Robert Charles Zaehner was born on 8 April 1913 in Sevenoaks, England. Zaehner’s Zurvan: a Zoroastrian Dilemma (1955), a study of how pre-Islamic Iranians viewed Time as a god, is among the greatest academic works ever written. While Senior Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, he was recruited by the SOE during the Second World War and sent to Tehran in 1943, acting as Assistant Press Attaché until 1947. Appointed Lecturer in Persian at Oxford in 1950, he became Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at All Souls College in 1952, remaining until his death.
Fellow of the British Academy in 1966, he received an honorary degree from the University of Lancaster in 1970. During his time in Malta training Albanians to fight against their communist government, he mastered Albanian in three months. The first scholar to argue that there needed to be a distinction between different types of mysticism, he also presented religions in their totalities. Notable works include Mysticism: Sacred and Profane (1957), Evolution in Religion (1971), Our Savage God (1974), and The City within the Heart (1980).