TEHRAN – Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani sent a message to a ceremony that Iran held on Sunday to honor his fellow scholar Najib Mayel Heravi.

The ceremony was organized at the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI) while Mayel Heravi was not able to attend the meeting due to his illness.

The ceremony was arranged on the sidelines of the 15th Honoring Ceremony for Supporters of Manuscripts.

In his message, Ashraf Ghani called Mayel Hervai “a man of a learned ancestry, whose services have expanded beyond the borders of his homeland.”

He also expressed his thanks to the NLAI for organizing the ceremony, which was attended by a large number of Iranian and Afghan scholars.

“The ties between Iran and Afghanistan have always been in a brotherly way and scholars of the two nations have never felt disunity,” NLAI Deputy Director Gholamreza Amirkhani said at the meeting.

The Tehran-based Afghan scholar Mohammad-Sarvar Molai also delivered a short speech.

“Najib Mayel Heravi’s family has a broad background in the study and preservation of manuscripts in Afghanistan,” he mentioned.

“I wish he was here to see how perfectly Iran and his country acknowledge the services of people of culture like him,” he added.

The ceremony ended with unveiling “The Son of Herat”, a book about Mayel Heravi. The book published by Book House in Tehran was authored by a group of writers that included Javad Ebrahimi Heravi and Asghar Ershad Sarabi.

Earlier in February 2015, Mayel Heravi was honored with an award from President Hassan Rouhani for his lifetime studies on Islamic manuscripts at Iran’s Book of the Year Awards in Tehran.

Photo: The organizers of the 15th Honoring Ceremony for Supporters of Manuscripts hold copies of “The Son of Herat”, a book about Najib Mayel Heravi, during a ceremony that the NLAI​ held in Tehran on January 15, 2017 to honor the Afghan scholar. (Mehr/Asghar Khamseh)

MMS/YAW