Road to Damask: a grand old man of Iranian enterprise talks to Michael Griffin about his life and his latest venture—organic rose essence for the high-end cosmetics market

Middle East, The, July, 2006 by Michael Griffin

"EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS in your life is by accident," declares Homayoun Sanati in his temporary apartment in London's Chelsea. "I have done 81 rotations of the world around the sun and everything that happened was by accident."

Now a millionaire, he winters in Bandar Abbas, visits the Mayo Clinic for medical checkups and London for legal advice. But every summer finds him in the southeast Iranian city of Kerman when harvest is underway at Zahra Rosewater, a company he founded in the late 1970s. Zahra Rosewater distilled 100kg of pure essence after last year's June harvest of Damask roses, most of which was sold at $7,500 per kilo to makers of cosmetics and fragrances in the European Union, notably in Germany.

Sanati started out as an office boy in Kerman's ancient bazaar, going on to deal in carpets and precious stones with his father. He was instrumental in establishing a literary empire during the time of the Shah, ran a date factory and later a cultured-pearl enterprise--before serving a five-year term in the prisons of the Ayatollah Khomeini. All by accident.

His acumen stems from his grandfather, Ali Akbar Sanati-zadeh, "a simple man with no education who thought he might see something of the world to know what was going on". Ali Akbar walked to Bandar Abbas, from where he worked his passage to India and Istanbul, only returning after 10 years of wandering through Europe and Russia. "He came to the conclusion that Iran needed two things to develop, education and industry, and he was particularly interested in industry," said Homayoun. "That is why we are called Sanati, which means industrious. It was a name he adopted and, simultaneously, he started an orphanage."

The first family fortune was built after Sanati-zadeh devised a washable helmet that was supplied by the thousand to the British-controlled South Persia Rifles in World War One. The second stemmed indirectly from his grandfather's early interest in the therapeutic effects of painting and calligraphy on traumatised children in the orphanage, which went on to become a greenhouse for Iranian artistic talent; Ali Akbar Sanati, the painter and sculptor who died in April 2006, was among the institution's earliest intakes.

"So we had this family tradition of art," recalls Homayoun, a chic and vigorous individual even into his eighth decade. "I was organising an exhibition of Expressionists in Tehran in 1954. The US attache came and told me that Franklin Book Programmes wanted to start a publishing firm in Iran. I'd always been interested in books, so I mentioned it. A few days later, they offered me the job. I said 'I know nothing about books'. They said: 'That's why we want you. We won't have to spend four years making you unlearn the bad habits of Persian publishers!'"

Franklin, a charitable organisation, was formed two years earlier as a joint venture between the American Publishers Association and American Library Association, to help developing countries publish in their own languages. Reliant on private donations to protect its political independence, Franklin paid for the translation of US classics, the training of indigenous textbook writers, the expansion of printing capacity and support-to-literacy programmes in 17 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

When the 28-year-old Sanati refused the offer, Franklin asked if it could use his office as a mailing address and some crates duly arrived. "After a couple of weeks I got curious and opened them. Simple books for children and teenagers; What is Electricity? What is Meteorology? What is Astronomy? and all in colour. I took them to a publisher and said: 'Suppose I translate these books?' He flipped through them and said 'yes'. I said: 'Would you pay me a royalty?' And he wrote out a cheque and that was that.

"So I reported back to Franklin that I'd taken books, found a customer, been paid and was going to have them translated. I made only one condition: I won't allow you to choose the books. I will decide which to print, which not to print. Because I'm a businessman and I know that to be successful, you must give customer satisfaction. And soon I had the whole publishing industry in my hands."

As director of Franklin's Persia programme for 16 years, Sanati organised the translation of 1,200 US titles, from novels like Moby Dick, The Call of the Wild and The Great Gatsby to authoritative tomes such as A History of Civilisation, The World's Great Thinkers and Varieties of Religious Experience--which he says were the better sellers. Within two years, the Tehran office had become so prosperous that Franklin ended its annual subsidy to the programme and Sanati went to look for projects to spend the profits on. Afghanistan's Ministry of Education had just cancelled a textbooks contract with the then Soviet Union for 'inserting communist propaganda' and it cabled him for help in rescuing the project.

"We have a formula in publishing," recounts Sanati, "the retail price of a book must be four times the production cost. In Afghanistan, they gave me a list of 120 titles. I worked for two nights to get the production costs, multiplied them by four and went to the ministry and said: 'These are my prices'. They said they were too high. 'Too high?' I said, 'too bad'. So we negotiated. I noticed that the more I insisted on my price, the happier the Afghans were because they could be sure that I was on my own and there was nothing political behind me. So I signed a tremendous contract for $2-3m."