Dr. Mohsen Banaei (Mazdak Bamdadan), a researcher, historian, author, and physician, is the recipient of the “Nowruz Award for Expert of Cultural Heritage of the Year” for the following achievements:

• Years of effort towards learning different languages to gain knowledge and understanding of the history of religions
•  Collecting authoritative research and works related to Iranian history and culture
• Having a clear and present view of the history and culture of Iran and Islam
• Utilizing a rational and critical approach towards those who have an antagonistic
  view of pre-Islamic history
• Unparalleled courage in telling historical facts in the context of scientific
  historiography
• Publishing a valuable book, The Dark Abyss of History, and presenting unique
  findings on one of the most important Iranian religions for the first time in the
  Persian language

Dr. Mohsen Banaie’s bio:
Dr. Mohsen Banaie was born on May 22, 1965 in Tehran, Iran. He spent most of his
childhood in the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan, before he later moved to Tehran.
Due to his bilingual childhood, he is capable of speaking both Persian and Azeri at a
native level. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, he visited many Iranian cities and
provinces, which encouraged him to read and engage with Iranian history and culture
from a young age. In 1985, he migrated to Germany and applied successfully for asylum to start a new life. Just three years later he began studying medicine at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, from which he successfully graduated with a PhD in 1994. In 1990 he also began to study comparative linguistics there with a scholarly focus on Iranian languages under the guidance of the professor Dr. Josef Elfenbein. Aside from his family, these two subjects dominated his later life. In 2001, Banaie became an author under the pseudonym Mazdak Bamdadan, under which
he has written and released more than 200 articles online about the Persian language.
Mazdak Bamdadan soon evolved to become a heavily discussed Persian writer as well as the leading scholar and pioneer of Islamic revisionism around world with an audience of thousands of readers.
Furthermore, he worked together with Inarah, a group of German scholars who act as the main initiators of Islamic revisionism, to write a German article, “Die dunkle Krypta,”
which appears in Inarah’s ninth anthology. He has also held two lectures at an
international symposium in 2018 and 2019. Banaie is also known for his four popular
lectures on Iranian culture and history, where he discussed controversial subjects like the lion and sun emblem as well as the popular but unofficial national anthem “Ey Iran,” as well as less controversial topics such as the historical and cultural background of
Ferdowsi’s famous Shahnameh and the relationship between Iranian writers and
physicians.
In November 2018, Banaie unveiled his true identity by publishing his first book titled
The dark crypt of history: How did Islam emerge?, where he discusses the congruency of the Quran and Islamic historiography, which accounts less than 5% according to him.
Mohsen Banaie currently lives in Cologne where he works as a physician. Along with
Persian, Azeri, and German, he also speaks English, Turkish, and Arabic.
He is living with his wife and two children in Colon, Germany