused on research on the Islamic sciences and the humanities.
A Muslim philosopher and a prominent musician, Farabi (c. 878-950) was regarded in the Arab world as the greatest philosophical authority after Aristotle.
The awards were handed to the top researchers, Iranologists and historians in various fields of the Islamic sciences, history, geography, humanities and Persian literature.
International expert Wilfred Madelung, the senior research fellow at the Institute for Ismaili Studies in London and author of the book “The Succession to Muhammad (S) - A Study of the Early Caliphate” as well as French archeologist Jean-François Perrot, were among those who were honored.
Other foreign scholars include Hojjatoleslam Khalid Ghafouri from Iraq and Austrian Iranologist Bert Fragner, the Executive Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the University of Vienna.
Also honored were Iranologist and author of several books on Iranian history and professor at the University of La Sapienza in Rome Carlo Cereti, and professor of history Masashi Haneda of Japan, whose main research topics were a description of world history and the history of East Asia.
Markus Ritter, Ph.D. in Islamic Art History and Archaeology and author of “Mosque and Madrasa in the Early Qajar Period in Iran” from Germany, was the other scholar who was awarded.