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Biography
Hossein Gol-e-Golab (Persian حسین گلگلاب also given as Hosayn Golgolab, (1895 – March 13, 1985) was a polymath Iranian scholar and musician who wrote the nationalist anthem Ey Iran.
Gol-e-Golab was born in Kerman, and studied at the Elmiya School and Darolfonoon. He learned to play both the setar and tar as a boy. He taught at Dar al-Fonun and later enrolled at the law school there, earning degrees in law and political science in 1922. However, he displayed a great talent for the natural sciences, especially botany, and in 1928 was tenured at the school of medicine. This later became the Faculty of Medicine at the emerging University of Tehran.
Gol-e-Golab never lost his interest in music, finding time to translate Western operas into his native Persian while teaching and writing on botany and serving on the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, to which he was appointed 1935.
In 1944, after witnessing an ugly incident where an American soldier serving on the Persian Corridor beat up a native Iranian greengrocer, Gol-e-Golab composed the poem Ey Iran, which was set to music by Rouhollah Khaleghi and soon became a de facto Iranian national anthem.