Dermot Dix, an Irish friend of Kian’s, wrote this piece for the Dubliner Magazine:

My friend Kian and I sometimes joke about ‘I’ countries: he is from Iran, I am from Ireland, and the last two countries where we met are Italy and India. Kian was arrested in Tehran on May 11th and has been held in Evin prison since then.

The news of his arrest came as a shock. Kian lives for ideas and the arts, he has no interest in subverting governments. In 1999 he forsook an academic career (as an urban sociologist) in New York to return to Iran, the country he had left as a child in the 1960s.

He loved his new life in Tehran: serendipitous conversations in Persian, learning to play the tar, soaking up life on the streets and in the public parks. He met and married Bahar, now pregnant with their first child.

Kian is funny and engaging. “I have a question for you,” he’ll say, and off we go on another debate — about boarding schools (he spent 10 years in English boarding schools, one in an Irish boarding school), about Mughal India, about Persian versus Irish music, about anything and everything.

How he could possibly appear a threat to the Iranian revolution is beyond me.

One of the last emails I received from him had him waxing lyrical about the beauty of Via Margutta in Rome, where we both spent some time recently. I long for the chance to hear what he thinks of North Great George’s Street, the Celtic Tiger, uilleann pipes played live, the Irish rugby team—I wonder when I’ll hear what he has to say about my ‘I’ country.