Listed alphabetically by surname of first author
Between Fact and Fiction - History and Story in Amirshahi's Dar Hazar
Eskandar Abadi
Deutsche Welle World Service, Germany
This paper analyzes Mahshid Amirshahi's novel Dar Hazar as she describes a series of impressions depicting an Iranian exile's homecoming during the tumultuous events that immediately followed the start of the Iranian revolution. The novel takes place during the 14 months that followed the events of 17 of Shahrivar of 1367. Amrishahi's novel is often valued as a historic record. This paper argues that the most significant characteristic of this original work is its quality as a well crafted piece of fiction, a novel. The discussion includes a formal analysis of the book centred around a basic distinction between the author of the novel and the narrator of the text. That is, while the linear notes claim that the protagonist in the pages is the author herself, a closer analysis reveals a narrator complexly constructed and distinct from the author. This paper characterises the narrator against five formal dimensions: the narrator's personality and voice, her ego as she travels within time; the impact of the patriarchal culture in the gender identity of the narrator as it acquires manly traits; the difference between the narrative voice as it moves in the present tense and the historic time as is ultimately revealed; and finally, the differences between the personality of the narrator and that of the author of the book. The central question is: can a text that has all the trappings of a high-quality novel have historical value at the same time? Is this text a work of fiction, a historical fiction, or history proper? How does the individual experience measure against historical distance? What are the differences between historic and fictional plausibility? In conclusion, the presentation argued that Amirshahi's book Dar Hazar is not only a shining example of skilful and intricate fictional writing but also of historical value.
The Great Famine of Tehran, 1917-1918
Hossein Abadian
Qazvin International University, Iran
During the Qajar period Iran was afflicted with two great famines which were the most disastrous events of their kind in Iran's history. The first, in 1871, wiped out a third of the population and, according to Sheikh Ebrahim Zanjani, the people were forced to consume dog and cat meat. The second famine, in 1917-1918, was concentrated mainly in Tehran where, according to police statistics, about 186,000 of Tehran's population died. Once the 1917-18 famine passed, the bread crisis changed into a political crisis during which terror squads were formed, crime increased, and governments became unstable and resigned one after the other. In spite of the wide range of the human catastrophe, the famine has not been seriously understood. Except for a few references in Russian and British sources during their occupation of Iran during the First World War, there is little public knowledge about the event. This paper uncovers the history of the great famine through the study of primary sources such as contemporaneous periodicals (Aftab, Ra'd, Nowbahar, Zaban-e Azad, Asr-e Jadid, Kowkab-e Iran, Sobh-e Iran and specially Setareh-ye Iran) as well as unpublished records and references such as records of the cabinets of Vosuq al-Dowleh and Ala' al-Saltaneh. The study considers such questions as the main causes of the famine, the impact of the First World War as well as individuals on the economic situation of the country, and the nature of the terror squads in the post-famine period. This study is a part of a book on the subject of the socio-political changes in Iran between the post-constitutional period and the end of the First World War.
Illustrated Shahnameh Manuscripts in the National Library of Russia and Their Relatives Abroad
Firuza Abdullaeva
University of Oxford, UK
The range of the Shahnameh mss represented in NLR is very wide chronologically and geographically: from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century and from Tabriz to India. The paper concentrates mostly on two pearls from this collection: The third-earliest dated illustrated manuscript of 1333 (Dorn 329) and the luxurious copy of the middle of the seventeenth century, executed in the royal atelier of Shah Abbas II (1642-1666), and decorated with 192 miniature paintings, belonging to at least three hands (Dorn 333). The first ms, Dorn 329, is compared with another of the earliest known Shahnameh mss, which now is in possession of the Topkapi Saray Museum (Hazine 1479). This gives a unique opportunity to trace several iconographic traditions that existed at the beginning of the fourteenth century in Shiraz, the only surviving Iranian centre of 'book mass-production'. The Istanbul ms is the earliest illustrated one, which has not been introduced properly to the scholarly world. It was produced two years before the NLR one, and demonstrates a different approach in representation of the scenes both in their selection and the manner of artistic execution. This bears witness that at that time, the tradition of a more or less restricted list of obligatory subjects to be depicted in the Shahnameh as well as their iconography had not yet been fixed. As for Dorn 333, paintings signed by two of the artists can help to identify their work also in the miniatures in a manuscript from the collection of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, which are probably also made by Afzal al-Husayni and Reza-ye Mosavver.
Central Banking and Iran's Economic Performance
Siavash Abghari,
Morehouse College, USA
This paper discusses central banking laws in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the relationship between inflation and central bank independence in the country. Two indices of legal independence of the central bank are constructed, which cover economic and political aspects of independence. Most transition economies experiencing high-inflationary periods in the recent past that have strengthened the position and independence of the central bank by changing the banking laws have experienced an inverse relationship between inflation and central bank independence indices. The relationship between inflation and central bank policy and its structure since the inception of the Islamic republic is examined. To improve the economic performance of the country and relieve some of the inflationary pressures, reform of the central banking laws and its structure is proposed.
From a Universalistic Islamic Revolution to Specific Demands for Legal Rights and Socio-economic Equality: The Iranian Revolution and the Contextualisation of Social Movements' Agendas
Fariba Adelkhah
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, France
At the time of the upheaval against the Shah, all tendencies within the opposition were articulating grievances centred on the notion of haqq: social justice and God's will merging to guarantee economic, social, and women's rights. This goal reflected the alliance between different and often antagonistic schools of thought, including Third Worldist ideologies, as well as Islamic, communist, liberal and democratic ones. After the Shah was overthrown, the movement radicalised and was taken over by elements from within the Islamic trend, and the subsequent debates focused largely on differences among different factions within this group. Yet, the tension between the ethical universalistic agenda and the ones unique to the Islamic revolution was not over. The differences were re-articulated by factions within the Islamic trend that had emerged in the course of the revolution itself, manifesting themselves in the debates between the conservatives, radicals and the reformists. The differences were, in other words, not so much about the role of religion on earth as doubts about how a religious revolution should find its way between ethical and contextualised agendas, between a unanimous revolutionary movement at its beginning and the new alliances and divisions among social groups after the revolution, between what a state could achieve and what it should accept.
Mastering the Ego Monster: Ezhdaha-ye Khodi as an Allegory of History
Wali Ahmadi
University of California, Berkeley, USA
This paper deals with Ezhdaha-ye Khodi (The Ego Monster), a seminal four-volume philosophical 'novel' written by the late Sayyed B. Majruh, a former professor of Western philosophy at Kabul University. The paper attempts to read Majruh's 'novel' not so much as a philosophical allegory – with its emphasis on the transcendental valorisation of abstract, metaphysical concepts – but as an allegory of history and a critique of ideology. The paper contextualises the text within the framework of historical incidents of far-reaching socio-political consequences in contemporary Afghanistan, such as the 'communist' coup, the (former) Soviet invasion, and the emergence of a fractured 'resistance' movement. Through a close analysis of the narrative elements and possibilities that form the fictional discourse of the allegory, the paper traces the paradoxical journey of the principal character – Rahgozar-e Nimehshab (The Midnight Traveler), a persona who remotely resembles Nietzsche's Zarathustra – from the apparent 'conquest of the ego' and the 'death of the [ego] monster' to the 'return of the [ego] monster' and the 'reign of [egocentric] Reason.' The intricacy of the journey, despite its disjunctive schemes, both reflects and generates an ideology of self-hood that is profoundly historical. Majruh neither denigrates any one specific ideological tendency nor valorises its rival ideology. Instead, he painstakingly discovers illusory 'idols' – mainly, as he maintains, 'idols of raw Reason,' 'idols of Progress,' and 'idols of Revolution' – within the very fabric of each and every ideology and ideological inclination. As such, as this paper illustrates, the historical topicality of Ezhdaha-ye Khodi consists of the fact that it deconstructs the equally 'idolatrous' motives of the progressive 'communist' revolution as well thereactionary motives of the opposition 'resistance' groups who used to wage an 'Islamic' revolution in Afghanistan.
The Role of Dreams in the Political Affairs of the Safavids
Nozhat Ahmady
Iran
One of the characteristics of the Safavid reign is the formalisation of Shiism as the official religion of the land. Various studies have dealt with this issue, but only a few studies have addressed Shah Esmail's dreams concerning his mission to formally establish Shiism as his official religion. This paper does not aim to study the truth or falsehood of such dreams and the role they played in history, rather, it aims to clarify the role of dreams in the political affairs of the Safavid dynasty. In this regard, it becomes clear that the Safavids manipulated dreams to promote Shiism and to justify many of their actions. The paper looks at the sources of the dreams and the issues they tried to address. It also looks at the various religious figures in the dreams (the Prophet, various Imams, etc.) as well as the timing and the political context of the dreams. Were dreams told more often during critical times such as the transfer of power or wars? Did the Safavid kings manipulate their dreams in order to justify killing their associates? And, in general, what dreams were the most common and in which periods of the Safavid era were they most widespread?
Iranian Society in Transition: A Socio-Cultural Approach to Political Behaviour
Mahdi Ahouie
Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
This paper provides an analytical perspective on Iranian people's perception of their lives and their society at the edge of the fourth decade of the Revolution. This is a documentary study based on up-to-date official statistics that have been collected by the Iranian government for use in high-level cultural and social policy making almost one and a half years before the presidential elections of June 2005. According to these statistics, one could observe that Iranian society, deeply frustrated by economic depression and other social problems, is experiencing a dramatic transition which provides a fertile ground for populist socialist slogans based on an extremist nationalism. In this context, this paper analyses the social and cultural reasons behind the outcomes of the presidential elections of the past year.
Peasant Road to Capitalist Agriculture: Recent Iranian Experience
Amir Esmail Ajami
University of Arizona, USA
This paper examines agrarian transition in Iran using a general typology of units of agricultural production: peasant/farmer/capitalist. By drawing on evidence from village case studies and data provided in the national censuses of agriculture, the geneses, trajectories and performances of these three types of agricultural production systems are empirically investigated. The study shows an increasing degree of differentiation among the peasants including their transformation into farmers. This illustrates the complexities and disruptions in the development of capitalist agriculture, which tends to refute the notion of a unilinear evolutionary process, as postulated in the Marxian classical model. A striking feature of agrarian transition documented in the study is the transformation of a dualistic agrarian structure, developed largely in the post-land reform era, into petty capitalist and medium production systems, coexisting with predominately small farmer units of production. The analysis demonstrates that various forms of state intervention have largely influenced the processes and outcomes of agrarian transition in contemporary Iran.
Cyrus Alai
UK
Since ancient times Iran, or Persia as it was known in the West, has been mapped extensively. The world's oldest known topographical map is a clay tablet from 2300 BC, showing a part of western Persia. Persian geographers, like Balkhi, Estakhri, Zakariya Qazvini and others, were the main contributors to the thriving field of cartography throughout the early Islamic period (eighth to fourteenth centuries). Ptolemy's fifth map of Asia, which depicts Persia, appeared in all the 59 editions of Geographia, published between 1477 and 1730. Gastaldi produced the first post-Ptolemaic map of Persia in 1559 in Venice, which served as the basis of many later maps for about a century. The first notable innovation in this field came to light when Olearius in his New Map of Persia (1646) changed the Ptolemaic oval shape of the Caspian Sea to an upright rectangle, correcting the latitude of the northern provinces. His map influenced the cartography of Persia for seven decades, until a full Russian survey of the Caspian was carried out in 1720. Dutch, French and German cartographers were all active in mapping Persia. However, it was their British counterparts who succeeded during the nineteenth century to improve the mapping of Persia considerably, based on new surveys, including those carried out by the Survey of India. Some of these maps were politically motivated, showing Baluchistan as a separate state until 1872, when the Goldsmid Commission settled the eastern boundaries of the country. The Pahlavis established several new cartographic institutions in Iran, as a result of which numerous modern maps of the country and its provinces were produced locally from 1930s until the present time. The absence of a good cartobibliography has often deterred scholars from making use of the many detailed maps that were produced. For the period of 1477-1925 the newly published General Maps of Persia (2005) by this author has made such a required work available.
Nozar Alaolmolki
Hiram College, USA
Globalisation is transforming the world economy and challenging the managers of many multinational enterprises (MNEs). Free trade flows have been increasing in response to the World Trade Organisation and regional free trade organisations like NAFTA. Regional trade and investment policies have encouraged regional corporate strategies by MNEs, rather than multi-domestic or global strategies. A number of smaller regional cooperation institutions are in existence, such as ECO (Economic Cooperation Organisation) and the Gulf Cooperation Council. These smaller regional developments are playing an important role in the global economy. Also, these institutions cannot be ignored in the broader context of regionalisation. This study proposes the establishment of a larger regional organisation that would incorporate the two into a single one. This proposal is made on the basis of the proximity between the countries, and the need for the expansion of trade between them. More specifically, this paper deals with the following questions and related relevant issues: Under what conditions do states attempt or see the opportunities to establish principles, norms and rules intended to promote regional cooperation? Do nation-states have economic power, political credibility and stability to maintain the regional regime or organisation once it is created?
Dream Visions of Mystical Time: Shams al-Din al-Daylami between Sufism, Theology and Philosophy
Elizabeth Alexandrin
University of Manitoba, Canada
Existing in a set of manuscripts, representing the author's stages of revision of his work and his changing doctrinal stance, is a medieval Sufi treatise by Shams al-Din al-Daylami (d. ca. 1197 CE), entitled Mir'at al-arwah wa surat al-wijah. The Mir'at al-arwah presents a range of models of time and space in addition to offering a relatively early hermeneutical approach to dream visions in the medieval Islamic context. Although by the end of his scholarly career, Shams al-Din al-Daylami would distance himself from contemporary trends in Islamic dialectical theology and classical philosophy, he originally broached the theological question of the mystic's potential 'vision of God' in the Mir'at al-arwah, and another one of his works, the Jawahir al-asrar. The Jawahir al-asrar, a work guided by the principles of Islamic dialectical theology, is therefore of equal significance to the study of al-Daylami's changing hermeneutical approach to the interpretation of dreams and individual mystical experience. It is most likely through the vehicle of al-Daylami's Jawahir al- asrar that this author's discussions of time and space were transmitted to a number of authors of the Sufi traditions in Azarbaijan and Central Asia; in particular, Mahmud al-Din al- Oshnuhi (or variant spelling, Oshnuwi, fl. twelfth century), Sayf al-Din al-Bakharzi (fl. thirteenth century), and Aziz-i Din Nasafi (fl. thirteenth - fourteenth centuries). This will set forth an account of one period of Persian Sufism in which there was a greater rapprochement between Sufism, Islamic theology, and philosophy than previously assumed through a comparison of al-Daylami's Jawahir and al-Oshnuhi's Ghayat al-imkan, a work often mistakenly attributed to Ayn al-Quzzat al-Hamdani (fl. twelfth century). The paper suggests that a closer examination of the developments within the twelfth-century Persian Sufi traditions provides further insight into the emergence of a new genre of literature concerned with the hermeneutics of dream visions.
Memory and Commemoration Amongst Yezidis in Armenia
Christine Allison
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France
The Yezidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority, possess a strong community identity and a rich collective memory. Many of their historical traditions have until recently been transmitted orally. Some of these are part of a wider discourse of events in Kurdish tribal history and are also told by non-Yezidis; others are exclusive to Yezidis themselves. The past two decades have seen a drive towards recording, compilation and publication of religious traditions amongst the Yezidis of Iraq and the European diaspora, processes which include a considerable element of selection and editing. During the First World War a substantial number of Yezidis came to live in Armenia, joining some who had been there since the early nineteenth century. Many of their religious traditions are different from those practised in Iraq, and discourses of identity are in line with the political context of contemporary Armenia, with many defining themselves as non-Kurdish. Alongside the wider discourses of tribal history, other, more localised defining events are also told, in particular accounts of how Yezidis came to their Armenian villages as refugees, and of the Yezidi military role in important battles against the Turks. Recently, the economic situation has forced many Yezidis to emigrate, to Russia in particular, to find work. Villages are often now inhabited predominantly by the middle-aged and elderly. The role of the village has changed from a socio-economic centre, frequently visited even by those living in towns, to a symboliclieu de memoire. This paper draws on the preliminary findings of a project begun in 2005 on Yezidi discourses of memory in Armenia. It focuses particularly on the annual day of commemoration of the dead, when Yezidis return to the villages to share a communal meal by the graves of their ancestors.
Messianism and Identity: Jewish Conversions to the Baha'i Faith
Mehrdad Amanat
USA
The Baha'i faith, a newly founded religion with modern elements, grew out of the messianic Babi movement in mid-nineteenth-century Iran. It attracted large numbers of mostly Muslim converts but later its ecumenical message appealed to Iranian Jews who through conversion shared Iranian cultural values and greater harmony with Iranian identity. This study explores the causes and examines the circumstances of these conversion experiences within their social and cultural contexts and addresses the question of why a persecuted minority would choose to join a new religion that was subject to even harsher persecution, rather than seek the relative security of conversion to Islam. It has been argued that Baha'i conversions highlight the convergence of a number of distinct processes at a time of grave historical change, most notably the advent of modernity and national integration. Many Jews migrated from ancient ghettos in order to benefit from economic and social mobility. At a time of high messianic expectations (a primordial theme among Persian Jews), a new faith promising equality and tolerance inspired a sense of optimism and the expectation of an end to prejudice and discrimination. Its acceptance of multiple religious identities provided the necessary space to negotiate new identities in new environments. Economic conditions necessitated a departure from the ghetto that gave the Jews a greater desire to rid themselves of the stigma of the "unclean" Jew and a willingness to re-evaluate traditional belief systems. Baha'i conversion to a large extent removed old cultural barriers and allowed greater assimilation.
Qajar and Pahlavi Public Diplomacy in Press and Radio
Camron Michael Amin
University of Michigan in Dearborn, USA
The very opening lines of the Qajar official gazette, Vaqaye'-e Ettefaqiyeh in 1851 announced the aim of overcoming 'lies' spread about the kingdom. From its inception, the media were as much about controlling Iran's global image as it was about controlling information inside Iran. Where censorship reached its limits, the Qajars sought to befriend expatriate Iranian journalists and make contact with sympathetic Western journalists to bolster their image. The cumulative effect of Qajar efforts was to attempt to modernise, militarise, sanctify and masculinise Iran's global image. When the Pahlavis replaced the Qajars, a more coherent, and less religious public image came to the fore. Though quite different from Qajar propaganda in form and emphasis, the Pahlavis' efforts at public diplomacy through the press employed similar strategies and influenced the priorities of state radio propaganda towards the end of Reza Shah Pahlavi's reign. The programming and scheduling of broadcasts were designed to reach regional audiences and global interests. But in the 1940s, a new element came into radio programming and Pahlavi public diplomacy: Islamic propaganda. These efforts need to be seen in the light of great power propaganda campaigns in the region and with regards to the Iranian press itself. British efforts to silence Habl al-Matin (Calcutta),Kaveh (Berlin) and the Iranian domestic press in the 1920s through the instrument of Reza Khan/Shah were coupled with the production of pro-British press propaganda (an effort which seems to have reached a fever pitch during First World War). These efforts to control information developed alongside new means of mass communication. For example, during Second World War, the British even tried to confiscate radios in Iran to control the flow of information during the Allied Occupation. Fortunately, the story of the battle for global and regional public opinion is well documented in recently published Iranian state archives (on the history of radio in Iran), British India Office Records, and, and its effect on the Iranian media is visible in the pages of the Iranian press - this study draws on all these sources for evidence.
The Iranian Diaspora in the United States - How They View Iran, the United States, and the Future
Fariba Amini
USA
Since the 1979 revolution which brought to power an elite clerical regime, Iranians have left their homeland en masse, whether voluntarily or by force, mainly emigrating to the USA and Canada.
Since then a huge population has lived where opportunity for education and employment has been higher than in any other Western democracy: the United States. Children who were born to these families are Iranian-Americans, consider themselves to be citizens of the United States, and have become part of American society. Nevertheless, many have shown a bonding towards their mother country and language, and the attraction towards Iran has been more widespread in the last decade as Iran has been in the spotlight. Iranian youth who have been born to these families have a higher interest in the history, culture, and politics of their motherland. Many travel to Iran to discover their past and find out more about their ancestral background. This study shows the changes taking place within the Iranian youth in diaspora. It is based on interviews with people from all walks of life: university students, young and successful Iranians in many fields, lawyers, engineers, doctors. This study shows a trend that has taken place within the last few years, especially after the Republican administration took over the White House and President Bush's famous Axis of Evil Speech. The study is broad, examining and speaking to Iranian-Americans in New York, Boston, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Washington DC. In trying to determining a trend within the Iranian diaspora, individuals from different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds were interviewed. Their responses and their behaviour are the core of this paper. Iranian Americans have an impact and influence over the policies of the United States towards Iran and the future relations between the two countries. This study also shows how these young Iranian-Americans can be a major force within their respective communities.
Iran's International Relations
Hooshang Amirahmadi
Rutgers University, USA
The international relations of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been in perpetual crisis since its inception in 1979. While hardly anyone would argue against the fact of the perpetual crisis, there is no unanimity about its causes. The explanations range from foreign conspiracy against the revolution, to premeditated nature of the crisis, to mismanagement of the foreign policy. While such explanations are helpful, they are not adequate for a deeper appreciation of the problem and for remedial prescriptions. This paper argues that the perpetual crisis is rooted in the Islamic nature of the state, failure of the republic in the arena of domestic democratisation, the emergence of a globalised world, the misguided foreign policy priorities, the lackadaisical eastward orientation, and the spiral conflict with America. The paper first offers a periodisation of the international crisis of the Islamic regime, and then explains why the crisis is rooted in particular factors, specifying the factor load for each given period. Examples are provided to demonstrate the arguments, focusing on US-Iran relations. The paper also attempts to project the future direction of the republic's foreign relations if its basic premises were to remain unchanged, and offer recommendations for a more proactive international policy that is more in accord with Iran's national interests.
Caesarean Childbirth as Reflected In Islamic Visual Arts - Illustrations in Ferdowsi'sShahnameh Manuscripts
Raisa I Amirbekyan
Yerevan State University, Armenia
This paper is devoted to the Islamic views on the medical operation known as Caesarean section as reflected in visual arts. I intend to discuss this phenomenon against the background of the illustrative cycles of the various manuscript copies of FerdowsiShahnameh from different collections around the world. Early Islamic medicine was an amalgam of Greek, Persian, Jewish and Indian science, side by side with Arabian folk-medicine. Muslims had their own version of Caesarean childbirth, and in the Middle Ages they were the first to write about it in text and poetry and to represent Caesarean childbirth in illustrations of scholars' manuscripts as diagrams, schemas and images, and in compositions of the miniature cycles added to poetic, prose, and didactic books. As the first-ever illustration of such operation in the text book at least 500 years ahead of others, one can regard the miniature from the extremely rare manuscript copy of the book written by al-Biruni (973-1084 CE) called al-Asrar al-baqiyah'an al-Quran al-khaliyadh (The Chronological History of Nations), at the Edinburgh University Library (N161). In his poem Ferdowsi described as well the birth of Rostam. In the illustration of this theme, the visual language is very close to the Shahnameh's original text. Tracing the origin of the iconography of the Caesarean childbirth visualisation in illustrations of Persian, Turkish, and Indian Shahnamehmanuscripts made in different regions of the Islamic world during some ten centuries, one can find many common details but also differences connected with various artistic styles, masters' mentality, the seal of time et al., in the framework of the Islamic art tradition.
'Unveiled' Women in the Iranian Blogosphere
Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Over the last five years, weblog writing has created a new public sphere in Iran. Indeed, weblogs reflect the experiences, needs, and aspirations of the population in the real physical world, bearing close relations to the socio-cultural aspects of everyday life. The presence of female bloggers in the Iranian blogosphere (weblogestan) clearly reveals a strong wish to compensate for their restricted presence in a highly moralistic society. For most of these women, weblog writing is initially a means to rediscover their 'true selves', which have been 'hidden' and/or 'repressed' in the real physical spaces in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This process of 'self-discovery' in public and in virtual spaces is based on the absence of body and face to face interactions. These factors allow people to hide their real identity and consequently have a better security publicly to discuss their personal problems or social concerns with the others. However, five years of experiences of blog writing show that many female bloggers, especially those who write under their real names, are likely to encounter more or less the same types of socio-cultural limitations and self censorship that they would in the real world. This study, based on four years of research including focus groups, personal interviews and regular observation of new and continuing weblogs, shows that Iranian women's experience of an 'unveiled' presence in virtual space has also an important impact on their real physical life. It encourages these women to act more freely in their physical public spaces and gradually to alter their behaviour and increase their presence in Iranian physical social space as well.
Iranian Youth and their Physical Fitness Standards
Amir Mohammad Amirtash
Tarbiat-e Mo'allem University, Tehran, Iran
Normative studies on the Physical Fitness (PF) of the Iranian people in general, and the younger population in particular, are very few. As a result, the purpose of this study is to investigate the physical fitness levels of the 6-18 year old Iranian schoolboys and to develop standard class norms accordingly. A sample of 14,000 schoolboys, from grades 1 to 12, was randomly selected from 65% of the provincial capitals of Iran for the study. The mortality rate was less than 3%. The 'Canadian Award Fitness Test' battery was used to collect data on the different PF components of the subjects. Descriptive statistics were used to provide information such as central tendency and variability indices for each PF Component over the school grades in each one of the participating state capitals. The data were also used to develop standard norms, as well as to create tables and graphs, not only for the necessary statistical representation of the data, but also for providing a basis for comparing grades among themselves and the provincial capitals that were selected for the study as well.
Russians in the Court of Mohammad Ali Shah
Elena Andreeva
Virginia Military Institute, USA
Part of a major research project entitled 'Russians in Iran (prior to 1917)', this paper analyzes how the Russian government placed people in the Shah's court early in the twentieth century in order to strengthen its influence over the Qajar rulers. The Russian presence aimed at gathering information and promoting Russian interests at the court and was one of several steps taken by Russia as part of its competition with the British to control Iran. Other important moves included taking over Iranian territories, establishing and leading the Persian Cossack Brigade, attempting to dominate the economy and trade of Iran through loans and concessions, and colonizing northern Iran. Russia's grip on Iran's internal affairs in the last decade of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century tightened during the reign of Mozaffar al-Din Shah and Mohammad Ali Shah (r. 1907- 09). The paper covers the appointment of two Russians to important positions in the court of Mohammad Ali Shah. In early February 1907, immediately after his accession, Doctor Sadovskii, the physician at the Cossack Brigade, was appointed as the Shah's physician. And in June of the same year, Captain Smirnov replaced Captain Kol'man as a tutor for two sons of the Shah, including the crown prince. Since the time when Mohammad Ali himself was a crown prince residing in Tabriz, he had employed several Russians in his retinue: Mr Shapshal as his personal secretary, Captain Kol'man as a tutor for his children, Cossack Captain Khabalov in his guard and a Russian head of his arsenal. This paper is based on Russian archival material that reflects the joint efforts by Russian military and diplomatic officials to obtain these two appointments and emphasises in a straightforward way their goals – to increase influence on the Shah and information-gathering at his court. The documents also explain in detail why Doctor Sadovskii and Captain Smirnov were chosen as the best candidates for these sensitive missions. Although Mohammad Ali Shah used the Russian-officered Cossack Brigade for his successful 1908 coup and went into exile in Russia after constitutional forces marched on Tehran in July 1909, the material in this paper is not put into the framework of the constitutional revolution. Instead, it provides detailed examples of an important aspect of Russian imperial politics in Iran – the attempt to gain dominant influence over Qajar rulers by attaching Russians to the imperial court.
Development of the Third Singular Copula in the Post-revolutionary Colloquial Persian
Koorosh Angali
University of Texas, Austin, USA
One of the results of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was (and is) the dominance and sovereignty of the lower-class populace over the rest of the nation. The ascendancy of the common man has brought many changes (in many instances disastrous changes) culturally as well as linguistically and otherwise. Particularly disturbing is the rather damaging influence of the illiterate or the poorly literate upon the Persian language; e.g., the widespread use of are 'yep' vs. the traditional formal/polite bale 'yes'. A rather peculiar change in the usage of pre-revolutionary words and expressions is the replacement of the colloquial 3rd singular copula –e 'is' (for the formal ast) with the long copula hast '(s)he, it exists'. Although in modern Persian both these verbs are derivatives of the Middle Persian (h)ast, they already have taken two different meanings in modern Persian. Therefore, the post-revolutionary colloquial Persian has practically confused two different verbs. What is even more disturbing is the submission of the literate and the scholar to such grave mistakes: even they are now using hast for the colloquial –e. It is very important rapidly and astutely to detect and correct these mistakes in the Persian language, which is already under constant attack from outside Iran, as well as inside (e.g., the penetration of the Los Angeles Far-Gelisi into Iran by the visitors, technocrats, with poor knowledge of Persian, etc.)
Dynastic Nationalism and the Cult of the Monarchy
Ali M Ansari
University of St Andrews, UK
This paper examines the development of dynastic nationalism under the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-1979), looking in particular at the attempts by Mohammad Reza Shah to define himself and his dynasty within a national narrative with a view to legitimizing the dynasty. The paper looks at the construction of the myth of monarchy and its associations with a specifically Persian/Aryan nationalism, with particular reference to the organisation of the celebrations at Persepolis for the 2500th anniversary of the monarchy, and the Shah's subsequent attempts to define himself as a legitimate and deserving heir to Cyrus the Great. The transition of the Shah from a 'constitutional monarch', to 'democratic sovereign', and finally revolutionary saviour of his people is charted, with particular attention to his increased use of popular mythology and religious symbolism. In this way it is argued that the Shah created the ideological space for the Islamic revolution which followed and that Ayatollah Khomeini successfully moulded the Shah's image to his own purposes. The paper concludes with an assessment of the post-revolutionary reaction to the myth, both in Iran and abroad and suggests that elements of the 'cult of the monarchy' are returning to the popular culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Leyli o Majnun as Mirrored in Leyli o Majnun ... or ... Jami, Reader of Nezami
Leili Anvar-Chenderoff
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, France
Although the far-reaching influence of Nezami's work on Persian poetry is widely accepted, it has yet to be assessed with more precision by digging into the texts. As far as literary history is concerned, there is no doubt that Leyli o Majnun has been one of the most influential works in Persian poetry and can be considered as a major 'palimpsest text'. It has inspired numerous poets who not only wrote (for some of them) their own versions of the romance but also to simply refer to the story as a model and to the characters as types or literary topoi. One of the acutest and most complex readers of Nezami was the theologian, spiritual master and poet, Jami of Herat. Jami constantly and almost obsessively refers to Nezami as his master in poetry and to his works as his source of poetic inspiration. His Haft Owrang (orSeven Colours) is composed as an echo to the Khamseh (or the Five Romances) of his elder. This 'mirror effect' is particularly interesting to examine in Leyli o Majnun: a study of the resemblances and the divergences with the original by Nezami will show how Jami has crystallised a spiritual interpretation of the original work. This paper offers a comparison between the poems in order to show that what Jami proposes is a spiritual and poetic commentary on the romance of Leyli o Majnun, on Nezami's work at large and on the concept of metaphysical love.
Scholars and What they Unwittingly Reveal: The Archaeology Survey of 1968 in Iran
Roya Arab
Institute of Archaeology, UK
In 1968 a group of luminaries in the field of pyrotechnology travelled to Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey, collecting field samples and doing ethnographic studies. They were accompanied by a geologist who took geological samples. The team and trip were organised by Theodore Wertime, 'Cultural Attache' to the American embassy in Iran, who was also a keen student of ancient technology. After the expedition, the artefacts got entangled in bureaucratic knots in Turkey. Luckily, Beno Rothenberg got an exit permit for the artefacts, retrieved them, and stored them in Israel, where they remained until a chance meeting with an Iranian student at the IoA. As part of a dissertation, they were re-boxed, re-labelled, catalogued and stored at the Institute of Archaeology, with the help of field notes, photographs, personal letters, published and unpublished reports, which were collected from the team members. This paper examines the socio-economic and political context of the 1968 expedition. Besides the 'Pyrotechnological Survey' there was much else that went on, including the fact that despite very little research being carried out on the artefacts and few articles being published about the expedition, the geological samples became the subject of a 260page report paid for by the US Naval Research. The report lists the resources of the areas visited in the three countries during the survey. In the case of Iran, most interestingly, uranium was located in the heart of the country. Meanwhile since 2000 Iran has been under scrutiny and at times threat for its civilian nuclear energy ambitions.
In a memoir published by his son, Wertime is quoted as being a CIA man, but the geologist Klinger could not have known the multiple uses to which his 'collection of scientific samples' would be put.
Relations between Gregorian Armenians and Western Catholics in Safavid Julfa
Shokoh Arabi-Hashemi
Islamic Azad Universtiy, Iran
New Julfa is a quarter in the southern part of the city of Isfahan established by the order of Shah Abbas I as a temporary and later permanent district for the Armenian residents of the city. At first, other than a very small Zoroastrian minority, New Julfa was exclusive to the Armenians. Eventually, other Eastern Christian communities found residence in the neighbourhood and with increased connection with the West, Catholic missionaries from Europe gained access to the quarter and began soliciting the Safavid kings for permits to build their own churches. This act created animosity between the predominately Gregorian Armenians and the various Catholic orders – such as the Augustines, Carmelites, Capuchins and Jesuits – vying for presence amongst the Armenian community. These antagonisms were more than intra-Christian sectarian strife; they signified competition amongst the various Catholic orders for access to the Persian court. At times, the Armenian resistance to Western Christian encroachment led the leaders of o the community actively tpseek the banning of other orders from residing and building churches in New Julfa. This paper, on the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the establishment of New Julfa, looks at the Christian community of New Julfa under the Savafids by studying unpublished documents from the Vank Church archives, reports from Catholic missions in New Julfa, as well as eyewitness reports from travellers of the period.
Educational Institution, Economic Development, and Democracy: A Case Study of Iran and Turkey
Nader Asgary
Jones School of Business, State University of New York at Geneseo, USA
Mazdak Asgary
Cornell University, USA
There is much literature written about the economic principles that promote economic development. However, there is not enough emphasis in the literature on the importance of institutions that impel for a sustainable economic development. The existence of a representative and sustainable governmental institution is critical to a country's long term economic development. An educational institution that is built up on fundamentals of democratic values is required; applying democratic processes for the development of human resources would in the long run guarantee a democratic system. In the past one hundred years Iran and Turkey have tried to build a sustainable democratic system. Some empirical evidence shows that, regardless of political system in short run, a country needs some degree of economic stability and growth (i.e., South Korea) to build a long term stable government institution. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that a transparent and representative political institution is essential for sustainable economic development and that an educational institutional system is the foundation of it. We discuss different components of institutions and their relationship with economic development in a Iran, South Korea, and Turkey. In our study we learn from the recent democratic process of other countries (e.g., South Korea) and we propose some fundamental issues (e.g., organisation) that need special attention in order to build a sustainable democratic system.
Visual Communication and American Image-Building for Iranians
Hesameddin Ashna
Imam Sadiq University,Tehran, Iran
Visual communication is one aspect of American public diplomacy that was visible in Iran throughout the Pahlavi reign. This paper analyses the propaganda messages produced byMarzha-ye Now (New Frontiers), a monthly official publication of the US Information Agency (USIA) from 1964 to 1979. This fully-illustrated magazine was published for an audience of Iranian intellectuals in order to promote the American way of life. Visual analysis of Marzha-ye Now uses persuasive, informative and agenda-setting indicators through 20 expressive, 2 descriptive and 12 interpretive analytical questions. By analyzing a sample of 2151 images (photographs, paintings and graphic designs) from 162 issues of this magazine, this study shows that in contrast to similar American and Soviet illustrated magazines which reflected audience values ('Look! We are just like you!'), Marzha-ye Now insisted mainly on the expression of sender values ('Look! You too can be just like us!').
Limitations of the Linguisitic Development of Persian in the Modern Period
Daryoush Ashouri
France
This talk concentrates on the linguistic evolution of modern languages in general and the efficacy of Persian as a vibrant and fluid living language in today's world of evolving technology, human thought and social progress. The talk is based on the author's study of the evolution of the English language and its transformative relationship to the intellectual and scientific development of the modern world for the past few centuries. The study shows that the growth of English as a modern language has enjoyed a dialectical existence vis-a-vis the concepts and ideas. underpinning the modern world. This existence has been sustained by the constant development of innovative linguistic structures and systems for the creation of new concepts. The process is one that has continuously overcome the language's own limitations through returning to its own linguistic 'raw material' (primarily from the Classical languages of Greek and Latin) and by placing this raw material in novel mechanical and technical formations. In comparison, the Persian language has remained within its predetermined 'natural' formulations, i.e., it has retained the language's 'acceptable' evolutionary process defined primarily through the rules and structures of its classical poetry. As such, Persian has not found new formulations to adapt to the exigencies of the modern world. The Persian language, much like the under- and uneven development of the society and economy of the Iranian nation, has failed to find a stable and structured existence in modern society.
Nilufar Ashtari
Belgium
In the Islamic Republic different political forces and cultures are vying for power and control over the political and cultural battleground. These cultures are constructed in and represented by three different types of cinema, 1) the 'model cinema', 2) the 'social problem cinema', and 3) the 'quality cinema'. This paper examines some of the recurring themes in the 'model cinema', consisting of war and 'revolutionary' films. This cinema is supported by the hardline factions in government and is the least popular of all genres. The papers looks at how revolutionary cinema coopted the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal discourse from the left, dehumanised the counterrevolutionary forces, reconstructed the past and, in 1990s film, tackled the Bosnian and Palestinian cause and changed its focus from Savak to terrorism aimed at the Islamic Republic.
From Madras to Venice: Circulation of Capital and the Patronage Activities of Julfa Merchants in India
Sebouh David Aslanian
Columbia University, USA
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New Julfans were not only successful merchants in India but also great benefactors of the Armenian cultural 'revival movement' underway in the eighteenth-century Armenian diaspora settlements in Europe and India. This paper examines the patronage activities of Julfa merchants in eighteenth-century India. It focuses, in particular, on the circulation of merchant capital and financial backing that allowed a small band of Armenian Catholic missionaries, based in Venice and known as the Mechitarist Congregation, to establish not only a new canon for Armenian literature through their prolific literary and publishing activities, but also an Armenian College in Venice and Paris. The Moorat Raffael College was the leading Armenian centre of higher education during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. It was established in accordance with the express wishes of a wealthy Catholic Armenian merchant from New Julfa named Eduard Raffael Gharamiants who had settled in Madras and the nearby French settlement of Pondicherry in the second half of the eighteenth century. Relying on the will of Eduard Raffael, court papers stored in London concerning the Moorat Raffael College, and travel diaries of Mechitarist monks who were sent to the Armenian community of Madras in the second half of the seventeenth century to raise funds for their educational and cultural activities in Venice, this paper explores the vital role of Julfa merchants in bankrolling the Armenian 'revival' movement in Venice. Theoretically, this paper argues that the circulation of capital was a crucial aspect not only of Julfan economic history, but also of the cultural history of the Armenian 'revival movement' in the diaspora.
Arsaces IV (c. 170-168 BC) the First Missing Parthian King
Farhad Assar,
University of Oxford, UK
In his Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, Justin (41.5.8-10) relates that the third Parthian ruler Phriapatius reigned fifteen years and bequeathed the throne to his eldest son, Phraates I. Having defeated the powerful Mardian tribes, Phraates appointed his brother Mithradates as his successor and died shortly thereafter. Although Justin omits Phriapatius' paternity and dynastic link with Arsaces II, the genealogical record on the Nisa ostracon 2638 (1760) confirms Phriapatius as a descendant of the brother of Arsaces I, the founder of the Parthian dynasty. In recounting Arsacid exploits in Bactria and Babylonia, Orosius (5.4.16) states that Mithradates I was the sixth king after Arsaces I. Unfortunately, Orosius offers nothing further on Mithradates I, including his relationship with the intervening rulers. A recently published inscribed ostracon from Nisa attests that a great-grandson of Arsaces I also ruled as Parthian king. I have shown elsewhere that this prince succeeded Phriapatius, reigned briefly as the fourth Arsaces and left no mature son on his death. Crown and command passed, once again, to the collateral Arsacid branch enabling the sons of Phriapatius, Phraates I and Mithradates I, to assume the diadem as the fifth and sixth Parthian rulers. This paper presents additional evidence to amend Justin's incomplete genealogy of the early Parthian rulers and show his intentional omission of the reign of Arsaces IV.
Ethnic Minorities, Regionalism, and the Construction of New Histories in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Touraj Atabaki
International Institute of Social History, Netherlands
During the revolution of 1979, social and political unrest with an ethnic flavour was often registered. The revolts in Kurdistan and Turkmensahra in early 1979 - which in the Kurdistan case lasted for another six years – the political unrest in Khuzistan and Baluchistan in mid-1979, and the political unrest in Azarbaijan in late 1979 to early 1980 were the major ethnic unrests the new regime faced in its early days of formation. However, all these rebellions were exclusively founded and organised by local political elites and activists and there were barely any references to non-elite popular autonomous participation. However, by the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, and during the period of 'reconstruction' and partial liberalisation under President Rafsanjani, the notion of ethnic rights gradually entered into the general discourse of individualism, individual autonomy and citizenship which was the preoccupation of the reformist circles. Such contributions became even more vivid during President Khatami's terms, exposing connections between the issues of citizenship and individual rights, including the rights of ethnic minorities in contemporary Iran. It was indeed during this period that writing on ethnic groups' distant past gradually became an intellectual enterprise engaging a large number of ethnic minorities' intelligentsias. Writing ethnic history has developed into a persuasive political project, shaping a significant and unbroken link with each ethnic group's constructed past, aiming to fill the gap between the ethnic group's origin and its actuality. The aim of the present study is to present a picture of tireless endeavours among ethnic minorities in Iran in constructing their immediate or distant past. The paper further examines the contribution of crafted ethnic historiography in Iran's contemporary political culture.
In Search of Earthly Paradise: Spatial Justice in Urban Iran
Kamal Athari
Iran
Spatial justice in the city, or fair and equal access to housing and urban amenities as basic citizenship rights and expectations, has been an integral part of the political imaginary and the public discourse of key social actors in Iran, both prior to and after the 1979 revolution. The persistent articulation of the demand for equal access to urban space by these social actors - whether state planners, politicians, political leaders, shanty dwellers, migrants, or public employees - succeeded in turning the issue into one of the essential agendas of the revolution, to the extent that the right to decent housing was enshrined in a key article in the constitution of the Islamic Republic. Furthermore, spontaneous public land grabs, populist state policies, and the confiscation of the landed properties of former regime associates, led to a major transfer of urban land and public resources after 1979. As a result of this combination of grassroots actions and public policy the shape of Iranian cities, their scale and the composition of their population has been radically transformed. The aim of this paper is to analyze the material, as well as the socio-cultural implications of this transformation of urban space, and the redistribution and reconfiguration of urban housing in post-revolutionary Iran. Evaluating the impact of the praxis of 'spatial justice in the city' demonstrates that major strides were indeed made in the first two decades after the revolution, in providing a more egalitarian access to urban space to various social groups and classes. Nevertheless, the actual impact of this urban transformation is paradoxical and far from clear-cut, as demonstrated by recent reversals in this relatively egalitarian trend. The unintended consequences of this experience, from the uncontrolled expansion of cities to the mounting difficulties of effective democratic governance, is the focus of the second part of the paper.
Michael Axworthy
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK
The paper presents one of the central themes of my forthcoming book on Nader Shah. Nader initiated in Persia a military revolution comparable to that which had been achieved in many European states in the preceding centuries, through the introduction of gunpowder weapons for all his troops, through the improvement of drill and training to maximise firepower, through his establishment of a permanently constituted and regularly paid army, and through its enormous expansion. These developments meant that at its peak in the early 1740s, Nader's army was the most powerful single military force in Asia, and possibly the world. Building on recent research by others (notably Rudi Matthee), which has suggested that geographic conditions and cultural factors meant that the Safavid regime never fully realised the potential of gunpowder weapons, the paper examines the state of the Safavid military system in the last years of the dynasty, suggesting that its decline may have been exaggerated. The paper then considers the Afghan revolt, its military effects, and Nader's response. After an examination of the nature and structure of Nader's army at its height, drawing on new source material (and addressing the significance of religious factors) the paper then looks at the effects of Nader's military policies on the country generally and briefly consider where they could have led if his regime had not crashed to disaster in the later 1740s. Given the widespread view that the military revolution in Europe was centrally important to the processes of state formation and economic development there, the paper suggest sthat the failure of Nader's Afsharid dynasty was a great lost opportunity in Iranian history.
Idioms of Friendship in Safavid Iran
Kathryn Babayan
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
In the spirit of Alan Bray this paper looks at the connections between idealised representations of masculine friendship and the official condemnation of sodomy in the Safavid period. Concentrating on the idioms of friendship produced in two epistemologically related spaces - the confraternities and the Safavid court in Isfahan - the paper begins to distinguish the meanings and protocols of intimacy and the ethical contours of a practice that has traditionally tied men together in amity. The paper explores these overlapping coordinates of friendship, love, and spirituality in order to understand the range of social systems in the Safavid world. How does the characterisation of friendship in visual and literary texts bear upon its particular social contexts? What becomes evident is that intimacy and its potential for erotic expressions in these male homosocial spaces came to be perceived at various crucial moments in history as a threat to productive society. This paper is a preliminary study for a larger analysis of the relations between gender segregation and sexual politics and the social and political economy of institutions such as the court, the guild and the marketplace.
The Iranian Thought in the Divan of Naser Khosrow
Askar Bahrami
Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, Iran
In Zoroastrian and Manichaean thought, az (greed) is a demon which causes the body to be destroyed, and deprives the spirit of salvation. The word az means 'try and effort' in Old Iranian, but its meaning has been changed and limited to the currently used one, referring to greed. One of the very few Persian literary texts in which this word has been treated in its mythical sense, is Naser Khosrow's Divan, where az has kept its demon character, which shows the influence of Zoroastrian thought on Naser Khosrow's poetry. This paper deals with the instances which prove this claim.
Farahnaz Bahrampour
Shahriyar Library, Tabriz, Iran
Iran's history has been one of a continuous search for sources of fresh water and the qanatis one of the oldest and primary solutions to this problem. Historians and specialists do not agree on the exact origins of the qanat system in Iran, but it is certain that the use of these underground canals goes back a few millennia, making Iran the probable birth-place of this technology. The city of Tabriz has played an important role throughout the history of Iran and according to numerous travelogues and memoirs it is said to have been enriched by at least one hundred underground qanat waterways of which only a few have remained. This paper is a culmination of studies on the destruction and abandonment of the qanats of Tabriz in the past one hundred years based primarily on the manuscript of Tarikh va joghrafiya-ye Dar al-Saltaneh-ye Tabriz by Nader Mirza. The paper also presents a study of the few remaining qanats that are still in use.
Rethinking Human Rights in Iran: A Feminist Critique
Golbarg Bashi
Columbia University, USA
In the modern Iranian context proper, both under the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic, the systematic abuse of human rights has always been a paramount concern among both Iranians and foreign observers. The purpose of this paper is to open up the domain of discussion by 1) exploring the endemic issues and problems within the human rights discourse proper, 2) expand that discussion into a wider spectrum of contemporary Iranian history during the twentieth century, and 3) subject the result to a feminist critique. Often a categorical, uncritical, and abstract notion of human rights is applied to an Iranian context that has already been radically Islamicised. The paper therefore exposes some of the innate issues domestic to the human rights discourse before we have even applied it to a condition similar to Iran, while at the same time opening up the Iranian political culture beyond its current and forced cornering into an absolutist and Islamist domain. The presentation intends to demonstrate that a familiarity with modern Iranian history over the last two hundred years shows that a multiplicity of ideologies and political practices have allowed for a much wider reading, interpretation and application of universal human rights than the current Islamic discourse allows or projects. The current leaders and ideologues of the Islamic Republic who are in opposition with certain norms and practices of the Islamic Republic have in effect plunged the current Iranian political culture ever deeper into an Islamist language. The paper thus opens that domain to a wider reading of modern Iranian history, extend it to its origin in pre-Islamic Revolution era of the Pahlavis, and back to the constitutional period, all by way of navigating a fuller spectrum of ideological and political operation, within which we can have a more historically accurate and thematically cogent conception of human rights, its uses and abuses, in the Iranian domain. Finally, the paper offers a postcolonial feminist critique, to open up the false binary opposition between human rights and Islamism, yet another version of 'Islam and the West', and propose a more historically balanced view of the predicament of human rights in Iran.
The 'Quest for a Third Power' and Public Opinion during the Late Qajar Period
Oliver Bast
University of Manchester, UK
The history of Iranian foreign policy under the Qajars and under Reza Shah (as opposed to the history of the policies pursued by other powers vis-a-vis Iran) has so far received extremely little scholarly attention. However, from the slightly more abundant literature on other powers' Iran policies it transpires that ever since the early nineteenth century those in charge of Iran's foreign policy had been trying to mitigate the pressure on the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity that resulted from the constantly increasing Anglo-Russian economic, political and military encroachment by a two-fold strategy: the attempt to play Iran's two imperialist neighbours off against each other and the quest for a – colonially non-interested – benevolent 'third power' that would allow the Iranians to counter-balance the dangerous growth of Anglo-Russian influence, and ideally even provide some sort of security guarantee for the independent survival of the Iranian realm. This paper tries to shed light on the relationship between this 'third power' diplomacy and Iranian public opinion between 1896 and 1924, a period that witnessed not only a great upsurge in newspaper/journal production but also longish periods of relative great freedom of press thus arguably being a time when public opinion in the common sense of the word emerged for the first time in Iran. Hence for the purpose of this paper, public opinion is gauged mainly by a case study-based analysis of influential specimens of the contemporary print media although memoirs and official papers are also scrutinised where appropriate. he main ambition of this paper is to chart how public opinion perceived and assessed Iranian diplomacy's (often elusive) quest for a third power, but it also asks to what degree public opinion had spawned discourses of qodrat-e sevvom, which in turninfluenced foreign policy-makers' decisions. The paper thus tries to make a contribution towards an endeavour that remains currently a desideratum, namely an analysis of the genesis, impact, and legacy of some major foreign policy discourses such as neutrality, third power, negative equilibrium, equidistance, non-alignment, neither East nor West etc. that have surfaced since Iran's emergence as a modern nation-state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Zanjan in the Second World War.
Masoud Bayat
Urmia University, Iran
In September 1932, Zanjan was one of the many northern Iranian cities that were put under Soviet bombardment. This attack and the ensuing occupation of the region by the Soviet army had short and long-term repercussions. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing and occupation of the city, the Soviet troops began interfering in the formal and informal administration of the area (from military engagement to the encouragement of the peasants to withhold payments to the central government). In the aftermath of the war, the Soviets retained their influence in Zanjan through the Tudeh Party which was formed in 1935. The occupation of Zanjan by the Ferqeh-ye Demokrat was a direct result of this influence. This influence continued for almost a decade where the party's presence was an unavoidable part of Zanjan's daily life and administration. This study is based on the analysis of primary sources from the era about the events preceding and succeeding the formation of the Tudeh Party in Zanjan during Second World War.
Tracking Suri: Narrative Pace in Mahshid Amirshahi's Early Stories
Michael Beard
University of North Dakota, USA
Narrative pace can refer to the ratio of events plotted against the page count; it can mean the tactics a writer devises to move from one scene to the next. It can also refer to the sentence-by-sentence experience of reading story. Mahshid Amirshahi's narrative speed is easy to demonstrate, and can be analyzed at all three levels. There are cases where the right narrating voice creates opportunities for flexibility and a sense of speed. The eight stories recounted by her adolescent narrator Suri (translated, by J. E. Knoerzer, as Suri and Co.) make an appropriate laboratory for examining this phenomenon. This paper proposes to track them as one might a film, in which we can visualise the point of view as one might a series of camera shots, where the camera may move, where the scene may shift, where a voice-over may intervene unexpectedly.
Peasantisation and Proletarianisation of Iranian Agriculture in the Post-revolutionary Decades
Sohrab Behdad
Denison University, USA
Farhad Nomani
American University of Paris, France
This paper is a theoretical-empirical examination of the effects of revolution, Islamic populism, protracted war, and economic crisis on the class nature of the work force in the agricultural sector of Iran. Relying on decomposition technique and class theory, based on the data for three censuses of 1976, 1986 and 1996, the study maps the trajectory of agricultural class changes in Iran. This analysis is in the context of a model of structural involution and de-involution for the examination of post-revolutionary type of economic crises. By differentiating the employment effect from the class effect, the study confirms that in the involutionary period (1986 in comparison to the pre-revolutionary year, 1976) Iranian agriculture underwent a process of peasantisation, corresponding to the de-proletarianisation process experienced in the rest of the economy. In the second period (1996, compared to 1986), the policy of economic liberalisation (starting from 1990), and rejuvenation of capitalist relations of production, began the de-involutionary process, which set into motion a notable trend toward de-peasantisation (proletarianisation) of agriculture, and the rural sector, more or less in step with the same trend in the rest of Iranian economy.
Leftist Interpretations of the Iranian Revolution: Then and Now
Maziar Behrooz
San Francisco State University, USA
The 1979 Iranian revolution has produced a large amount of literature by various leftist groups, from the Muslim Mojahedin to pro-Soviet Tuden Party to the 'Majority' and 'Minority' factions of the Feda'iyan Guerrillas. This paper will examine the analysis of the revolution and the Islamic Republic state by the aforementioned leftist organisations. Next, the paper will examine the approaches of the same groups 25 tears later and in light of changes that has occurred both in Iran and in the international environment. The paper will base its argument on both primary sources publications of various organisations) and secondary sources (books and articles published about various organisations).
The Sheriman Family between Julfa and Venice: Migratory Circulation and Cultural Hybridity
Houri Berberian
California State University, Long Beach, USA
This paper examines the Sherimans, a wealthy Iranian-Armenian merchant family, with origins in early seventeenth century New Julfa and branches as far west as Italy, especially Venice, and as far east as Madras (India) and Pegu (Burma) and as recent as the nineteenth century. In addition to merchants, the Sheriman family included highly-placed state officials, military and religious officials, and counts. The family's journeys and dispersion from southwest Asia to western Europe and southeastern Asia began decades after they were first established in Iran, which in itself was the consequence of displacement and dislocation. The Sherimans were among Shah Abbas' deportees, being settled in New Julfa in the early seventeenth century and playing a significant role in the domestic and international commerce of Iran by taking advantage of its contacts within and outside the country. Through the study of family correspondence, memoirs, and other family material acquired in Venice and the Vatican, this paper views the Sheriman family as a link between Iran and Europe and more generally East and West as they travelled and toiled between southwest Asia, Europe, and southeast Asia. The Sheriman case illustrates the important role of migratory circulation and cultural hybridity in the family's networks, survival, and even success in different parts of the world. The Sherimans are a perfect example of the significance of the function of merchants in bridging political and cultural gaps through extensive travel and economic transactions in multiple empires and regions. The Sheriman family's history also sheds light on the important role that multiple identity plays in the cosmopolitan existence of the Armenian merchant family. A pliable and fluid identity was a key factor in the ability of the multi-generational members of the Sheriman family, whether in Julfa or Venice, to achieve religious, military, and intellectual distinction as well as great wealth, political influence, and social clout.
A New Julfa Merchant in India: the Book of Will of Khoja Petrus Woskan
Bhaswati Bhattacharya
International Institute of Asian Studies, Netherlands
This paper traces the social and economic relations between Iran and India in the eighteenth century through the study of the Armenian migration and community in India. Large-scale settlement of Armenians in India followed the forced evacuation of Julfa in Armenia by Shah Abbas in the beginning of the seventeenth century. While proximity of Iran to India – the key-role player in Asian trade in premodern times – partly explains the situation, the politico-social developments in New Julfa from the late seventeenth century onwards played an equally important role in the decision of Armenians of New Julfa to seek other bases of operation. Khoja Petrus Woskan (b. New Julfa, 1680 - d. Madras, January 15, 1751) was such a person who left New Julfa for Madras in 1705. His Book of Will, containing the last will and testament that Woskan prepared before he passed away, was translated into English and presented to the Mayor's Court in Fort St George, Madras. While the will is an important document showing the networks of Petrus and the continuous circulation of goods, information, human and capital resources between Iran and India that sustained Armenian trade in that period, it also sheds important light on the historiography of the Armenians of New Julfa and India.
Art and Mithal: Reading Geometry as Visual Allegory
Carol Bier
The Textile Museum of Washington, USA
By the eleventh century CE, from Spain to India, seemingly complex geometric patterns adorn most major Islamic monuments. Too often this extraordinary phenomenon is treated as inconsequential, as geometric patterns in the treatment of Western art history are considered to be ornamental and decorative, nonrepresentational and, therefore, meaningless. The reasons for this rapid proliferation have not been adequately explained. This paper focuses on two octagonal tomb towers dated to the 11th century, which are located on the Iranian Plateau between Hamadan and Qazvin at Kharraqan, in an effort to shed light on representational meanings associated with geometric pattern in Islamic monuments. Dated by inscription, these monuments are constructed of fired, unglazed bricks, which are arranged to form numerous geometric patterns that cloak the building's eight faces as a revetment. In addition to the date, the inscriptions also give the name of the architect, Muhammad ibn Makki al-Zanjani. Beyond the raw historical data of name and date, what means are available for us to assess the constructed meanings these buildings once had within their original cultural milieu? This paper takes as its starting point an assumption that art, as allegory, may be interpreted on many levels. Mithal is the Arabic term used to refer both to Islamic philosophical allegory and to geometric example or model; the word itself presupposes likeness or resemblance. Looking at location, choice of inscription, and contemporary issues in local philosophical discourse, this paper articulates a direct relationship between geometric patterns visually expressed, and topics of ontological interest and metaphysical exposition that were being discussed in early Saljuq Iran. Drawing upon tenets of Islamic theology, it is argued that these designs, far from being merely ornamental, designate meanings appropriate to their funerary context, thereby illuminating a temporal and spatial specificity of meaning for Islamic geometric ornament.
Influence of Attar's Mantiqu't$ T$air onAlaoland Jayasi's Padmavati – A Special Reference to Fana and Baqa
Abu Musa Muhammad Arif Billah
SOAS, University of London, UK and the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh
Persian influence on Hindi and Bengali or other South Asian literatures is a common phenomenon. History reveals that since time immemorial a close cultural relation has existed between these two regions. After the advent of Islam in India this relation reached its zenith. Sana'i, Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Jami, Nezami etc, contributed a lot to produce voluminous work in this field. Fana, baqa, asheq, mashuq, etc. are the main features of Persian Sufi tradition. As Persia is considered a cradle of the Islamic Sufi tradition, medieval Persian poetry played a significant role in generating the Sufi poetic genre within its framework, which left much influence to reproduce an Indian style of Sufi literary tradition. Based on this tradition, hundreds of poets wrote thousands of poems. Malik Muhammad Jayasi's Hindi Padmavati and Alaol's Bengali Padmavati are the best examples of them. Jayasi not only embellishes his Sufi thought by Attar's fana concept but he also designed the narrative structure of his poem following Attar's Mantiqu't$ T$airespecially the story of Sheikh-e San 'an. Alaol gets further infusion by the mystic trend of Attar and extended his Sufi thought from his predecessor Jayasi's fana to Attar's fana and baqa in his poem. The principal aim of this paper is to focus on how these two medieval poets were influenced by Attar in developing their poetic and mystic thoughts.
Oghuz Khan Narratives, Politics and Legitimacy in the Late Medieval Persianate Historiography
Ilker Evrim Binbas
University of Chicago, USA
This paper focuses on the Oghuz Khan Narratives in late medieval Persianate historiography. The Oghuz Khan narrative is an ethnogonic myth on the mythistory of Oghuz Khan and his descendants recorded in a cycle of genealogical narratives. Competing to a certain extent with the Mongol genealogical narratives, the Oghuz Khan narrativesbecame a common theme in many dynastic genealogies and also in the universal histories written in the post-Mongol political context in the area stretching from Istanbul to Samarkand. Especially in the fifteenth century, when Islamic dynasties like the Ottomans traced their ancestry back to Oghuz Khan, these narrativesgained an additional political impetus due to the competition between the Ottomans and Timurid successor states, such as the Aqquyunlu and Qaraquyunlu. However, even in the areas where Chingizid prestige was strongly felt, the Oghuz Khan narratives were commonly circulated, and probably some oral versions entered into the literary historical traditions and vice versa, especially in Central Asia. The presentation compares three representative Oghuz Khan narratives found in three chronicles. The first one is the Ilkhanid historian Rashid al-Din's Jami' al-tavarikh, the second is the Timurid historian Sharaf al-Din Yazdi's Zafarnameh, and the third is the Ottoman historian Shukr Allah's Bahjat al-tavarikh. The paper argues that the change in and the use of the Oghuz Khan narratives in different historical sources and contexts can be explained with the narratives' relationship with the competing models of sovereignty in late medieval Islamic history.
Stories of Imam Ali and Imam Reza as Sung in the Kurdish and Turkish of Khorasan
Stephen Blum
City University of New York, USA
This paper discusses three narrative poems that for several decades have occupied a prominent position in the repertoire of the Bakhshis in northern Khorasan. The verses in Kurmanji Kurdish about 'Imam Reza: Protector of the Gazelle' and 'The Meeting of Imam Ali and Khezr' are attributed to the nineteenth-century poet Ja'far Qoli, as is the Kurmanji version of 'Imam Ali: the Hawk and the Dove.' A second version of the latter story that is currently sung in Khorasani Turkish is an adaptation of a Turkmen poem evidently composed by the eighteenth-century poet Magtymguly Pyragi (1733-1783), and it is sung to a musical mode (maqam) that strongly resembles a mode used by the Yarsan and Ahl-e Haqq in Iranian Kurdistan. The music history of northern Khorasan has been shaped by interaction among speakers of Persian, Kurdish, Turkmen, and Khorasani Turkish. Several aspects of that history can be approached through an analysis of these texts and the musical resources used in performing them. The materials on which this analysis is based include recordings made at various times during the past 36 years and the critical edition of Ja'far Qoli's poems published by Kalimollah Tavahodi.
A New Lexical Resource: Persian WordNet
Farhad Keyvan
Netservia Labs, USA
Habib Borjian
Hofstra University, USA
Manuchehr Kasheff
Columbia University, USA
Christiane Fellbaum
Princeton University, USA
The authors of this presentation discuss the design and creation of a unique electronic lexical resource, dubbed PersiaNet, as an important step towards making Persian more accessible for linguistic, literary, and cultural studies. PersiaNet is modelled on WordNet, a lexical database that has been created for over 30 languages world-wide and has found wide acceptance among theoretical and applied linguists (Fellbaum 1998, Vossen 1999). Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are grouped into sets of synonyms (synsets), each representing a canonicalised concept. Synsets are interrelated by means on conceptual-semantic and lexical relations including hyponymy, meronymy, antonymy, and entailment. The result is a large semantic network, where word meanings are represented and made accessible not by means of definitions but in terms of their relations to other words. The authors developed an interface, compatible with both Roman and Persian script, that allows lexicographers in different locations to populate the database with Persian synsets and to develop the semantic network. PersiaNet utilises a single common database that can be accessed and shared by each lexicographer. PersiaNet will constitute a powerful tool for various Natural Language Processing applications including machine translation and information retrieval. It is directly mappable onto dozens of other wordnets, allowing for cross-linguistic applications and lexical comparison. Applications for creating Persian language education materials, multi-lingual dictionaries of Persian, and a tool for converting digital Persian text in the current Perso-Arabic alphabet into Latinised Persian transcription will be potential by-products of PersiaNet.
Circulation of Elites in Post-revolutionary Iran
Mehrzad Boroujerdi
Syracuse University, USA
It is generally accepted that the post-revolutionary political leadership in Iran is radically different from its predecessors. Yet, even after 26 years, our knowledge of the new ruling elite is still rather skeletal. To address this problem the author created an up-to-date and comprehensive data set containing biographical information on over 1,500 political personalities in post-revolutionary Iran. This dataset covers ministers in eleven different cabinets, members of seven parliaments, members of five Council of Guardians, and members of three Assemblies of Experts. Based on an analysis of the information contained in the database, the paper analyzes the recruitment, composition, and rotation of the new ruling elite in Iran by discussing such issues as their class origin, provincial background, age composition, educational pedigree, and frequency of election/appointment. The analysis of the data shows that circulation of elites in post-revolutionary Iran happens most at the bottom of the elite pyramid (the majles) due to the public's desire for change. At the same time, the institutions wielding greatest power have been the ones most resistant to change (Assembly of Experts and the Council of Guardians).
The Herat Issue in the Context of Afghan-Iranian Relations
Vladimir Boyko
Centre for Regional Studies, Barnaul State Pedagogical University, Russia
This paper aims to shed light on a little-known and ill-investigated quasi-democratic experiment in Afghanistan localised in the Herat area (1929 to early 1930s), and the role of Herat in Afghan domestic as well as international/regional politics. The study is primarily based on recently declassified Russian foreign ministry archives. Herat is one of the oldest cities of Asia, and the capital of the province by the same name, currently in Afghanistan. Historically, Herat was the largest centre of Safavid Iran, and later the Durrani Empire. The most powerful rulers of central and western Asia have constantly struggled for Heart: Persians tried to maintain their historical and cultural influence on this area, while Afghans always feared what they perceived as centrifugal trends. British and Russians made their own stakes in the 'Great Game' and kept their eye on Herat as well. Geographically and ideologically Heart accepted the influences of bordering Persia since the early twentieth century. The failure of King Amanullah's reforms (1919-1929) resulted in the split of Afghanistan into several centres of power: the Tajik Bacha-e Saqao in Kabulistan, the turbulent southern and eastern provinces, the coalitional Afghan north, and finally the Herat Republic by Abdurrahim. The latter actually introduced an autonomous self-governance in Herat that allowed him to maintain socio-economic and political balance within this large border region during the civil war (Enqelab of1929). The political set-up of 'Herat Republic' was conditioned by his charismatic leadership, counterbalanced by the newly-establishedmajles dominated by the clergy and local nobility. Herat's populist version of democracy was undermined by the functioning of Sharia courts and oppression of the Shiites. The idea of Herat regional autonomy was repeated during the recent civil war in Afghanistan and the agenda of local self-governance is still open. The paper looks at one other major factor: the contradictory, competitive and collaborative influences of Russia and Iran in Afghanistan and in the northwest areas in particular.
The Persian Tradition of Euclid's Elements of Geometry
Sonja Brentjes
Aga Khan University, UK
The Persian tradition of Euclid's Elements is closely connected with the Arabic transmission of the work in Iran, Central Asia and India. This tradition does not have a single but, rather, multiple starting points, i.e., despite the overwhelming impact the Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's Arabic edition of the Elements had upon the Persian tradition of the text, it was not the only Arabic version translated into Persian. As for its impact upon other genres of mathematical texts, there seems to have been no marked differences between the two linguistic traditions. On the institutional level, too, the Persian tradition like the Arabic one lived in different spaces – the courts, the madrasa and the sphere of the interested individual. This paper discusses whether these macro-level parallels dissolve or at least modify and show greater variations when we start looking at them from various micro-level perspectives. A second issue discussed in the paper is whether the profound differences in the arts that evolved with and after the Ilkhanid dynasty between the Arab-speaking and the Persianate regions, included a different attitude or usage of Euclid's Elements.
Sweetness and Light: Wedding Music in Iranian-Australian Communities
Gay Breyley
Monash University, Australia
The wedding ceremony traditionally represents a community's most significant celebration and an opportunity for a broad musical repertoire to be performed. As a celebration of both transition and continuity, the wedding is a site of hope and nostalgia, joy and poignant reflection. It is also, of course, a community gathering and therefore a performance site on a more general level. All these aspects are reflected in the ways music is chosen and performed at weddings. This paper explores musical practices at weddings in Australia's Iranian migrant communities and analyses some of the sociopolitical and cultural meanings of musical choices and performances. For migrants from Iran to Australia, the significance of the wedding as turning point is complicated by the experience of migration and its various effects on different generations, and by the community's changing collective position in Australian society and its changing relations with its 'homeland'. In many cases, when the bride and groom celebrate their transition from their two respective homes to their marital home, they also imaginatively enact a transition from the 'Iranian' world of their parents to the 'Australian' world of their (usually) desired children. However, the meanings of 'Iranian' and 'Australian' are rarely clear and the desire to be affiliated with aspects of one or the other often relates to paradoxical notions of success and morality, tradition and modernity, pleasure and security. Often difficult to verbalise, these desires and ideals are reflected in musical performances. In this paper I examine a few examples of the particular combinations of 'Iranian', 'Losanjelesi' and 'Australian' wedding music sounds that reflect the various subtleties of particular migrants' cultural memories and imaginaries and their forms of sociopolitical identification.
Caught between Zulaykha and Farhad: Gendering the Poetic Voice in the Ghazals of Jahan-Malek Khatun
Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
McGill University, Canada
Jahan-Malek Khatun (d. ca. 1390) is premodern Iran's most prolific woman poet. Her divan (edited and published for the first time in Tehran in 1995) contains over 1,400 ghazals, several hundred ruba'is and a small number of muqatta's and qasidas. Jahan-Malek was an Injuid princess, the only child of Jalal al-Din Mas'ud Shah ibn Sharaf al-Din Mahmud Shah to survive to adulthood. After the death of her father she sought the protection (and possibly also the patronage) of her uncle, Sheikh Abu Ishaq. Jahan-Malek Khatun married her uncle's chief nadim, and she appears to have begun composing poetry during his lifetime. What makes Jahan-Malek Khatun and her poetry so interesting to scholars of Persian ghazal poetry in the fourteenth century is that she composed poetry for (or during the reign of) many of the same Injuid and Muzaffarid patrons as her more famous male contemporaries, such as Hafez and 'Obayd-e Zakani. The volume of Jahan-Malek's poetry is impressive, as are the style and complexity of her ghazals which echo that of the poems of Hafez in particular. This paper provides a brief biography of Jahan-Malek Khatun, locate her within the literary milieu of fourteenth century Shiraz, and discuss the various ways in which she ingeniously employs both male and female poetic personae in her poetry. The discussion of the gender of the poetic voice in Jahan-Malek's poetry is focused on her incorporation of elements from well known Iranian amorous tales, such as Khosrow va Shirin, Yusof o Zolaykha and Layli o Majnun.
A Tight Rope Act Over Common Moral Ground
Elizabeth M Bucar
University of Chicago, USA
Following the 1979 Revolution that established the Islamic Republic of Iran, veiling became obligatory, the Family Protection Law was repealed, and groups like the Sisters of Zaynab patrolled the streets in search of offenders of sharia law. For these reasons and others, the collusion of politics and religion in Iran is often interpreted by Western scholars as patriarchal by design and detrimental to Iranian women. In contrast, many leaders of the contemporary women's movement in Iran participated in the Islamic revolution and consider the publicisation of Islam to be liberatory for women. This paper considers the creative arguments Iranian women make about their proper roles in contemporary Iranian society and how they draw on Islamic teachings. It focuses on the work of one exemplary leader of the Iranian women's movement, Shahla Sherkat, founder and managing editor of Zananmagazine, and how she rhetorically draws on and shifts the moral and political teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini. Sherkat's argument for the creativity of self-censorship is juxtaposed to the Khomeini's teaching on the necessity of political unity (later codified in the 1996 Iranian press law) in order to demonstrate how, in Sherkat's words, censorship was a "bestowed blessing." Two major points are argued. First, a scholar's prior secular feminist commitments can interfere with her analysis of the dynamic actions of women within Iran, particularly if they lead her to dismiss religion as a potential resource for women's rights. Second, perhaps ironically, women who work within an Islamic framework in Iran are able to widen subtly the discursive parameters of this often male-inscribed tradition, even as they operate within it.
The Diadem, Nimbus, Red Footwear and the Veil: Insignia and Court Practice as Cross - Cultural Mediators between Rome and Sasanian Iran
Matthew P Canepa
College of Charleston, USA
The relationship between Sasanian and Roman ruler representation has presented both an intractable problem and challenge for scholarship in both fields for almost eight decades. Beginning in the mid-third century, the Roman and Sasanian systems of ruler representation and courtroom etiquette grew increasingly similar with regards to several key elements. These involve the most basic markers of royalty including such emblematic features as the diadem, nimbus, red shoes, prostration, and the ceremonial use of veils and silence around the sovereign. Trying to disentangle the process that led up to this state of affairs is more difficult, especially if one follows those Roman sources that claim that any change in the emperor's appearance was the result of a whole scale importation of Sasanian customs, which is not borne out by the visual evidence or majority of the textual evidence, or modern scholarship which typically ignores any interchange at all. Since Alfoldi's articles in 1934/5, previous considerations of these issues have largely understood it as a problem of cultural origins, seeking to fix certain elements of court culture as absolutely Iranian or Roman. In a new approach to the evidence, I argue that the fundamental significance of these commonalities in insignia and ritual, and the motivations behind their emergence, lies in their conversational function as cross-cultural mediators. Both courts highlighted features such as full prostration or red, bejewelled shoes since they provided an intelligible focus for their struggles to exert dominance or establish parity and, as such, were useful mediators of ideas of power and legitimacy in a language of cross-cultural debate. This state of affairs developed from a complex process wherein indigenous developments in each culture gained a cross-cultural layer of interpretation. In this paper I argue that the courts often gave indigenous practices a new cross-cultural meaning as they became sites of competition between the two realms either in their shared experience of each others' courts in the diplomatic process, or in viewing their own images or investing their client kings.
Manuscript Transmission of the Avestan and Pahlavi Videvdad
Alberto Cantera
University of Salamanca, Spain
Miguel Angel Andres Toledo
University of Salamanca, Spain
This paper is a presentation of a new edition of the Avestan and Pahlavi Videvdad. The new edition is a collection of as many Videvdad-manuscripts as possible in digitised form. These new ly gathered and digitised manuscripts have shown that the Avestan edition of theVidevdad is not a reliable source and also that Geldner's stemma of the Videvdadmanuscripts are in need of revision. The authors describe the collected manuscripts, their colophons and try to present a new, more convincing stemma. For further information about the project, please see www.videvdad.com.
From Husraw I to Husraw II: Some Thoughts on the Late Pahlavi Cursive
Carlo G Cereti
University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Italy
Among the great cultural achievements of the Sasanian Empire is the invention of the Avestan script, derived from a late Pahlavi cursive. This subject was widely discussed in earlier years, notably by W. B.Henning and K. Hoffmann, and has now been taken up again by J. Kellens in his most recent book. In the present paper the author tries to put together all the philological and epigraphic evidence relevant to date the birth of the Pahlavi cursive, reaching the conclusion that it should be placed in the later years of the empire.
Houchang EChehabi
Boston University, USA
The Shiraz Festival of Arts has become a major trope in criticisms of the Pahlavi regime. There is a consensus in the scholarly literature that it was elitist and offensive to the sensibilities of the average Iranian, in addition to being a colossal waste of money. This paper examines the genesis of the festival, provides a synopsis of the programming over eleven seasons, and ends with a detailed discussion of the most talked-about production, a play from Hungary. The conclusion of the paper is that while a few productions were indeed very offensive, most programmes were not, and some of them, such as the concerts of traditional Persian music, had a lasting beneficial effect on Iran's cultural life. Sources for the paper are personal memories, interviews with the director, the memoirs of Empress Farah, contemporary newspaper accounts, and the actual catalogues of the eleven festivals that were held from 1967 to 1977.
Identifying the Parthian Statue Shami
Mohammad Reza Chitsaz
al-Zahra University, Iran
The largest metal sculpture of a man made in ancient Iran at the Iran Bastan Museum Iran. This one-armed statue is comparable in size and in medium to the sculpture of the Elamite Queen Napir-Asu in the Louvre. The Iranian statue was found in 1934 by peasants of Shami (Kal Chenar), north of Izeh, in Khuzistan. There have been numerous studies of this important archaeological find but a unified designation for the sculpture remains to be agreed upon. General appellations such as The Shami Sculpture or the Parthian Prince or theParthian Ruler have all been applied to the piece with little definitive agreement of whom the statue represents.
But upon studying contemporary coins of the Parthians and the relief statues of the period, a similarity emerges with one of the kings the Elimite strand of this dynasty. Furthermore, the location where the Shami statue was discovered is significant because the area contained an important temple which was conquered by Antiochus III and later on Antiochus IV only to be re-conquered at the end of the Parthian Mehrdad I period. This paper is based on close scrutiny of the contemporary sources and attempts to identify the statue and the person whom it represents.
The Eight Pointed Rosette: A Possible Important Emblem in Sasanian Heraldry
Matteo Compareti
Italy
The eight-pointed star resembling a flower is an astronomical-astrological symbol which has been very widespread in the art of the Near East since ancient times. It possibly had also a special meaning in Sasanian Persia since it can be seen on the shoulder of some shahanshahs and, at least in one case, on the garments of a noble lady within pearl roundels in precious metalwork. In two 5th-6th century Sasanian silver dishes embellished with complex religious scenes, an eight-spokes visible wheel resembling a flower or the astronomical symbol is even flanked by winged putti (a clear borrowing from Byzantine Christian art). Furthermore, a recently studied probable Sasanian textile fragment kept in Athens shows exactly the eight-pointed star in a clear position of prominence in the composition representing a central king on horseback and some attendants around him. Parallels with literature referring to the Sasanian period can be traced in order to find an explanation for the position of the eight-pointed star in that textile. The aim of the present paper is to analyse the pieces of art just enlisted and try to identify (cautiously) the eight-pointed star as an important symbol in Sasanian art which was most likely connected to the royal family itself.
Popular Politics in Iran -The Urban Crowd and the Fall of the Qajar Dynasty
Stephanie Cronin
University College Northampton, UK
This paper looks at the continuing political vitality of the urban crowd in early Pahlavi Iran and the role it played in the crisis which wracked the country in the first half of the 1920s. It focuses in particular on the part played by street politics in the mortal struggle between Reza Khan, supported by the new nationalist elite, and Ahmad Shah and the partisans of the Qajar dynasty.
The paper locates the crowd actions of the crisis years of 1924-5 in their historical context, insisting that, for the people of Iran's towns and cities, as they entered the Pahlavi era, there was nothing unusual or exceptional about popular protests. Such protests were, rather, a familiar feature of urban life throughout the country. Urban crowds habitually employed a wide variety of methods in their efforts to influence, manipulate, resist and sometimes confront local and national authorities. Indeed there existed a repertoire of actions with which both the people and the authorities were intimately acquainted and through which conflict between rulers and ruled could be choreographed. This repertoire was deeply ingrained in the historical experience of broad layers of especially the urban, but also to some extent the rural, populations, who resorted to it spontaneously and almost instinctively. Among the actions constituting this repertoire, perhaps the most well-known are the addressing of appeals in the form of petitions and telegrams to the central authorities, either the government or the majles, the use of mosques for political meetings, the taking of bast, the guild strike and the closure of the bazaars, the distribution of anonymous and often menacing and intimidatory shabnamehs and, when these methods were exhausted, collective bargaining through riot. In attempting to rescue the urban crowd in Iran from obscurity or from condemnation as a fanatical and blindly reactionary mob, the paper hopes to rectify the imbalance in much older scholarship and to introduce into the study of Iranian history some of the perspectives of 'history from below.'
The Origins and Development of Persian Epic Literature
Ghazzal Dabiri
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
This paper examines the development of the Persian epic from the early Islamic period to the late thirteenth century CE. The origins of the genre lie within two overlapping movements. The first was the translation movement, which made Middle Persian histories and works of wisdom literature available first in Arabic and later in New Persian. The second was the adaptation movement, which was the deliberate and conscious effort of litterateurs to use poetry as a vehicle of expression. The works of Ferdowsi, Nezami, and Attar illustrate some of the ways in which epic literature developed as a result of the translation and adaptation movements. Ferdowsi adapted prose histories into a historical epic, while Nezami and Attar combined, in varying degrees, the use of histories and wisdom literature to compose romantic and quest epics respectively. The paper briefly explores the ways in which the translations of texts from Arabic to New Persian influenced the direction Persian epic would take. A comparison and analysis of selected excerpts of Arabic texts and their Persian translations illustrate the translators' methodologies and objectives, including the techniques they employed to render narrative. The paper proceeds to argue that poets later implemented these narrative techniques and objectives and adapted them into epic form. To trace the development of Persian epic from within, an analysis of the structure and styles of the three poets is undertaken and a look into the way in which elements of oral literature and composition in performance were appropriated and borrowed by Ferdowsi and Nezami.
The Holy Fool in Medieval Islam - The Qalandariyat of Fakhr al-Din 'Araqi
Ashk P Dahlen
Uppsala University, Sweden
Fakhr al-Din Ibrahim Araqi's (d. 1289)mystical poetry has been considered to be unparalleled and he has been celebrated as the most eloquent spokesman of divine love in the history of Persian literature. His literary production is above all distinguished by the depth and audacity of its unbridled esoteric speculations and the intensity and brilliant colour of its religious expression. As a disciple of Sadr al-Din Qunawi, he was the first writer to introduce Mohi al-Din ibn Arabi's mystical teachings in the Persian language. He composed Sufi love poetry in the tradition of Sana'i and Attar, and also wrote a commentary on the Fusus al-hikam in elegant Persian prose. Due to his creative talent and the synthesizing character of his spiritual vision he made a fecund contribution to Islamic mysticism. The task in this paper is to draw attention to a feature of Araqi's production which has so far been largely neglected by modern scholarship, namely the genre of qalandariyat. The examination is based on a close reading of selected passages of his divan, which are analyzed by initially taking into consideration hagiographical accounts about his life. Before exploring the qalandariyatpoems, it is however necessary to look at the religious and historical background against which this genre emerged and developed. In this respect, the essay initially examines theqalandar phenomenon, its spiritual doctrine and practice, in the context of Medieval Islam, and then give attention to it as a distinct literary type.
The Proliferation of the Iranian Tradition of Viziericide in the Ilkhanid Period
Gholamreza Dar-Katanian
Islamic Azad University, Shabestar, Iran
This paper is a preliminary study of the tradition of assassination of ministers or viziers prevalent throughout Iranian history up to and including the Qajar period. The paper specifically looks at the charges of takfir (apostasy) that were levied against ministers both before and after the arrival of Islam as a reason for their assassination. The Ilkhanid period, aside from its many social, cultural, scientific and literary achievements, was a period that has remained unequalled in the history of Iran in regards to the practice of viziericide. The paper discusses the nature of the Ilkhanid court and the role of the Yasa or the imperial code of Chingiz Khan, which formed the backbone of the Ilkhanid state and contributed greatly to this practice.
The Rise and Early History of Ardashir-e Pabagan
Touraj Daryaee
California State University, Fullerton, USA
The rise of Ardashir (224-240CE) and the Sasanian Empire presents a special problem for historians of late antiquity. This is not so much because of a lack of sources, but rather because of their conflicting and anachronistic nature. We may not know exactly what happened in the first decades of the third century, but by sifting through the evidence that does exist one may arrive at a safe conclusion as to who Ardashir was and how it was that he burst unto the scene of political hegemony on the Iranian Plateau. This paper attempts to demonstrate that Ardashir's origin was much more humble than mentioned in the various sources and that this upstart would manipulate all records to achieve political legitimacy. It will also be shown that the location of the early stronghold of Ardashir was far away from Estakhr, the centre of the province of Persis, which can only mean that he was at best a local upstart on the fringes of the province, and that the taking of the patronymic name of Sasan was a further evidence for his non-noble lineage.
Moral Choices in the Shahnameh
Olga M Davidson
Wellesley College, USA
This paper focuses on two epic situations in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh where a hero is faced with a moral choice. Either of the two alternatives facing the given hero is justifiable in terms of one moral code and unjustifiable in terms of another. In the first situation, the hero Rostam is commanded by the prince Esfandiyar to submit to the authority of the king, who is Esfandiyar's father. Although Rostam is sworn to defend the king in any situation where the king's rule is threatened, the hero refuses to submit to the bondage demanded by the king precisely because this bondage has to be enforced by the prince Esfandiyar - who is acting in this situation not as a prince but as a warrior. Rostam's refusal to submit to the authority of the king thus violates the moral code that demands loyalty to the king but it ratifies the moral code of the epic warrior who must not allow himself to be controlled by someone he considers to be inferior to him as an epic warrior. In the second situation, the hero Siyavosh is commanded by his father the king to kill the hostages whom the hero has taken for the king. Although Siyavosh is sworn to obey the command of the king, he refuses to kill the hostages because such a killing would violate the terms he had negotiated with those hostages and with their families. The refusal of Siyavosh violates the moral code that demands loyalty to the king but it ratifies his own moral code as a negotiator who is true to his word. In both situations the poetry of the Shahnameh presents a conflict between two moral codes, and, in both situations, the principle of loyalty to the king loses out to other principles, despite the fact that the medium of this poetry is founded on the authority of kingship. That authority, however, is flexible enough to test the morality of heroes who strive to live by its rules - even if they are forced in some situations to defy those rules.
Literary Societies and Journals in Post-revolutionary Iran
Ali Dehbashi
Bukhara: a Persian Review of Culture, Art, and Iranology, Iran
Literary societies proliferated in the decades following the Constitutional revolution of 1909-11 in Iran. They were scattered in the major cities and played a significant role in the emergence and development of literary trends and publicised the works of numerous new poets and writers. Many eminent literary figures of the twentieth century, including Dehkhoda, Bahar, Eshqi, and Aref, were themselves members of these societies, and both published their works in the literary journals and occasionally served as their editors. Hedayat, Farrokhzad and Sepehri, for example, first published their work in Sokhan, Arashand Sadaf, respectively. This study begins with a brief elaboration on the history, socio-political background, and influence of some of the major literary societies and journals throughout the first eight decades of the twentieth century. The bulk of the paper concentrates on their changing fortunes during the turbulent years of the Islamic revolution of 1979, and the course of their developments in the following decades. In order to clarify patterns of change, as well as the nature and significance of the radical transformations that characterise the history of post-revolutionary literary journals and societies, a framework is adopted by way of which developments are classified chronologically, into three successive decades.
Modernisation and Clothing: Politics of Dress under Reza Shah
Bianca Devos
Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Germany
During the twenty years of his rule, Reza Pahlavi (1921-1941) pursued a policy of authoritarian modernisation which aimed at transforming Iranian society along European models. Western-styled clothing, including a peaked cap called 'Pahlavi hat', were made compulsory for all male Iranians in 1929, in order to give the Iranian people a modern appearance and to construct a uniform national identity. This process was carried farther by the substitution of the 'Pahlavi hat' as the official headgear with the 'European hat' in 1935 and resulted ultimately in the forced ban on veiling (kashf-e hejab). The Uniformisation-of-Dress law (Qanun-e motahhed al-shekl nemudan-e albaseh) and the supplementary regulations (nezamnameh) entitled the government to examine the clerical status of certain individuals: only Muslim (and non-Muslim) Iranian clerics still had the right to wear traditional clothes like abas and turbans. This paper discusses the impact of the dress reforms on two antagonistic groups in Iranian society, theulama and the Pahlavi state officials, by looking at a particular product of the dress codes, namely the licence to wear clerical clothing (javaz). Based on both published and unpublished sources from Iranian archives, the following questions will serve as a guideline. How successful was the newly modernised Pahlavi bureaucracy in implementing the nationwide dress regulations and which developments can be traced from interpreting the bureaucracy's documents? To what extend did the dress reforms – and the allocation of javaz-licences in particular – enable the Pahlavi state authorities to penetrate people's everyday life and to weaken the ulama' s social position? That theulama themselves did not constitute a uniform social group can be gleaned from the different reactions from various levels of the ulama hierarchy. What concrete effects did the change of clothing for clerics have for those who did not fulfil the necessary qualifications to maintain their status?
The New Great Game of International Reconstruction in Afghanistan
Andreas Dittmann
Univertitaet Bonn, Germany
The plans of reconstruction for Afghanistan face various challenges. The political pre-considerations include both the implementation of programmes of national security and development programmes at the same time. Especially the National Development Plan (NDP) demands a certain coordination of international assistance. There is an uncharted jungle of national and international governmental and non-governmental organisations, especially in the field of humanitarian aid. Overlapping interests amongst them cause certain forms of severe competition, which is further fuelled by the fact that most aid institutions gather in Kabul due to security reasons. This 'New Great Game' for development-related resources proves partially to be a serious obstacle for the development of Afghanistan itself.
Where Did the Saljuqs Live? Turkish Lords and City Life in Pre-Mongol Iran
David Durand-Guedy
Institut Francais de Recherche en Iran, Tehran
The attitude the Turks had toward city life during the medieval era has been subject of various enquiries. However, most of them concern later periods and not the first stage of the Turkish era, that is the Saljuq period. The Saljuqs have been described sometimes as familiar with urban life, at other times faithful to their nomadic roots. A precondition to address this issue is to determine as precisely as possible where they lived, in which location (inside or ouside city walls)? In what type of accommodation (palace or tent)? The example of Isfahan - capital of the Saljuq state for half a century - has already provided us with concrete elements which lead us to think that the Great Saljuqs sultans had a more nomadic way of life than hitherto thought. The aim of this paper is to propose a broader analysis of the issue, by considering the case of all the Turkish lords (Saljuq sultans, but also great emirs including Atabegs) throughout Iranian territory. In addition to Isfahan, the situation of the numerous centres of power in Khorasan, Jibal, Kerman, Fars and Azarbaijan are examined. Eventually, the results of this enquiry could contribute to a better understanding of the nature of the Saljuq state, of its evolution, but also of the nature of the Turkish domination.
Modern Medical Education in Nineteenth-Century Iran - An Arena of Dialogue between Traditional and Modern Medicine
Hormoz Ebrahimnejad
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford, UK
Iran established its first 'modern' school, the Dar al-Fonun (Polytechnic College or Academy of Applied Sciences), in 1851, in which modern medicine was taught. This paper examines the curriculum, the composition and the nature of medical course materials at the Dar al-Fonun. For the Qajar government, the Dar al-Fonun was created not only to introduce modern Western sciences but also - a fact that has never been duly emphasised - to bring the educational system, dominated by the Shiite clerics, under the control of the state. The education at the Dar al-Fonun incorporated both Western modern sciences and traditional Iranian sciences. Accordingly, the audience of Western physicians at the Dar al-Fonun was not limited to young students destined to study modern medicine. Many established traditional physicians of the army also attended the courses of the Dar al-Fonun, either out of their personal interest or by the order of the government. This made it impossible for Dr Tholozan, the French physician to the Shah and professor of medicine at the Dar al-Fonun, for instance, to sweep away the traditional medical texts from the curriculum of this modern school, as he had planned to do. There was a gap between what Dr Polak or Dr Tholozan wanted to teach and practice in nineteenth-century Iran, on the one hand, and what they were practically able to, on the other. In such an institutional and intellectual context, the education of modern medicine involved the coexistence of, and necessarily dialogues between, modern and traditional medicine.
What is Persian about the Persian Carpet Today? A Case Study on Carpet Manufacturing and Carpet Trade at Kashan
Eckart Ehlers
Universitaet Bonn, Germany
Carpets are one of the icons of Persian history and Persian culture. However, this icon is currently threatened by economic competition and globalisation. The Persian carpet industry and trade are undergoing severe changes with deep impacts on the local and regional levels of production and marketing. Kashan as one of the traditional centres for Iranian carpet manufacturing and its specific carpet industry are represented as a case study of this both internal and external competition vis-a-vis the traditional patterns. The presentation is based on fieldwork in 2002-03 as well as on most recent data on the Kashan carpet industry in 2004.
The Nation and its Periphery - Provincial Urban Iran in Revolution and War
Kaveh Ehsani
University of Illinois, Chicago, USA
This paper is a study of the transformation of Iran's provincial urban periphery since 1979. The premise of the paper is that the Islamic Republic should be categorised as a provincial regime, as much as an Islamist polity. Once again, after the highly centralizing Pahlavi interlude, urban provincial society has entered the mainstream of Iranian history. Taking the small town of Ramhormoz, Khuzistan, as a case study, the paper analyzes the impact of the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war in order to unpack the multi-layered transformations affecting social-political relations, individual and collective identities, and the physical landscape of provincial urban Iran in the course of the decisive decade of 1979-89. By analyzing this period from a local, rather than a macro/national perspective this essay attempts to shed some light on a number of interconnected processes affecting provincial urban society and the relations of centre and periphery: The rise of local, young, subaltern social actors in the course of the revolutionary upheaval which changed the balance of power in the provinces; the demographic shifts caused by the movement of war refugees, which lead to the emergence of new local socio-cultural syntheses; the dramatic expansion of the public sector, including revolutionary organisations and foundations, which allowed the upward mobility and the ascendance to power of local actors; and the dramatic transfer of urban land and the impact of revolutionary housing policy, which reshaped the urban geography of provincial towns, commodified urban space, and created a new urban political economy. The essay concludes that the Islamic Republic, paradoxically, integrated the marginalised urban provincial society into the mainstream of national political-economic life.
Movie Theatres as Public Space in Contemporary Iranian Cities
Parviz Ejlali
Iran
This article analyzes the changing role of movie-theatres as important urban public places in Iranian cities over the past century. From the time the first public motion picture theatre opened its doors some 102 years ago, a significant part of urban Iranians' public life and leisure time has been shaped in and around these public entertainment places. The history of urban motion picture theatres in Iran has undergone three phases: the first period, ending with Iran's occupation during the Second World War, saw the establishment of some 15 theatres in Tehran, while the production and dissemination of war newsreels in Persian expanded attendance and made cinema into an equally important component of the collective public social and political imaginary. The second phase, between the Second World War and the 1979 revolution, witnessed a major expansion as the number of theatres increased to 112 active cinemas in Tehran and 393 cinemas in the whole country. The 1980s, by contrast, were a decade of relative decline, as many movie theatres were targeted during Islamist demonstrations or confiscated by the revolutionary government, and the film industry was treated with hostility and suspicion. In the post-war period theatres witness a relative revival and film attendance once again becomes part of the urban landscape and collective public activity, at least in the larger cities. Some theatres were rebuilt, ironically with subsidies from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which also became a major source of funding for the reemergence of the film industry. Yet even in 2001 there were no movie theatres at all in two major southern provinces (Bushehr and Hormozgan).
Why do movie theatres occupy such a sensitive place in Iranian urban public life? How do these public places of leisure shape urban culture and collective identity? Who attends theatres, who owns and operates them? This paper examines movie theatres as spaces in which the social imaginary and styles of life of generations of urban dwellers have been shaped and publicly displayed. The different urban publics produced by different movie theatres, as well as the social interactions and mentalities which have been moulded in these spaces at different historical junctures and for different generations, are the major focus of this paper.
From the Reed Pen to the Printing Press: The Innovations of Qajar Calligrapher Mirza Mohammad Reza Kalhor
Maryam Ekhtiar
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA
In Iran, calligraphy has traditionally been perceived as an impenetrable redoubt in which traditional artistic values are preserved. In the late nineteenth century,\ this notion was challenged by the innovations of the calligrapher Mirza Mohammad Reza Kalhor. A master ofnasta'liq of the line of Mir 'Imad Hasani, Kalhor is not only considered a leading calligrapher of the late nineteenth century, but an innovator as well. his paper illustrates that although calligraphy remained largely untouched by the forces of modernisation and Westernisation, it too was eventually changed permanently. The introduction of lithography into Iran in the early nineteenth century was a momentous event in the modernisation process. It was not until the late nineteenth century, however, that the nasta'liq script was markedly altered to suit this new technology. This paper focuses on this transition and the contributions of Kalhor to this process. Kalhor's innovations permanently altered the nasta'liq script in Iranian print culture, the effects of which are still evident today.
Social Moods and Radical Change in the late 1970s Iranian Society: A Case in the Discourse Analysis of the Iranian Revolution of 1979
Parviz Emamzadeh Fard
Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran
This paper offers a cultural explanation for the upheavals Iranian society experienced in the late 1970s by focusing on the developments in the Iranian popular songs of that period. It asserts that the message of Iranian society, increasingly set on challenging the ruling social and political order, had its echoes in the development of the popular song of the late 1970s. In late-1970s Iran one can see a dramatic change in the contents of Iranian popular songs and a significant shift in the popularity of their performers. By content analysis of these songs, the change pattern can be described as going from elite-mass standard expression of romantic-idealism to an opposition or even rebellion against the social and political order of the time.
Sasanian Queen Boran and other Female Rulers of her Age
Haleh Emrani
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
In the period between 600 CE and 900 CE, there were instances when powerful women rose to power and influenced political and social affairs of different areas of the world as wives, mothers, warriors or saints. Examples include the Byzantine Empresses Theodora I (527-565 CE) and Irene (750-802 CE), the Queen Hind al-Hirah (554-? CE) of Lakhm (Syria), the wife of the Prophet Muhammad 'Aisha Bint Abu Bakr (623-678 CE), the Khatun of Bukhara (670s CE) in Central Asia,Hind al-Hunnud, the opposition leader to the army of Islam (624 CE),in the Arab World, Boran, Azarmidokht and wives of Wahram II in Persia. In this paper, the rise of Boran to the Sasanian throne is compared to other women who ascended to a high level of political authority in the Sasanians' neighbouring societies such as Byzantium, Arabia, and Bukhara, to explore the similarities and differences in the circumstances leading to their rise to power and to identify specific social and political conditions making it possible. The question is under what circumstances women could seize imperial authority for themselves in the Byzantine or Persian Empires, or rise to political prominence in Bukhara or Arabia. Specifically, how could a female assume a role that was socially and politically believed to belong to a man? The specific women whose rise to power is compared to that of Boran are those names above.
Refugees in Iran - From a Human Crisis to Migration Management?
Anisseh van Engeland-Nourai
Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, France
The presence of refugees in Iran raises many issues and Iran has had trouble adjusting its national policies to the situation. The main argument and the goal of this paper are to analyze how Iran can turn a state of human emergency into a migration management ensuring the return of these refugees. The first part of the paper provides a brief survey of the existing situation by looking at the data given by UN agencies and non governmental organisations (NGOs) to know the identity of refugees in Iran (numbers, location, ways of life). In the second part, the paper addresses international and Iranian legal issues: Iranian law does take into refugees account and the Iranian policy entails difficult political choices. There is a need to amend Iranian law regarding that matter. In the third part, the study uses organisations' reports to analyze the day-to-day management of the camps: I also demonstrate how Iran, with the collaboration and help of UN agencies and NGOs, went from a human crisis to a camp management. This accommodation of refugees cannot, however, last for too long and it is now necessary to go from a crisis management to a migration management. In the fourth part, the paper presents the attempts of NGOs and UN agencies to negotiate the return of those refugees (the right to return). The main issue is how to handle successfully the return of refugees and turn the current situation into a successful state crisis management. The conclusions of the study are that a solution that accommodates every actor (the host state and the country of origin, as well as the refugees themselves) should be found. There is a need for a strategy that would ensure a reasonable transition from a longstanding refugee emergency to comprehensive migration management argument.
Legacy of the Imam: The Transsexual Rights Movement in Iran
Kouross Esmaeli
New England Institute of Art, USA
Transsexual life in Iran has been receiving increased recognition and coverage both inside and outside of Iran. From the BBC to Dateline NBC, the New York Times and various Iranian newspapers, transsexuality has offered a new and wholly unexpected view of the Islamic Republic and its attitudes to sex and sexuality. The history of this phenomenon in the Islamic Republic goes back to Imam Khomeini who, well before the 1979 revolution, was the firstmujtahid to make transsexual operation acceptable under Islamic Law. Since then, Khomeini's status as the leader of the Iranian nation has ensured that the Islamic Republic recognise transsexual operations. Since the revolution, the practice has increased to the point where Iran has one of the highest per capita transsexuals in the world. In the shadow of this phenomenon is the question of homosexuality which is strictly forbidden and punished in the Islamic Republic. This presentation seeks to look at divergent sexualities in Iran in light of the differing attitudes of the Islamic Republic to these two questions. This is particularly interesting considering the fact that the legal and social relationship between transsexuality and homosexuality in Iran is the exact reverse of the West where homosexuality enjoys a greater visibility and acceptance than transsexuality. Based on the author's short documentary produced for the US-based network Current TV, Legacy of the Imam is a work in progress probing these issues. The documentary includes interviews with specialists as well as with transsexuals. The study is based on interviews with Dr Bahram Mir Djalali, one of the foremost surgeons and specialists in the world on the question of transsexuality; Hojjatolislam Mohammad Mehdi Kariminia, a seminarian in Qom writing his doctoral thesis on the question of transsexuality in relationship to Islamic Law, and Ms Khatun Molkara, the first transsexual to obtain the legal permission personally from Ayatollah Khomeini to perform the sex change operation. Ms Molkara is the best-known transsexual activist in Iran where she currently leads an NGO dedicated to transsexual support and visibility. There are also interviews with a new layer of young transsexual activists who are coming together and continuing to struggle for greater social acceptance and governmental support.
The Register of Sheikh Fazlallah Nuri: Commercial and Connubial Transactions in a Newly Discovered Document, 1303 HQ-1306/1885- 1889
Mansoureh Ettehadieh
Nashr-e Tarikh-e Iran, Iran
This article is based on the recently discovered register of Sheikh Fazlallah Nuri. It contains 11,448 transactions and contracts registered in his court, mahzar during a three year period, from Moharram 1303 to Safar 1306. These transactions concern all classes of people and cover all kinds of deals. Each transaction has a code for reference and the original document bares a signature and seal. They comprise the sale and purchase or rent of property, such as houses, shops, agricultural lands, even a room. Contracts include marriage and divorce, heritage, endowments, loans settlement of disputes etc. These documents give an insight on how a traditional society which had not yet been affected by modernism functioned. For instance, how was the problem of interest, rebah, which is forbidden by religion, dealt with in a religious court? How much of mehr was actually paid? What were the conditions of divorce? For instance, how was a mohallel chosen when a man had divorced his wife three times and wanted her back? Another aspect of importance is the prices and costs of the transactions, for instance what was the mehr in different classes, or how much the rent of a room was in different districts of the city. One other aspect worth of notice regards manners and beliefs of the age, some of which might appear somewhat quaint today, as the conditions cited in a contract for carrying a corps to Karbala. In this paper a selection of typical cases are introduced and discussed with reference to two other source of the same period which compliment the information in this document, namely the police records of Count de Montforte and the Amar-e Dar al-Khalafeh which is a count of the buildings in Tehran.
An Anthropological Evaluation on the Risk of Disappearance of Zoroastrian Community Culture in Contemporary Iran
Nasser Fakouhi
University of Tehran, Iran
Zoroastrians constitute the most ancient religious minority in post-Islamic Iran. The present population of this community is 50,000 to 60,000 people (less than 0.001% of total population) concentrated primarily in three cities: Tehran (more than 50%), Yazd and Kerman. Since the introduction of Islam in Iran (seventh century CE), Zoroastrian culture has had more or less paradoxical relations with the dominant Islamic culture: on the one hand we have encountered a considerable transfer of Zoroastrian concepts, structures, and even rituals and religious forms to what Henri Corbin called 'Iranian Islam', and this is one of the main reasons of a flourishing and steady appearance and spreading of Zoroastrian religious and historical texts and commentaries about them, and their enormous popularity among ordinary people as well as academic elites. But on the other hand, the number of Zoroastrians themselves has decreased continually. The reasons for this are multiple and complex: social pressure for conversions, inter-group marriages, immigration etc. The waves of immigration began as early as 9th and 10th centuries, and the principal destination was India, where a rich and strong community of Zoroastrians took form (the Parsis). During the next centuries immigration continued, but field studies seem to demonstrate that since the last three decades the intensity and the combination of theses waves have created, for the first time in Iranian history, a real danger of the disappearance of Zoroastrian community culture. This issue is the chief concern of the paper, which is based on fieldwork done on the Zoroastrians population in summer and autumn 2005. The paper describes the present situation, discusses the consequences, and suggests some solutions to counter this threat.
Role of NGOs in Rebuilding Bam after the December 2003 Earthquake
Samira Farahani
Hamyaran - Iran NGO Resource Centre, Iran
The Bam earthquake was an unprecedented disaster. It caused destruction of the city, loss of thousands of people, and terrible living conditions for many. International, national, and local forces, including governmental, non-governmental and private sectors, were mobilised to face this crisis. After the earthquake, many NGOs were interested to work in Bam. Depending on their mandates and their expertise, these NGOs were focused mainly on community empowerment, sustainable development, poverty reduction, environmental issues, women and youth problems, vulnerable and homeless people and so on, usually based on a participatory approach. At the same time many international NGOs (World Vision, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, People in Need, Caritas, Save the Children, etc.) came to Iran to help the victims in different ways. Since they were not familiar with Iran's situation (i.e., Iranian power structure, Iranian work ethic, cultural issues, etc.), they offered their partnership to national NGOs in forms of joint projects, local representation, etc., and met a wide range of responses in Iran. These cooperations have resulted in a number of successful and unsuccessful practices. This paper surveys and analyses the role of NGOs and their impacts on rebuilding Bam during and after the crisis, through introducing those practices while many of them are still in progress, and finally will try to present an evaluation of NGOs' performance in Bam.
Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, the Historian-Mathematician
Mahdi Farhani-Monfared
al-Zahra University, Tehran
This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the possible interactions between mathematics and history in the works of Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, the litterateur, historian and mathematician of the fifteenth century (eighth century AH). Yazdi is well-known for his history entitled Zafarnameh-ye Teymuri. However, he has three books on arithmetic: Hisab al-uqud, Kunh al-murad fi 'Ilm Wifq al-a'dad, and Hilal al-matraz. Subscribing to the received view that findings of various sciences are heavily brought to bear in historical research, this paper seeks to investigate as to whether or not Yazdi's expertise in arithmetic influenced his historiography in any way. Providing a brief overview of Yazdi's life and works, the paper embarks on analyzing Zafarnameh in order, first, to pinpoint a rational, quantitative approach in Yazdi's work and, second, to find out the extent to what Yazdi's mathematical knowledge had a conscious or unconscious effect on his historiographic expression. The paper demonstrates that Yazdi's mathematical expertise hardly improved his method of historical analysis. Yazdi, in reporting such matters as the number of Timur's troops and spoils of war, remains entirely loyal to the qualitative tradition of Iranian historiography, hence exhibiting insignificant mathematical (i.e., quantitative) sense in his historical writing. The paper concludes with suggesting possible reasons as to why little connection was made between Yazdi's mathematical knowledge and his historical expression.
A Foreigner in the Service of Shah Abbas I - The case of the Syrian Christian, Michel Angelo Corai
Edward K Faridany
UK
The emphasis placed on official history of the early period of Iranian-Western relations has erased the role played by many individuals with little official posts. Based largely on manuscript sources in the Medici archives, Florence, and the Vatican's Archivio Segreto, this paper attempts to lift the veil shrouding one such career, that of Michel Angelo Corai. Corai first appears as guide and interpreter in Anthony Sherley's account of his journey to Iran in 1598. But beyond his crucial role in facilitating this seminal encounter in Iranian-European relations, Corai barely appears again in the established histories and sources associated with this period, an obscurity which might be taken to imply that he took little or no further part in any major events. In fact, Corai continued to remain an important shadowy figure. He was the supreme facilitator and fixer – highly able and trusted, multilingual, travelling discreetly and unobserved, equally at ease whether in Isfahan or Florence, Aleppo, Prague or Qazvin, and while at these cities executing his diplomatic responsibilities without fanfare or ceremony. Upon closer scrutiny, his activities seem to have been concerned with the critical issue of the day: finding the means to unite the Papacy and the Persian court to counter the Ottoman menace.
Lamentation among Bakhtiari Nomads of Iran
Mohsen Farsani
University of Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
One of the ancient customs of the Bakhtiari nomads is the mourning ceremonies conducted and carried out with great fanfare. Lamentation and funerary commemoration are significantly more important amongst the Bakhtiaris than joyous celebrations such as wedding or circumcision ceremonies. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that weddings last for no more than a day, whereas mourning periods last up to a year. During the actual funeral ceremonies, the most important and the most distinctive ritual is the recitation of funeral poems. This singing recitation of the mourning poems is called the gageriv, a term which is defined and discussed in this presentation. The paper also discusses a number of other rituals related to funerals amongst the Bakhtiaris, specifically the rituals specific to men and women and the longterms rituals that last the whole year after the death.
Women's Cultural Organisations in the Reign of Reza Shah
Maryam Farzaneh
Iran
This paper seeks to study and analyze the participation of women in Reza Shah's cultural policies. During the reign of Reza Shah, the ideas of reform and modernisation which had already existed among the Iranian people became the official policy of the state. The modernisation of women and women's role was a central part of state policies and among the institutions established to carry out this goal, the Kanun-e Banovan was the most prominent. This paper looks at the primary sources in the Iranian National Archive pertaining to theKanun-e Banovan to understand the objectives of the organisation for the development of women's cultural and political role in Iranian society. This archival access is particularly important since much of the most important policies and goals of the Kanun were not released publicly and were internal documents between the Shah and the administrators of the organisation. Another institution that was created with the organised coordination of the official policies aimed at women's development was the Iranian Girls Scouts. The paper looks at the creation and the social reception of the Girl Scouts through the study of journals such as Ma'aref, Pars, and Amuzesh va Parvaresh. The Girl Scouts met with much resistance and their survival ended up depending on decree. The study of these various institutions helps us understand the coordinated policy of Reza Shah aimed at the modernisation of women and helps us understand the objectives of the organisers of these polices to lay the social groundwork for this development.
Martyrdom on the Frontlines of the Iran-Iraq War
Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
This paper examines the usage of religion and religious stories, such as the Battle of Karbala (680) and the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, to entice very young Iranian males to fight and even commit suicide (and become martyrs) on the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Religion imbued with secular nationalism was the powerful force behind the volunteering of thousands of Iranians who partook in the war. Shahadat as an Iranian Shiite ideology constructed on the Karbala paradigm is the focus of this paper. The group most affected by this religious propaganda was Basij-e enqelab-e eslami (the Mobilisation Force of the Islamic Revolution), which was primarily made up of young teenage and old Iranian males. Western governments and scholars alike have always been baffled by this rather strange phenomenon, and for the past twenty-five years have attributed it either to these men's lack of confidence and training, or simply to their desperation in a mentally or physically abused environment. However, I argue that upon a close examination of different primary sources it appears that this sort of action was deeply rooted in their beliefs to fight what they thought as evils of the world. The sources reveal that these young boys were neither coerced nor had any desire to commit suicide, but their ideology, as it seems, was that of self-sacrifice to reach paradise. The clerical establishment of Iran successfully used this angle of Karbala, which historically was essentially part of the early Islam's wars for supremacy that has turned into the ultimate source of inspiration amongst the devout and practicing Shiites. Such primary sources as the martyrs' wills, the corresponding state propaganda in popular media and mosques throughout Iran, and speeches by Iranian clerics are utilised. Excerpts of a propaganda documentary movie, Shahadat (martyrdom), is shown.
Ghazal Khani and Gardan Koloft
Sasan Fatemi
University of Tehran, Iran
Ghazal khani is a genre of song in which didactic, religious and love poems are set to simple, non-metrical music and sung by a particular social category, the gardan koloft (literally 'thick neck'). This group is the descendant of the nineteenth-century dash, who were distinguished from other social groups by their double character: at once disrupters of order and protectors of the weak, wrongdoers and generous. The gardan koloft became very influential during the Pahlavi era, due to their collaboration with the Shah against the Mosaddeq government. However, their influence was limited to the city of Tehran's traditional and disfavoured southern parts, where they constituted an opulent and powerful class. The wealthier among them, while holding such positions as butcher or vegetable wholesaler, regulated the operations of the quarter's small businesspeople and opened gaming houses and/or opium dens. After the 1979 revolution, their influence was reduced to almost nothing. Ghazal khani, too, presents a kind of double character, as far as the contexts in which it performed are concerned. This genre of song is associated as much with religious circumstances (during the holy months of Ramadan and Moharram) as with those of disreputable sites (kharabat) and with disreputable games and sports such as those relating to pigeon-fancying. Ghazal khani is also sung in the traditional sports clubs that themselves have double reputations in society, being sometimes associated with generosity and rectitude, and sometimes with delinquence. Ghazal khani, urban popular song with deeply moral content, sung by people of dubious moral character, is still sung at Shahr-e Rey, in the south of Tehran.
Ali Shariati in South Africa: An Example of Selective Reception
Schirin Fathi
Universitaet Hamburg, Germany
This paper takes a look at the reception of Ali Shariati's thoughts and writings in South Africa. Shariati, one of the most influential precursors of the Islamic revolution in Iran, was known not only as a sociologist but also as an Islamic ideologue and orator. He combined in a most skillful manner, Western ideas and philosophies with Islamic teaching and popular Shiite imagery in Islam, and I argue that it is this mix that accounts mostly for his success at home. How, however, can this mix be transferred to other settings? This paper looks at Ali Shariati's writings and sociological models and how far they were received and possibly applied in South Africa among the very small Muslim minority and the disproportionate role they played in the struggle for equality and against apartheid. The Muslim minority of South Africa began to organise and develop a specific minority consciousness in the mid-1970s. The reform movement among them looked specifically to authors such as Sayyid Qutb, Maududi and, later, Shariati, who figured quite prominently in transforming the Muslim identity from a purely cultural one into a politicised, Islamist identity. The other vital question to answer is whether it was only the Iranian revolution, serving as the vehicle for Shariati's thought, that impressed and inspired Muslims throughout the world at some point, or whether there were unique ideas prevalent in Shariati's writings that shaped the Muslim discourse in South Africa in the early 1980s. The paper is looks at some key concepts of Shariati's work and in how far they were transformed or adapted to fit within the particular South African context. It addresses questions pertaining to the particular Shiite character of his writing and if they could be adjusted within a non-Shiite setting, or in how far the reform/revolutionary content is applicable universally and informs the ongoing debate on the link between religion and politics.
Before and After Konkur: An Ethnographic Account of the Iranian Concept of University
Nematollah Fazeli
Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran
With the establishment of Dar-al-Fonun in 1851, Amir Kabir sowed the seeds of Iranian modern higher education. However, Iranian modern higher education was not fully formed and born until 1934, when Reza Shah established the University of Tehran. Since that time Iranian higher education has been constantly expanding. By 1979, the Iranian higher education system had expanded to the point where it included 26 universities, 87 colleges, 228 higher education institutions, and 180,000 students. Despite the vast expansion and development of the Iranian higher education system, it has not been able to meet public demand for higher education. One may ask how and why Iranian higher education expanded. And what have been the impacts and consequence of this expansion on the Iranian understanding of university and higher education?
In addition to the many global processes, there are local processes that make the Iranian university more complex to understand. For instance, the Iranian university has never had autonomy and it has always been severely politicised. All political regimes in Iran have seen the university as an ideological instrument to produce political knowledge to justify their aims and existence, and politically to socialise the young generation for their purposes. However, in the mean time, the university has been a site of cultural and political resistance against the governments and state hegemony. As a lecturer of anthropology and an ethnographer in an Iranian university, I will speak about my personal experience of how the concept of university has changed and the new university has emerged in Iran. The paper will provide an ethnographic account of the Iranian university from an 'emic' point of view; it will raise questions such as: how do Iranian students understand the university? How do they live their academic life? Why do they choose to come to a university? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the university for them?
Oedipus / Shah Shoja / Joseph - Princely Villainy and Legitimacy in Fourteenth Century Shiraz
Ali Ferdowsi
Notre Dame de Namur University, USA
A son blinds his father, lets him die in exile, and elopes with his father's wife. Around the same time, he dismembers his tutor and regent, and scatters his body parts all over his domain. Murder, blinding, incest—these are the classic ingredients of every Oedipal story. The central figure in this saga is Shah Shoja (d. 786/1384), the mid-fourteenth century Mozaffarid ruler of Shiraz and adjacent areas. The scandal threw his reign into a downward spiral that temporarily cost him his throne. Shunned and un-patronised by the stingy new nominal sovereign of Shiraz, Shah Mahmud, the younger brother of Shah Shoja, the older brother's courtiers went to work to alter the valence of the scandal by overwriting it with another narrative. This narrative is the famous Biblical (and Quranic) story of Joseph, itself long recognised as a variant of the Oedipal theme. It too, is constructed out of similar motifs: exile, a blinded father, sexual approach by a maternal figure. Working much the same as antidotes, only stories that are sufficiently similar, structurally and thematically, could function to retrace and overwrite each other. Hafez is one of these courtiers who put his skills into the task of supplanting the reprobate story of Shah Shoja's first term as the sovereign of Shiraz with its edifying counter-story, that of Joseph's. Hafez's casting of Shah Shoja as the Joseph of his time has been previously well established. What has not been studied before is that 1) Hafez was not alone or the original source of this identification, and 2) this identification, including that of Hafez, was not an innocent poetic play, but rather a politically motivated act. It was part of a concerted ideological labour exerted to restore and augment Shah Shoja's legitimacy in preparation for his recapture of Shiraz. It was the mainstay of his political offensive. However one chooses to judge this overwriting of the prince's villainy, the micro-historical reading of Persian poetry, especially when it plunges its political intent into mysticism, is long overdue. In this paper, I shall show how through the magical alchemy of a labour of mystification, Persian courtly authors conjure a discourse of legitimacy out of the existing and widely shared capital of the Perso-Islamic tradition.
Local Participation: The Missing Key to Democratic Reform in Iran?
Behrang Foroughi
University of Toronto, Canada
Over the past hundred years, every major intellectual attempt to institutionalise democracy in Iran has perceived the structure of political power as the main barrier to success. Indeed, it has always been assumed that it is through a political reorganisation of society from the top down that democracy might seep into the social fabric of the Iranian society. And while the election of Mohammad Khatami as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1997 generated high hopes for political reform and a move towards democracy, in fact the Khatami period proved to be no exception to this trend, and it was not long before these hopes faded. It can be argued, then, that the continued dominance of this faith in elite-level politics was an important factor that contributed to the lack of democratic reform of Khatami's presidency. While democratic reform in Iran has commonly been sought through elite power struggles and mass mobilisation, perhaps one reason for their failure stems from the fact that they are both elite-driven processes. Simply put, the mass mobilisation of the 1979 revolution neither came from the grassroots, nor did it end in local democracy. Therefore, and as local participation has continued to be ignored up to the present day, the political reforms of the Khatami era were ill fated from the start. The paper will argue that local participation can create not only the social capital upon which democratic institutions are built, but can also instigate the all-important culture of dialogue, diversity, and cooperation in which democracy itself might be able to flourish in Iran.
A Bakhtinian Reading of Iranian Football Riots
Babak Fozooni
University of East London, UK
This paper applies a Bakhtinian framework of analysis to a weeklong series of Iranian football riots (21-27 October 2001), during the qualifying rounds for the 2002 World Cup. The presentation begins with a brief introduction of Iranian football after the Islamic 'revolution'. It then outlines two case studies where rioting became carnivalesque (in the Bakhtinian sense of the term) and demonstrates how this came to oppose the official Islamic spectacle(in the Debordian sense of the term). Although the victories won were not immediately generalised, they, nevertheless, represent the beginnings of a slow paradigmatic shift from the hegemony of the spectacle to the emergence of carnivalesque. Various aspects of the carnival, such as dialogic interaction, grotesquerie, music, dancing, excess, violence, cultural transgression, and hysteria, are examined. It is suggested that the riots signify a turning point in the dynamics of conflict within Iran and bode well for a resurgence of the social movement.
Ali Gheissari
University of San Diego, USA
The Iranian revolution of 1979 routinely resorted to a strong moralistic rhetoric in its opposition to the Pahlavi period, disparaging its prevailing moral and cultural climate. Given the fact that religion was a pivotal element in the overall ideological composition of the new period, the study of the moral dimension and its implications isof particular r elevance to a better understanding of the scope of social change in contemporary Iran. This paper examines three distinct yet inter-related analytical criteria: 1) boundaries of moral landscape, 2) a survey of Iran's moral capital, and 3) an examination of the parameters of social change in Iran and their impact on morals. First, a preliminary discussion of moral landscape entails an overall theoretical framework of the moral boundaries of reality, i.e., the notion of moral maxims, and the intrinsic value of morals and their impact on the repertory of human experience in a given period. Second, Iran's moral capital including the subjective criterion of moral values and the language of ethics are examined -- here sources of the moral self and its various expressions and representations are discussed, as represented in classical sources such as the andarznameh genre, in Sufi writings, and in specific sections of religious manuals on popular ethics. Thirdly, the above explorations are followed by an interpretive approach to the changes that have taken place in the Iranian society during the twentieth century and especially during the more recent periods -- i.e., by looking at the fusion of older moral concepts with modern trends such as the Jacobin ethics and the demarcation between 'their ethics and ours', and the militant stance to the questions of morals as a whole. Through a close reading of a wide range of primary material and innovative analytical framework this paper aims to further expand the arguments presented in the existing literature. The result of this project will contribute to the methodological debates in the field of the history and sociology of morals, and more specifically to the cultural history of modern Iran.
Mahasti Shahrokhi and Exilic Literature
Elham Gheytanchi
Santa Monica College, USA
In the past decade or so, there has been a burgeoning exilic literature in Persian consisting mostly of short stories, poetry and novellas. Exilic literature, formed by the experience of exile and isolation, challenges popular understanding of national identity, gender relations and sexuality. A novella written by a French - Iranian writer, Mahasti Shahrokhi, Shali beh deraza-ye jaddeh-ye abrisham (A Shawl as Long as Silk Road) is an example of exilic literature. Published in 1999, A Shawl (135 pages) is about an Iranian woman migrant in London whose partner is an Englishman with little knowledge of Persian. The heroine's pregnancy and her subsequent dialogue with the foetus constitute the major theme of the text. This paper analyzes the use of language, home, gender identity and sexuality in the context of exile in which the traditional understanding of these concepts are provoked and de-familiarised.
Azarbaijan in the Early Sasanian Period - A Research in Administrative Geography
Mehrdad Ghodrat-Dizaji
Urmia University, Iran
It appears that at the beginning of the third century CE, Media Atropaten (modern Azarbaijan) was one of the lands which had been damaged a lot because of the Parthians' wars of attrition with the Romans. With the rise of the Zoroastrian Sasanians, this land, which had a long tradition under the Zoroastrian religion, became part of the Sasanian Empire. In fact, both Syrian and Arabic sources, as well as later events, confirm the adherence of Azarbaijan to Ardeshir I, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty. Ardashir defeated the last Parthian king in western Media and then captured Azarbaijan without any problem and ordered the erection of a rock relief near Salmas in commemoration of his victory. Shapur I, Ardashir's successor, too, established the Sasanian hegemony over Azarbaijan by his campaign in the year of 241/242 CE and following his triumph over Romans, he captured Armenia, a province north of Azarbaijan. From that time, Armenia, because of its Parthian king's feud with the Sasanians and Armenians' conversion to Christianity, and because of the Romans' claims over that land, was one of the most important regions over which the Sasanians competed with the Romans, and therefore Azarbaijan turned into a political, military and religious stronghold for Sasanians. In early Sasanian sources, from an administrative point of view, Azarbaijan was regarded as part of Iran, while Aneran (non-Iran) consisted of the present Caucasus and Anatolia. During the Parthian and Sasanian periods, the northwest of Media was called Azarbaijan just up to the Aras river. In the early Sasanian era, this province was in the hands of a marzban who was appointed by the central government and probably resided in Ganzak, where there was the famous fire temple of Azargushnasp. Azarbaijan was regarded as a sacred land and its geographical place names, according to Avestan texts, probably existed from the early Sasanian period. All the sources and evidence indicate that after the Asorestan province, where the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon was situated, Azarbaijan was perhaps the most important province of Sasanian Iran, apparently even more so than Persis.
Children, Work and the Street: The Empowerment of Iran's Street Children
Eshrat Gholipour
Omid-e Mehr Foundation, Iran
The phenomenon of street children is an urban tragedy plaguing most modern cities, especially the metropolitan areas of developing countries. Any solution to this persistent problem needs to pay special attention to the local economic, social, and cultural conditions. In Iran, although there are no precise statistics and data, all indicators point to a deepening and widening of this problem. Dowran-e Emruz newspaper has put the number of street children living and working in the streets of Iran between 25,000 to 30,000. In the winter of 2000 it was announced that each month witnesses the death of around 100-150 of these children due to malnutrition, the cold, and physical abuse. This paper presents the planning and enactment of a programme to empower street children in the Darvazeh Ghar neighbourhood of Tehran where the majority of the street children live. The programme's long and short term goals are to provide access to shelter, health care and education, with close cooperation of social work agencies in order to help gain legal status for these homeless children. This paper presents and assess the work of the Anjoman-e Hemayat az Hoquq-e Kudakan (Society for the Protection of Children's Rights) which grew out of this programme and has gained national and international (UN) recognition for its work.
The Fall of the Majales-e Vokala-ye Tojjar (1884-85)
Gad Gilbar
University of Haifa, Israel
In July 1884 Naser al-Din Shah ratified the establishment of councils of representatives oftojjar (merchants) in the main commercial centres of Iran. Within three or four months the big merchants established their councils in eighteen towns in the country and at least in three major commercial centres outside Iran (Baghdad, Istanbul and Baku). Members of all councils were elected by the local tojjar. The councils were to supervise the commercial activity in the country, to encourage investments of local big merchants in new economic projects, and above all to limit the interference and involvement in their business of both the provincial authorities and the local religious leaders. The Shah approved the merchants' proposal that the councils would not be subject to the provincial governors. Furthermore, Naser al-Din gave clear directions that the governors should implement the councils' decisions. The establishment of the councils sparked fierce resistance from the very first phase of their work. The opponents came from two influential groups – provincial governors and prominent ulama. Finally, the Shah himself despaired of the chances that the tojjarwould be able to overcome the harsh resistance of provincial governors and leading ulama. In February or March 1885 he cancelled his orders that enabled the establishment of the councils. Thus, the initiative to have in Iran representative councils of merchants was finally buried. Documents found recently in the Russian, French, British, and Austrian archives shed new light on the fall of the majales. They enable us to have a better understanding of the conflict which developed between the big merchants and the ulama. The basic elements in this struggle reappears in major events that took place during the last decades of Qajar rule. The paper focuses on the developments that brought about the collapse of the councils. It discusses the roots of hostility between tojjar and ulama as it was manifested in Tabriz in winter 1884. It suggests that the relations between the two groups were more complicated and intricate than perceived so far.
Under the Skin of the City? Representations of Urban Space in the New Iranian Cinema
Christopher Gow
Warwick University, UK
A great many films of the New Iranian Cinema are set in and around the capital city of Tehran. Indeed in some instances the 'city' itself comes to play as important a role as the characters of these films themselves. Film studies as a discipline meanwhile, has witnessed a growing interest in cinematic representations of the city and 'urban space'. This paper therefore examines the different ways in which the 'city' (most notably, but not exclusively, Tehran) and 'urban space' in general have been represented in some recent Iranian films.
Sohravardi's Reading of the Shahnameh
Omid Hamedani
Ferdowsi University, Iran
Suhrawardi's hermeneutical approach to the elements, components and narratives of theShahnameh, as they are expressed in his mystical treatises, delineates the metamorphosis of the epico-mythic Weltanschauung into a mystico-gnostic worldview. We will best understand this metamorphosis by contrasting the hermeneutical principles of Suhrawardi with those of Ferdowsi in interpreting various myths and epic narratives. Ferdowsi's hermeneutics can be described as logocentric, a term which highlights the role of 'logos' in imposing a rational interpretation on the seemingly illogical and counterfactual aspects of myth and epic narrative. In contrast, Suhrawardi's hermeneutics are dominated by different ontological and epistemological principles that may be designated as radical hermeneutics, a theory of reading whose focal point is the Erlebnis of the reader which in turn moulds the intentio lectoris. The paper will scrutinize the way in which Suhrawardi interprets such epico-mythic elements in the Shahnameh as the mythic bird, Simorgh, the epico-mythic king, Kaykhusrow, and such epic and heroic figures as Zal, Rostam and Esfandiyar, as mystical symbols in the context of his gnostic and illuminationist worldview.
An Unknown Autobiography of the Twentieth Century by Mohammad Ali Mas'ud al-Molk
Zahra Hamedi
Islamic Azad University, Iran
Mohammad Ali Mas'ud al-Molk wrote his Ebrat al-nazerin between the years 1897-1921 in six volumes. Mas'ud al-Molk was a member of the prominent Shirazi family, the Qavams, and his autobiography is a critical observation of the life, politics and society of Shiraz and Fars province of his day. This paper concentrates on two points of Mas'ud al-Molk's work. The first is a description of the author's critical views of the ruling establishment of Shiraz and their relationship with the Qavam family alongside his assessment of the economic and social situation of Shiraz during the First World War. The second part of the paper concentrates on other primary material contemporaneous with Ebrat al-nazerin such as Tohfat al-nayyer and the British Foreign Office documents. In comparing the autobiography with these other primary sources, Mohammad Ali's critical thinking and his particular concern for the condition of the people of his time gave him a special understanding of his time and his society.
Diaspora Philanthropy - A Case of the Iranian Community
Noosheen Hashemi
HAND Foundation, USA
Philanthropy is the monetised expression of a community's commitment to its future. Inequality and an aging population are leading to the expansion of the non-profit sector worldwide. Years of accumulated wealth in the United States and Europe are about to change hands. This transfer between 1998 and 2052 has been estimated to be somewhere between $41 trillion and $136 trillion. America is the most philanthropic country in the world; its giving by individuals, foundations and corporations totalled nearly $250 billion in 2004, 75% of which came from individuals. The sheer size and potential impact of philanthropy is propelling it into a global force for change, on par with government, private sector, and media – complete with its own human capital, science, and systems. Higher immigration and advances in giving infrastructure are boosting diaspora philanthropy which is estimated at $100 billion from the United States alone – graduating from 'free money' to becoming a key actor in economic development. The estimated 7.6 million Filipinos living in 190 countries sent home $62 billion between 1990 and 2005, keeping an estimated one million people above the poverty line. In spite of diaspora philanthropy's noble objectives of 1) identifying with the homeland through financial and cultural support and 2) assimilating into the adopted land through investment in local causes, it is ineffective unless members mobilise and rally to common cause and engage in organised action. It is this organised action, driven by ties of co-responsibility, that differentiates a diaspora from an ethnic community. The educated and able Iranian immigrants, who are estimated to number three million, form a community considered nascent compared to major immigrant groups of the twentieth century. This paper provides a comparative analysis of philanthropic practices of the nascent group, with historical references, relative to best practices engaged in by established diaspora groups. It discusses leading-edge thinking in philanthropy, including innovative, strategic, and entrepreneurial approaches to solving 21st century social ills. It further examines the external forces, especially the lack of institutions, affecting Iranians' willingness to invest in their future and shape their destiny. There is an opportunity, and indeed a necessity, to employ philanthropy as a unifying tool to accomplish the highest aspirations of Iranian people worldwide
Suyurghal (Land Tenure) in the Safavid Period
Abolfazl Hassanabady
Astan-e Qods-e RazaviArchives, Iran
Although there are numerous academic studies of the political, economic, social and cultural legacy of the Safavids in Iran, there are many basic facts that have yet to be considered. Although the Safavid period is considered to have one of the richest sources of primary material for historical inquiry, most studies do not go beyond official decrees, documents from foreign companies, and various missionaries operating in Iran. Astan-e Qods-e Razavi,because of its importance as a religious and historical site and one that gained great prominence under the Safavids, was the recipient of great gifts and donations from the Safavid rulers. One of these gifts was the syurghal or land tenure which were donated to theAstan as a continuous source of income. There is a voluminous amount of sources on this issue, with nearly 60,000 documents in relation to the Safavid era between the years 1000-1148 AH (1592-1735)alone. This paper offers a preliminary analysis of the suyurghaldocuments and presents them as an important indication of the Iranian economic system and relations under Safavid rule.
Hagiographic Tendencies in the Tarikh-e Rashidi: Mirza Haydar Dughlat's Hagio-Historiographic Way of Writing History
Thomas Hayoz
Universitaet Bern, Switzerland
This paper is a contribution to the study of the development of Persian historiography and hagiography in Central Asia in the sixteenth century and their reciprocal relationship. It focuses on a well-known historiographic text that shows clear signs of hagiographic influence: Mirza Haydar Dughlat's Tarikh-e Rashidi (completed in 1546). Scholars like Florian Schwarz, Anke von Kuegelgen, and Bakhtiyar Babajanov have pointed out that, at least since the early sixteenth century, historiography and hagiography seem to have profoundly influenced each other in content as well as in form, in a way that the boundaries of literary genres blurred and new hybrid genres emerged. This trend was caused or at least favoured by the close relationship between worldly rulers and Sufi masters. In the same way as the spheres of governance and the mystic path were mixed, so were the respective discourses. As a case in point, Mirza Haydar Dughlat includes biographies and silsilas (i.e. chains of spiritual descent) of Sufi masters, and even mystic treatises, in his mainly political narrative. This paper analyses the relevant sections of this work and shows the author's hagio-historiographic way of writing history.
Aliabad of Shiraz: Transformation from Village to Suburb
Mary Elaine Hegland
Santa Clara University, USA
Over the last several decades, Aliabad, located not far from the outskirts of Shiraz, capital of the southwestern province of Fars in Iran, has been in the process of changing from a village to a suburb of Shiraz. In spite of economic, political, and religious interaction between people from Aliabad and the outside, some level of outside people coming to live in Aliabad and a few others moving away, and a few men who engaged in migrant labour in Shiraz or elsewhere, the village of Aliabad clearly formed a separate political, economic, and social unit up until some forty years ago. Since then, however, boundaries between Aliabad and the outside and especially between Aliabad and the nearby city of Shiraz have been eroding. Aliabad residents are experiencing the processes of modernisation and globalisation. Life styles, attitudes, and social relations and dynamics are becoming more similar to those of upper middle and middle class urbanites, who experienced similar changes several decades earlier. In examining the transformation from an agricultural, animal husbandry, and trading village to bedroom suburb and service centre, the study draws on anthropological field research conducted for 17 months during 1978/1979 and during summers of 2003, 2004, and 2005 in the village of Aliabad and surrounding areas including Shiraz. Living and conducting participant observation in Aliabad during these two periods allowed the author close comparison of conditions and dynamics a quarter of a century apart. With transportation, education, rising standards of living, exposure to outside influences and ideas, and interaction with people in Shiraz and elsewhere, Aliabad people's outlooks and lifestyles are becoming more similar to those of middle class urbanites, who had experienced modernisation in earlier decades. Differences between Aliabadis and Shirazis are disappearing. Part of the reason for these changes is the close proximity to Shiraz. Shiraz's edges are moving outward and have almost reached Aliabad. Aliabad is well along the way to becoming a bedroom community, a suburb of Shiraz.
From Iranian to World: Persian-Language Pop Crosses Over
Farzaneh Hemmasi
Columbia University, USA
A vibrant Iranian exile popular music industry has existed outside of Iran since the early 1980s, disseminating Persian-language pop to all corners of the Iranian diaspora and into Iran itself, where the music was prohibited after the revolution. However, this music has had an almost exclusively Persian-speaking audience, never truly 'crossing over' to Western listeners, as have some other non-Western pop musics emerging from the conditions of diaspora and exile, such as Algerian-French rai. A possible explanation is that Iranians of the diaspora are largely first-generation exiles for whom intra-ethnic communication and maintaining connections with Iran are more pressing concerns than creating music that speaks to their host countries. However, new musical developments by Iranian diaspora pop musicians indicate that this situation is changing. In the autumn of 2004, Swedish-Iranian pop artist Arash Labaf made history with the first Persian-language single 'Boro Boro', which held a position at the top of the Swedish pop charts for several weeks. This paper focuses on the musical influences and lyrical content of Arash's bhangra-inspired 'Boro Boro' and other songs as it investigates strategies and significance of this artist's attempts to expand his audience in the West. Through my analysis of these examples, I explore the possibility that Persian-language pop music's increasing integration into the Western mainstream may be indicative of a more general acceptance by Iranians living abroad of their disaporic conditions.
'Borrowed' Terminology and Techniques of the New Julfa Armenian Merchants: A Study in Cultural Transmission
Edmund Herzig
University of Oxford, UK
Seventeenth and eighteenth century Armenian commercial and financial documents provide a wealth of evidence for the commercial practice of the Julfa Armenian merchants. Both the language of the documents – a unique merchant dialect of Armenian – and comparison with the practice of other merchant communities of south and west Asia and the Mediterranean suggest a high degree of correspondence in the practice and terminology of merchants from culturally distinct communities. The Julfa Armenians, like many other such communities, jealously guarded their particular cultural identities and often maintained a high degree of social segregation, yet in their working lives they were ready to borrow and share norms and practices derived from alien cultures. Much of their commercial law, for instance, appears to have been based on Islamic sharia law, and much of their accounting and financial terminology is Indian in origin. The present paper sets out to explain this paradox. It argues that a functionalist approach offers one productive line of explanation, since both a tight-knit community to provide the pool of trustworthy associates and the cultural and social means to encourage adherence to a shared system of values, and cosmopolitan business practice to facilitate commercial relations with a wide range of international business partners from other communities, were essential for the effective operation of the Julfa merchants' trade. It argues also that an approach based on theories of cultural transmission, using the concepts of selectivity, channels of communication, receptivity, and reinforcement is particularly helpful in understanding why the Julfa merchants were in some respects so open to cultural transmission, and in others so closed.
The Child's World as Portrayed in Iranian Elementary Textbooks
Patricia J Higgins
State University of New York, Plattsburgh, USA
In this study, textbooks in use in Iranian elementary schools in 1970, 1986, and 2000 are compared to reveal many features of Iranian cultural knowledge that have remained the same over this thirty-year period. Previous analyses of Iranian textbooks, especially those that have compared, explicitly or implicitly, the textbooks of the Pahlavi and Islamic Republican eras, have focused on changes in the texts. Despite significant changes, however, much of the content of elementary textbooks was carried over though the transition between these two governments and through the first twenty years of the Islamic Republic. The commonalities in these textbooks demonstrate, in part, the power of cultural continuity, despite politically revolutionary change. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic (and more specialised subjects such as science, social studies, religion, and art), textbooks teach children behaviour appropriate to a variety of contexts and many of the values of the culture that produces them. Thus, texts can be read as lessons in behaviour and values that textbook authors and adopting groups either consciously want to convey to children or lessons that are so much a part of the culture that they go unquestioned even by adults whose expertise is education. In this paper, techniques borrowed from critical discourse analysis, an approach that has been applied to textbooks from the United
States, Canada, Japan, China, and other countries, are used to help identify underlying values and perspectives and the means by which child readers are encouraged to adopt them.
Contesting Iranian National Identity in the Era of Reform
Shabnam Holliday
University of Exeter, UK
The presentation aims to deconstruct contemporary Iranian national identity during the period of Khatami's presidency (1997-2005). The thesis argues that both the notions of nation and identity are constructed and contested, on both the state and non-state levels. The Khatami period has been chosen because it is characterised by extensive discussions on democracy, Iran's role in the world and region, and the role Islam has to play in society and government. Through my research I hope to illustrate that these factors can be better understood within a framework that examines these discussions and the current dynamics in terms of contesting articulations of national identity. Therefore, the thesis aims to deconstruct contemporary Iranian national identity by looking at the articulations of national identity in terms of discourses and counter-discourses. For example, the articulation of national identity among more conservative parts of the current Iranian government, symbolised by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered as a hegemonic discourse. Counter-discourses of national identity examined in the thesis are that of the reformists in the Iranian government, symbolised by former President Khatami, civil society in Tehran. The study seeks to determine how the notions of Islam, democracy, anti-imperialism (in terms of independence from the West) and Iran's cultural heritage dominate the discourses and counter-discourses, and whether it can be said that there is in fact a dominant, rather than hegemonic, discourse articulating national identity.
A Quiet March for Self-Realisation and Intellectual Survival: Finding a Voice through the Processes of University Art Education in a Society where Personal and Collective Futures Remain Uncertain
Mehri Honarbin-Holliday
Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
This paper draws on observations in the field, and the deconstruction of the structures in art education at Tehran and al-Zahra Universities to illuminate the sense of agency in the behaviour of the student body. Projecting data from Tehran, visual and ethnographic texts, the paper argues that far from being 'lost', 'over-affected' by Westernisation, and in pursuit of 'purely materialistic' goals, this young urban generation seeks to be critical, reflexive, and progressive. The data is a manifestation of their struggles and triumphs, common experiences, and thoughts in the post-revolutionary era, towards the fuller understanding of both self and society. Contrary to contentions from outside Iran, the student body are neither a-political, nor disinterested in socio-politics, but they search for peaceful means and expression through art in order to think clearly, and to structure lives. The above abstract is in the context of an investigation of the development of art education in the Islamic Republic, with the author as a participant artist.
Tehran: Where is the Core of the Capital City? From Historical Heritage to Current Social and Economic Dynamics
Bernard Hourcade
CNRS, France
The historical spatial development of Tehran is usually shown as starting from Dar al-Khalafeh-ye Tehran inside the walls of the late nineteenth century, and going later towards Shemiran in the north and to Rey in the south. In the late twentieth century, some housing units were built in the east and west. This evolution created the well-known dualistic capital city of the 70s, with a strong and busy central core from Bazaar to Abbas-Abad. This remains true. However, a detailed study of the social and economic activity of Tehran and suburbs in the last decade (Atlas of Tehran Metropolis, 2005), has shown new trends in the making of new central places in this metropolis. The places of reference are no longer the Bazaar or Ferdowsi square. The geographic model of Tehran is no longer the strong centrality of Paris or London but perhaps, the multicentrality of Los Angeles. This evolution, as a matter of fact, fits with the First Masterplan of Tehran (A Farmanfarmaian and V Gruen, 1968). Based on a detailed cartographic analysis of Tehran and its province at local scale, this paper shows the historical trends of the spatial evolution of Tehran, focus on the emerging new centres, and discuss the formal or implicit ideas or theories that can be found in planning the city of Tehran from the Qajars to the new Master plan of Tehran (2005).
Supplicatory Prayers, Prophetic Medicine, and Magic in Sixteenth and Seventeenth century Safavid Majmu'ehs
David M Hughes
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Taking the work of Geertz and other symbolic anthropologists as a guide, this paper explores the intersection of magic, religion and medicine in early-modern Iran. The modern scholarly discourse on 'high magic' in the Islamicate context has overshadowed the existence and importance of rituals, practices and beliefs of daily religiosity. By examining collections ofdo'as from several sixteenth and seventeenth century majmu'ehs, this study challenges some of the traditional categories of scholarship on Muslim thought and practice. The paper situates these supplications, both as thought and as practice, within their social and political contexts. The texts are seen as potential mirrors, reflecting a broad cultural symbology of the society in which they are produced. What is the function of a written supplication text? How are these texts to be viewed vis-a-vis the high magical and medicinal texts of the period? The paper rests on the belief that by examining the symbols within these supplicatory texts, we can gain a better understanding of the quotidian life of the non-elites. The study incorporates methodological insights gleaned from scholarship on other cultural contexts with the hopes of erasing the binaries that plague such conceptions as: prayer/spell, magic/religion, and thought/practice.
Seven Hundred Years of Critics: A Study of the Anthologised Naser Khosrow
Alice C Hunsberger
Hunter College, City Universioty of New York, USA
Beginning in his own lifetime, notices of Naser Khosrow (394-470/1004-1077)'s life and works have been included in the major Persian language source texts of history, religions, geography and poetry. Sometimes the entries criticise and sometimes they praise. Yet even when they contain apocryphal information, these secondary sources provide a valuable window on the reception of this very public intellectual over the centuries. Putting aside questions of biography, chronology and denomination, this paper looks specifically at the selections of Naser Khosrow's poetry that have been included in a number of anthologies or biographies of poets written over a seven hundred year span. My analysis thereby produces a portrait of this poet as he was viewed by the finest literary scholars. The anthologies to be studied include al-Baydawi's Nizam al-tawarikh (thirteenth century); Jami's Baharestan(fifteenth century); Amir Dowlatshahi's Tadhkirat al-sho'ara (fifteenth century); Lotf Ali Beg Adhar's Atashkadeh-ye adhar (eighteenth century); Reza Qoli Khan Hedayat's Majma' al-fusaha (nineteenth century) and some twentieth century works such as Zabihollah Safa'sTarikh-e adabiyyat dar Iran. Several apocryphal accounts are included, notably al-Baydawi's rendition of Naser Khosrow's meeting with the Sufi sheikh al-Kharaqani (d. 425/1034) and a poem in praise of Naser Khosrow falsely ascribed to Farid al-Din Attar (d. 617/1220). While the paper's analysis takes into account the narrative assessment by each anthologist, it focuses primarily on gauging the relative importance of the content of specific lines by comparing their frequency of citation, and thereby discover if literary judgment changed at all over the centuries.
An Enquiry into Cultural Consumption among Iranian Youth and the Implications of Globalisation
Aliakbar Jafari
University of Wolverhampton, UK
This study uses Iran, as a developing non-western country, for further research into consumer behaviour. In the context of appropriating Western cultural trends among Iranian youth, this research investigates whether/how 'cultural globalisation' has affected the identity of such consumers. The significance of this research lies in the fact that Iran has undergone major socio-cultural, economic and political changes since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Although the country's legislation has been implemented in such a way as to protect religious values against the influence of western culture, the consumption of Western cultural goods has recently accelerated among Iranian youth, who comprise nearly 70 percent of the country's 70-million population. Some social critics within the country see this practice as a 'corrupting influence' of 'decadent Western culture', or what they call 'cultural invasion'. Such attitudes may be interpreted as a reaction against cultural globalisation, which has affected Iran in the last decades. Consequently, Iran offers a unique context to examine the meaning and nature of consumption as a possible form of resistance for some, but rejection by others and its relationship to the individuals' concept of self and identity, with a particular focus on young consumers. Drawing upon cultural globalisation, as a theoretical position, the research has come up with some major themes emerging from the data collected so far. The study examines the manifestation of cultural globalisation in the Iranian context by looking at varying relationships between the consumption patterns of Iranian youth and their identity construction.
A Descriptive Study of the Ethno-linguistic Identity Re-Construction of Female Iranian Immigrants in Australia
Maryam Jamarani
University of Queensland, Australia
The cultural experience of Iranian women in Iran is different from that of the Iranian women in Western countries in many ways. In Iran various ethnic, cultural and religious limitations are imposed on women, while in Western countries those limitations are limited or removed. The limitations include clothing, social contact with the opposite sex, choice of job, and social mobility. Once out of their homeland and away from those restrictions, Iranian women might start to construct a new identity for themselves and in doing so the role of language as a bridge from a religious and patriarchal culture to a Western one is of great importance. The aim of this paper is to study the ethno-linguistic changes in the identity of Iranian female immigrants in Australia and to identify the core values in their culture, as expressed in their use of language, both Persian and English. The paper aims to shed light on an understudied aspect of the population under investigation. The population is first-generation female Iranian expatriates in Australia and the focus of the research is on their linguistic and socio-cultural identity. The study only includes participants in Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland). This study integrates two topics of research, namely, identity and acculturation within the field of applied linguistics. By looking at Iranian migrants' perceptions of their immigration to Australia and the difficulties of their adjusting to the new culture, the study explores and analyzes the socio-cultural and ethnic identity reconstruction of the group under study and the effect of this on their language use.
The Role of Non-governmental News Agencies in Developing Iranian Civil Society
Houshang Jeirani
Iran
When Iranian reformists took power in 1997, civil society and its issues became one of the main socio-political debates in Iranian society. In the reform period (1997-2005), non-governmental news agencies were very active in improving Iranian civil society. They transgressed and ignored ideologically-based policies of the government and entered into many forbidden areas (called red lines) by their critical news, interviews, reports, photos, etc., and made a crucial change in the country's media environment. In the mentioned period 15 non-governmental news agencies were established, which challenged the Iranian governmental Radio-TV and also IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency). In the most part of the mentioned period the non-governmental news agencies became the main source of news for national and international media, especially in the time of socio-political crises in Iran. The present research studies the role of non-governmental news agencies in developing Iranian civil society through analyzing their news, reports, interviews, etc., between 1997 and 2005 and their effects on opening the political arena of the country.
Yuka Kadoi
University of Edinburgh, UK
Iconographically, the legendary Iranian hero Rostam is easily identified by his clothing – a tiger-skin coat. Having stemmed from descriptions of his dress by Ferdowsi, this distinctive costume element became recognisable in the illustrations of the Shahnameh, intending to single him out. His striped coat remains an iconographic cliche in the Shahnameh. Yet its art-historical significance has not been fully investigated yet. The establishment of the design in Rostam's coat is indeed intriguing: his clothing was already highlighted by multiple dots in Sogdian examples found in Pendjikent (now in Tajikistan). By the early fourteenth century, judging by some surviving pictorial examples, it had taken a form of simple wavy lines, basing on actual observations of tiger or leopard spots. It became stylised and combined with other sartorial elements according to pictorial and decorative modes in Iran. But what is interesting is that it was gradually transformed into a curious composite of wavy motifs and Buddhist-inspired flaming jewels, a pattern which eventually came to be known as cintamaniin Ottoman art. It is also essential to look closely at the role of a tiger-skin coat in the development of Shahnameh iconography, particularly in association with legitimacy. This costume, which readily evokes a valiant image of Rostam, was in favour with rulers and patrons throughout the ages. Clearly, the dynamic transformation of Rostam's tiger-skin coat, whose visual journey ranges from pre-Islamic Transoxiana to Ottoman Turkey, is one of the good parameters of the evolution of iconography in the Iranian world.
Sa'di Studies: A Progress Report
Kourosh Kamali-Sarvestani
Fars Encyclopaedia, Iran
Mosleh al-Din Sa'di (1213-1292) is a watershed figure in classical Persian literature, both in terms of the variety of works he has written or composed and in terms of the chains of works inspired by his poetry and prose. From a literary historical perspective, too, one can divide the whole belletristic tradition in Persian as one preceding Sa'di and one that followed him. In spite of this unique significance, Sa'di studies have lagged behind those devoted to other major figures, either in world literature as exemplified by studies in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller or in terms of comparable figures in Persian literature, such as Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Hafez. This paper presents an overview of the history of a collective cultural effort begun about a century ago to collect and publish all useful information and knowledge on this epoch-making figure in the classical canon of Persian literature. This multi-generational scholarly effort can be said to have gone through at least four distinct stages, namely stages of initiation, compilation, editing and text preparation, and critical evaluation. The name given to the whole effort, Daneshnameh-ye Sa'di, has been chosen to give an impression, both of the overall direction of the effort and of its inclusive scope and reach. The historical perspective assumed in this project is also intended to serve a model for future efforts directed at other outstanding figures of Persian literature in general and specifically in bringing the efforts of modern literary historians, editors, and scholars and critics into a new level of coherence.
Stepping onto the Modern World - Thoughts on End of the Ta'zieh by Mahshid Amirshahi
Ramine Kamrane
Université de Paris 1, France
The 1970s and 1980s saw a proliferation of religious symbolism in contemporary Iranian literature. Of all of the works produced in this context, Mahshid Amrshahi's End of the Ta'ziehstands out as the only one (as far as I know) that does not use this religious symbolism in positive light. The basis of End of the Ta'zieh is the account of the events in Karbala, a narrative that enjoys the most impassioned and sacred position amongst religious Shiites. For those that make idealised and positive uses of this story, the events of Karbala are the most revered prototypical story whose narrative, by virtue of its sanctity, not only relay meaning and value to its specific characters, events and lessons, but gain new significance each time it is told. End of the Ta'zieh operates in the exact opposite of this value system. In this story, the recounting of the story of Karbala not only fails to revive the significance of the story or to show it in sacred light, it actually causes a devaluation of its worth and paradigmatic position. As such End of the Ta'zieh is a clear expression of the diminishing position of the sacred from history. The story of Taqi, the hero, is not merely the story of his breaking from the world of children and stepping into maturity, it a story of his passing from a world mixed with the magic of religion onto a world which has been robbed of that magic. The conclusion of End of the Ta'zieh is not merely the end of the passion play, it is equal to the end of its social value.
On the sources of al-Abniyah 'an haqa'iq al-adwiyah, the Oldest Persian Text on Pharmacology
Yunes Karamati
Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, Iran
There is not much known about Abu Mansur Movaffaq ibn Ali al-Heravi, the writer of al-Abniyah 'an haqa'iq al-adwiyah. Also, the writer only talks about 'Amir al-Mosaddad al-Mo'ayyed al-Mansur', to whom he has dedicated his book. Some historians have tried to figure out the real name of this amir, and in the light of that, find the exact date when al-Abniyah was written. However, none of these scholars has tried to do so with respect to the 'sources' based on which the book was edited. This paper intends to provide some pieces of evidence concerning the influence of Ibn Sina's Qanun on this book, as a probable source for Abu Mansur Heravi. It also proves that this book dates back to the mid fourth century AH, and probably the year 447.
Not Just Another Memoir: Poetry and Prose of the Iranian Diaspora
Persis M Karim
San Jose State University, USA
Since the late 1990s, writers of the Iranian diaspora have attained a certain following in both the United States and Europe. While the most obvious examples of this success are memoirs authored by women such as Tara Bahrampour's To See and See Again, Azar Nafisi's best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran, Firoozeh Dumas's Funny in Farsi, and Azadeh Moaveni'sLipstick Jihad, and Marjane Sartrapi's graphic memoir, Persepolis, the emerging fiction and poetry of this community has received far less attention. Because memoirs play against a pre-conceived notion about Iranian women's silence and lack of agency and proclaim certain 'Iranian' truths, they also work to create an image of Iran in the US imagination that can limit the scope of literary expression. This paper investigates the emerging fiction and poetry of writers of the North American Iranian diaspora (men and women who write in English) whose work is rooted, not in the experience of looking back at childhood or early adulthood experiences in Iran, but rather in the experience of growing up in the West while being informed by Iranian culture, language, and politics. This literature of the diaspora has a complexity of language and sentiments that articulates a kind of neither-nor sensibility (neither Iranian nor American); it is also suggestive of the ways that writers are using fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to forge a public identity for the Iranian-American experience. Often however, these texts are read like memoirs, in that they are representative of the whole culture and as such, are often not appreciated for their literariness. In poets/writers such as Susan Atefat-Peckham, Farnoosh Seifoddini, Tara Fatemi, Reza Abdoh, Marsha Mehran and Layla Dowlatshahi, we see a new generation of diaspora writers whose writing is characterised by a different experience of situatedness between Iran and America and whose impulse is not on telling their own journey or biography, but is attentive to the culture and politics of 'betweenness'. This paper introduces some of these writers and the themes that characterise the literature of the Iranian diaspora.
Prevalent Sciences among the Iranian Nizaris Through the Fall of Alamut (1256 CE/654 AH)
Mohammad Karimi-Zanjani-Asl
The Centre of the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, Iran
Drawing on an unpublished manuscript and select books, this paper sets out to identify sciences prevalent among the Iranian Nizaris through the fall of Alamut in 1256 CE (654 AH). This is done through critical examination of two categories of documents: 1) the unpublished manuscript of Dastur al-monajjemin, which is currently housed at the Paris National Library. Paul Casanova and Mohammad Ghazvini regard this text as one of the most preeminent works that have survived the destruction of Alamut; 2) Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's writings from 1226 to 1256 CE (624-654 AH) while he stayed at the Ismaili fortresses. In light of his trustworthy and accurate recording of sources, including the names of authors, the unknown author of Dastur al-monajjemin provides an invaluable account of books and treatises held at the Alamut library as well as sciences practised by the Iranian Nizaris during the imamate of Hasan Sabbah. The latter includes the whole array of sciences from literature, history andhadith to mathematics and astronomy. The Nizaris' dedication to these sciences after the death of Hasan Sabbah is manifest in Nasir al-Din al-Tusi who, like the unknown author ofDastur al-monajjemin, was committed to recording myriad sources and authors used for his research. Having included the dates of compilation for his writings, al-Tusi helps us differentiate between two classes of his research – i.e., those carried out during his residence at the Ismailite fortresses and those undertaken after the Ismailites sustained their major defeat. This paper demonstrates the continuity of scientific tradition in Dastur al-monajjeminand al-Tusi's writings. Further, in light of the pedagogic character of al-Tusi's writings, it shows how and why the aspirations of the Iranian Nizaris were oriented to promoting sciences, rather than merely destroying their enemies.
Initial Conditions, Industrialisation Policies and Economic Growth - A Comparison of Iran and South Korea during the 1960s
Massoud Karshenas
SOAS, University of London, UK
During the 1960s there were remarkable similarities in terms of various economic indicators between Iran and South Korea. In the early 1960s the two countries had similar population and per capita income levels. The degree of openness as measured by the ratio of exports and imports to GDP in the two countries was also on average close (with Iran having an edge over South Korea in this respect). In terms of growth indicators Iran in fact outperformed South Korea throughout the 1960s decade, with much higher savings and investment rates and a more spectacular growth performance along with a higher degree of price stability. Since the mid-1970s, however, the growth path between the two countries appears to have diverged sharply. Korean growth accelerated and surpassed Iran's over the subsequent three decades. Admittedly, war and political turmoil in post-revolutionary period have played an important role in economic performance in Iran since the 1970s. However, it is the contention of this paper that even allowing for the impact of political upheavals, there remains a qualitative difference in the nature of economic growth between the two countries even during normal times - e.g., 1960-73, and the more recent post-war period in Iran – with important implications for the sustainability of growth in the two cases. What policy lessons can Iran learn from the experience of Korea? A comparison between the two countries during the 1960s growth episode can provide some of the key elements for answering this question. To answer this question one needs to go beyond the quantitative indicators mentioned above. The differences in initial conditions, resource endowments, and institutional set ups, set limit to, and condition the outcome of economic policies. Similar policies and development strategies can produce different results in different contexts. The paper highlights the importance of context specificity in designing policies and strategies for sustainable growth. It also discusses the implications for the sustainability of the current phase of economics growth in Iran.
Homa Katouzian
University of Oxford, UK
No classical Persian poet was a greater and more passionate lover than Sa'di. One may even make the higher claim that he was the greatest lover, certainly the greatest lyricist of human love, in classical Persian poetry. Yet the impact of Bustan and Golestan has been so great that they have overshadowed the work of Sa'di as a poet of love-songs. Not only have these love songs been translated seldom into Western languages compared with those two books and especially Golestan, but even in Iran Sa'di's ghazals have never been appreciated as much as they deserve, except in vocal singing in traditional Persian music. This paper seeks to situation Sa'di alongside Hafez and Rumi as one of the three greatest Persian ghazalwriters of all time.
Chinese Iranica in the Late and Post-Mongol Period
Ralph Kauz
Institut fuer Iranistik der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Austria
This paper aims to illustrate the cultural impact of Persian and Iranian culture on China after the end of the Mongol dynasty. The study seeks to provide a comprehensive history of the Persian language in China until the end of Ming dynasty in 1644. Persian was the lingua franca of the Silk Road at least from the Mongol period onward. Even after this trans-Asian link ceased to exist, Persia kept its status in some areas of the route. However the question still remains: what happened in China where Persian became one of the official languages during the Mongol Yuan period (1271-1368) and spread throughout the whole empire? Moreover, although intercourse with Central and West Asia perished by no means after the breakdown of Mongol rule, how is it that Persian became the prime language of Chinese Muslims by the end of the nineteenth century? This study looks at the enduring linguistic and cultural influence of Persian in China after the Mongol period where the Mongols' numerous institutions such as schools for Persian interpreters, the compilation of Persian-Iranian glossaries and the translation of Persian texts were sustained well into the succeeding centuries.
Contemporary or Specific: The Dichotomous Desires in the Art of Early 21st Century Iran
Hamid Keshmirshekan
University of Oxford, UK
The cultural history of Iran has shown an uneasy tension between traditional – which is often labelled as native, national, Islamic – on the one hand and on the other the modern – which is seen as imported, Western and secular. This tension showed an increase mainly after the 1979 revolution, when Iranian avant-garde artists – as well as intellectuals in other fields – were caught between two poles of authenticism and modernism. This paper discusses the existing, and perhaps conflicting, ideas in visual art activities in Iran, while examining recent artistic events, productions and exhibitions mainly in the early 21st century. It is not the task of this paper, however, fully to examine all the variety of artistic genres within the country, but to examine the dominant dichotomy in cultural and artistic thought with which Iranian artists are confronted. These are the idea of 'contemporaneity', or being imbued with the 'spirit of the time', dominating particularly the younger generation of artists' minds; and at the same time 'specificity', relating to the issue of cultural and national identity which is still an underlying precept of compelling force. The first involves the idea that the 'post-modernist' imagery is of fragmentation and hybridisation – the scattering of traditions and the recombination of their diverse elements. The second refers to the ever-present obsession of cultural concern (and frequently social concern) with which Iranian artists are engaged within the country. The question is, however, how to construct an art discourse that uses contemporary concepts as articulation of indigenous tastes or broader metaphysical positions considered as culturally 'ours.' Hence the paper seeks to examine the several factors which have contributed to formation of those mentioned ideas in Iranian art. It aims at examining the parallel movements in mainly the socio-political and cultural arenas and also the effects of globalisation and transnational cultural and social links in this period.
The Ancient Notions of Resurrection and the Saviour in Contemporary Persian Poetry
Shervin Khamseh
Islamic Azad University, Tehran
Many religions share the notion of a saviour and final resurrection that will signal the end of human misery and injustice. This paper seeks to study this messianic thought in several religions and to analyze its influence on the poetry of Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Forugh Farrokhzad, and Sohrab Sepehri. Nima, for example, saw the appearance of the Saviour with much anticipation, certainty and delight. Shamlu was not clearly devoid of this mind-frame, although his uses of such imagery are more ambivalent and shifting. The despair and loss of hope in the poetry of Akhavan-Sales and Farrokhzad cast a shadow on their notions of the messianic mind-frame. At times, Forugh openly reveals her doubt at the appearance of the messianic figure as is evident in her poem Didar dar shab('Nightly Visit'). In the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri, the notion is alluded to through the poet's use of ancient Zoroastrian character, Sushians, in his poem Mosafer ('The Traveller').
Struggles over Defining the Moral City: Political Islam and Urban Public Life in Post-revolutionary Iran
Azam Khatam
Iranian Sociological Association, Iran
An essential feature of urban life under the Islamic Republic has been the conflict between the state's attempt to Islamicise public space and the individual bodies within those spaces, and the citizens' attempts to claim spaces of autonomy and/or regulate their own public self-presentation. This paper argues that the struggle over defining the moral city and shaping urban public space has undergone three distinct phases. The first phase, from 1978 to the 1980s, was shaped by the powerful mobilising capacity of political Islamic principles. It was defined by notions of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, and was little resisted. Urban spaces were given to displays of politicised religious morality, streets were named after martyrs, alleyways were marked by shrines, sermons and prayers blazed from mosques, and any display of inappropriate public conduct was policed with severity. In the second phase (1985-97), amr-e beh ma'ruf was codified and became a strictly authoritarian project, just as urban life veered toward a renewed consumerism, and the populist appeal of political Islamism began to loose its mobilising appeal. Moral policing of urban public space became institutionalised, as various coercive organisations were created to enforce Islamist rules and control public life in streets, parks, and places of leisure. At this juncture two polarised and differing interpretations of the Islamic state's responsibility for creating an ethical society were formulated. One approach stressed individual responsibility for ethical public conduct. The second approach, a return to the hesbat tradition giving absolute power to religious authority to confront moral threats to the political order, stressed the responsibility of the religious leader, and by extension the Islamic state, to confront ethical laxity and 'cultural invasions'. However, in the third phase (after 1996) these two ethical approaches to public moral control have been undermined by shifting demographic and social contexts. The emergence of the post-revolutionary youth generation as social actors whose constant presence in urban public space undermines state coercive capacities, and continuously reshapes urban life, has radically altered the dimensions of the struggle over defining the moral city. How urban space has been affected and shaped by these historical trends after the revolution of 1979 is the primary focus of this paper.
The Factor of Islamic Republic of Iran in the Context of the US Middle Eastern Policy in 1979-1989
Frik Aziz Khatami-Tirgordi
Yerevan State University, Armenia
The socio-political developments and Cold War conditions in the Middle East in 1970-80s have changed the geopolitical situation and the equilibrium of powers in the region. This contributed to the shifting of some aspects of US Middle Eastern policy. These events forced US Presidents Carter and Reagan to rethink Middle Eastern policy. Iran's new Islamic regime made fundamental changes in Iran's foreign policy. This paper introduces post-revolutionary Iran's place and its role in US regional policy. In outward appearance it seems that after the revolution US-Iranian relations entered a new stage of antagonism and mutual hostility. But the investigation shows that in 1980s there were some factors where the interests of the two countries corresponded to each other, in which case Iran and the United States were acting together. It is true, after the revolution Iran and the United States stopped being allies but this did not prevent them for collaborating with each other secretly when necessary. The main and pivotal issues which are discussed in this paper are 1) Carter's and Reagan's efforts to fill the Iranian gap in the Middle East after the Revolution; 2) the factor of US-Iranian mutual interests in the White House Middle Eastern Policy in the 1980s; and 3) the factor of antagonism between Iran and the United States in regards to regional policy.
Science and Mithal: Geometrical Demonstrations in Early Arabic and Persian Sciences
Elaheh Kheirandish
Harvard University, USA
This paper addresses the relationship between 'scientific knowledge' and 'scientific craft' in the Islamic Middle Ages, and discusses the historical meanings and distinctions in Arabic and Persian scientific works, between mathematical 'illustrations', 'constructions', and 'demonstrations' on one hand, and physical 'operations', 'productions', and 'combinations' on the other hand. The focus is on two subdivisions of geometry: optics, a subdivision of plane geometry, and mechanics, a subdivision of solid geometry, where the Arabic term mithal is used as geometrical 'examples' and 'models' respectively. Drawing from a range of textual and material sources as early as the third/ninth and fourth/tenthcenturies, the presentation traces the transmission and transformation of the expressions, conceptions and manipulations involved in scientific explanation, application, and experimentation in the context of both Islamic and European developments.
A Multitude of Voices - Public and Private Politics as Articulated in the Iranian Blogosphere
Gholam Khiabany
London Metropolitan University, UK
Annabelle Sreberny
SOAS, University of London, UK
This paper explores the varied definitions of what constitutes 'the political' in the Iranian blogosphere and explores some of the political debates within the blogosphere through a study of selected blogger voices. Despite, or because of, the difficult conditions under which political communication functions inside Iran and notwithstanding a tough information policy environment, Iranian blogging, celebrating its fifth anniversary, is a vibrant public sphere of articulations of various kinds of 'political' issues. While far from more 'traditional' modes of political communication such as the press and organised parties, it would be wrong to dismiss the blogosphere as merely transient, 'personal' and expressive. Indeed, its space of diverse individual and collective articulations of the political addresses old and new concerns to new audiences at home and abroad and may well extend the sphere of the political in ways unimaginable to both religious and secular political elites.
Contested Memories and Competing Narratives of the Islamic Revolution in Cyberspace
Shahram Kholdi
University of Manchester, UK
Remembering the 1979 revolution and the Islamic Republic's early years has become yet another level of contestation amongst Iran's major competing factions. The Islamic Republic's major rival factions, this paper argues, have recently begun to promote their political message as corresponding to the proclaimed values and aspirations of the young Islamic Republic. They compete over how their prominent figures and their role in founding and defending the Islamic Republic are remembered. At the same time, they contest the other factions' narrative, and discount or challenge the way their role in the Islamic Republic's founding years is remembered.
Since 1997, we have been witnessing the emergence of new memoirs, written and published by the revolution's veterans, such as the former President Rafsanjani, Sheikh Sadeq Khalkhali, and Ayatollah Montazeri. This process has taken a different turn, especially since the months leading up to President Ahmadinejad's election. The new form is 'transcribed interviews/speeches' by distinguished revolutionary veterans, many of whom are hardliner or reformist figures, such as Habibollah Askar Owladi, Mohsen Reza'i, Behzad Nabavi, and Sa'id Hajjarian. The method that both reformist and hardliner factions use to spread these 'oral histories' adds to the significance of their message: their favourite medium is the Internet. Any such interview/speech is always published on more than one reformist or hardliner website. It is often accompanied by critical commentary contesting or confirming the claims of the narrator. This paper's objectives are hence to identify the emergence of 'a virtual oral history' of the early years of the Islamic Republic of Iran by its very protagonists and to explain and characterise how such narratives contextualise the present differences between rival factions in a historicised manner. Identifying the root causes of the present differences in events that date back to the early years of the Islamic Republic of Iran and/or the advent of the Islamic Revolution, the paper discusses how contested memories tend to shape and reshape ongoing factional differences.
The Empress and I: Haute Couture and Iranian Crafts
Keyvan Khosrovani
France
The emancipation of Iranian women was a positive by-product of the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Under Mohammad Reza Shah, Iranian women were symbolically and literally represented by his own wives: Iran's three queens, Queen Fawzia, Queen Soraya and Empress Farah. The last and perhaps the most influential of royal wives, Farah Diba, played a significant role in promoting Iranian traditions and culture. Her decision to choose traditional Iranian textiles and handmade crafts for her official wardrobe had ramifications beyond superficial fashion. The net result was not only a collection of unique gowns and outfits which she wore well but more importantly it was an inspired validation of an ancient Persian handicraft tradition. It revitalised an almost forgotten art form into a national 'Fine Craft'. It was in 1966 that I was charged with the mission to design the Empress's clothes and start the handicraft project. From that date until the fall of the Pahlavi regime in 1979 the empress wore to all official ceremonies costumes that could be defined as 'Iranian Haute Couture'. I continued working with Empress Farah until 1979, not only designing a collection of garments for her using Persian textiles and embroideries, but occasionally for other members of her family, including the Shah and their children. In this endeavour, a team of creative artists were involved including Mohammad Noragi for Batik silk, Monireh Jahanbani for Baluchistan hand-stitching, Ostad Tariqi for Zari (brocade), and Pari Zolfaqari, who was exceptionally talented in executing the final product. For more than thirteen years I was privileged to be the conductor and leader of this gifted and brilliant team of artists. I brought to the task my design sensibility as an architect and designer and my own travels through the country. We journeyed throughout far-flung provinces in search of crafts and found those who still practised the tradition of their ancestors, and found ways to promote their art by incorporating it into new designs. Our team succeeded in creating la haute couture d'Iran a collection worthy of an Empress and able to proudly hold its own in face of the great European houses of haute couture. Brief as the movement was, it brought visibility and a national sense of pride, not just for the royal entourage but also for a much larger sector of society and even internationally. We aimed to keep and respect Persian tradition, innovating in a manner that respected continuity to create a 'national' Iranian art form that was simultaneously ancient and modern. The question now is whether it has had a lasting legacy or not.
Is the Bearded Man Drowning? Picturing the Figurative in a Late Fifteenth-Century Painting from Afghanistan
Chad Kia
Columbia University, USA
In the study of Persian miniature painting and its development through the fifteenth century, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of the illustrations in the Mantiq al-Tayrmanuscript at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This manuscript of the allegorical work by the twelfth-century mystical poet Attar contains three paintings that are among the earliest specimens of the new style of Persian painting ushered in by Behzad and other artists at the court of Sultan Hosein Bayqara in Herat. While these three paintings bear all the traits of the new style, they also are unusual in containing figures and events that are apparently unrelated to the text they depict. Over the years, these enigmatic paintings have enticed art historians' curiosity and generated a number of largely inconclusive interpretations. This paper thoroughly analyses the ambiguous foreground of one of these well-known paintings, 'The Bearded Man Drowning,' and specify the nexus between Attar's metaphoric language and the painter's supposed cryptic depictions. The lower half of 'The Bearded Man Drowning' shows figures engaged in various actions and a series of conspicuously obscure details that betray no literal connection to the text they accompany. Through a close reading of Attar's text, the paper shows that the figures and actions depicted in the lower half of the painting are in fact pictorial wordplays analogous, but not identical, to the rhetorical devices commonly used in Persian mystical poetry. The paper also shows how, using what Attar's text has to recommend to a Sufi initiate, the artist has depicted images that signify specific practices of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, which enjoyed a great influence at the court of the last Timurid prince. This approach opens an array of possibilities for further study in the relationship between the visual and verbal imagery of later Persian painting.
Paradoxes of Circulation and Hybridity: Joseph Emin's Cultural Idioms of Self and Nation
Mana Kia
Harvard University, USA
This paper will examine how the circulation of cultural idioms constitutes notions of self and home in The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, the memoir of an Armenian published in 1792 in London.
Emin was born in the midst of the eighteenth century upheavals of Iran, including the devastation of the Armenian center of New Julfa in 1747 under Nadir Shah. He and his family moved from Hamadan to Baghdad, Basra, Gilan, Surat, and finally Calcutta. Fleeing from having to follow in his father's mercantile footsteps, Emin traveled to England where he spent the next few years working menial jobs, learning English, and making the acquaintance of such eminent British personages as William Pitt and Edmund Burke. He developed aspirations of Armenian national independence and traveled to the Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire to realize his dream. His aspirations were ultimately disappointed, and he was forced to flee to New Julfa and then to Calcutta, where he wrote his English-language memoir.
An often conflicted cultural hybridity, engendered by his circulatory migration, characterizes Emin's idioms of self and nationhood. In order to 'translate' his life, Emin employs Orientalist images and references familiar to an English-speaking audience. But Emin's Orientalism is hybridized and conflicted by his familiarity and partial affiliations with the peoples he is representing. Emin simultaneously subverts and submits to Orientalism's dualism by representing Armenia as irrevocably Eastern, yet with a potential to realize European national virtues. In contradistinction to the self-serving, helpless merchant, Emin narrates himself as the realization of Armenian potential, describing a pious, brave masculinity essential for the maturation of Armenian nationhood. This masculinity resonates strongly with Iranian concepts of the noble and selfless javanmard (chivalrous brave). Although Emin seeks to highlight the cultural difference between Armenia and the East, this severing is only partial, destabilizing the binary of east and west upon which Orientalism depends.
Loans in Qajar Tehran - A Study on Bay'-e Shart
Nobuaki Kondo
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan
Although usury is prohibited by Islamic law, there have actually been some means to lend money with interest. Bay'-e shart, a sale with stipulation, was one of such means. This social practice prevailed in Qajar Iran, and people would go to sharia courts to arrange the contracts and draw up the documents. In this paper, I analyse some bay'-e shart documents from Qajar Tehran and try to clarify the social background of the practice. The system ofbay'-e shart was rather complicated. As its name shows, it is categorised into a kind of sale in Islamic law. In this case, the seller takes on the role of a borrower, and the buyer takes on that of a lender, the merchandise, then, becomes the mortgage, and the price of the merchandise equals to the loan. Shart here means the stipulation which gives the seller/borrower an option to cancel the contract after a certain period. At the same time, the seller/borrower leases the merchandise from the buyer/lender, and gives him a rent, which actually means the interest. Through this system people were able to lend money with interest, without breaking the prohibition of rebh. We cannot find any professional bankers or merchants who took part in the transactions in the documents. On the other hand, we find some courtiers, builders, and women. The usual rate of the interest was 15-30%. Some transactions caused conflicts among the sellers/borrowers, the buyers/lenders and the shareowner of the mortgage. These conflicts, as well as some doubt on legality of the transaction, brought problems to the Qajar state. However, the state could not prohibit the transaction; that is because the transaction was indispensable for the economic flow at that time.
Historical Morphology Groupwise - The Development of Western Iranian Nominal Systems
Agnes Korn
Johann Wolfang Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt, Germany
The contemporary Western Iranian languages display nominal systems of widely differing kinds: when one disregards vocatives, there is, for instance, a one-case system with ezafe in New Persian, a two-case system plus ezafe and grammatical gender in Zazaki and Kurdish, a three-case system in Gilaki and a four-case system in Baluchi. Among these, only the derivation of the New Persian system from attested Middle Iranian and the origin of the oblique plural (general plural in New Persian) ending -an is immediately obvious. Moreover, as the distribution does not go together with isoglosses in historical phonology, the development of the nominal systems cannot be accounted for by a family tree model. This paper argues for an explanation of the Western Iranian nominal systems in terms of language contact and linguistic area. The ezafe in Kurdish and Zazaki corresponds to the Persian one in function, but not in form. Unlike the Kurd and Zazaki ezafe, NP -i has Middle Iranian predecessors, so the structure may have been copied from Persian, its form being developed further in Kurdish and Zazaki to match the two-case system with gender distinction. The elements used here may derive from demonstrative pronouns. The Baluchi four-case system can be shown to be based on an earlier three-case system which is identical to the Gilaki system both in form and function. Its starting point may be seen in the system of earlier Parthian, the oblique singular (-y in pre-Manichaean Parthian) being reduced to genitive function and a new element added to get a neo-oblique (ending -a, which is placed after the indefinite article). The shared innovations in the Gilaki-Baluchi system strongly argue for a joint development in a time when the two languages were spoken next to each other.
New 'Old' Materials about Ali Qapu Fresco Paintings
Irina Koshoridze
Georgia National Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia
Marina Friedmann
Georgia National Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia
The copies of Ali Qapu fresco paintings kept in the Oriental Department of the Georgian National Museum have attracted attention for several reasons. The copies were made in 1932-33 by Matilda Mgebrishvili when she lived in Iran. These are life-size copies made as a result of her visits to the palace. It is historically documented that the Ali Qapu palace was richly painted, but unfortunately figurative images have been almost entirely damaged. The conservation and preservation of the frescos were performed in 1970s by the Italian Oriental Institute and it incorporated a great number of famous and still active scholars. It became possible to reveal only some small fragments of figurative paintings that provide evidence that such scenes were painted in the main hall adjoining the balcony and in the upper storey, the so called music room. 28 copies kept in the Oriental Department of the Georgian National Museum have some similarities with the other copies of Ali Qapu paintings made by another artist, Sarkis Katchadurian, in 1931-32. Some scenes copied by these two artists are identical and unique as the original fresco paintings have been lost. The copies kept in the Oriental Department somehow replenish Sarkis Katchadurian's paintings and make it possible partially to restore the decorative programme of the Ali Qapu palace. The subject of the copied material as well as the style of paintings make us think that these copies must have been made from the so-called music room that was the Shah's private leisure recess. Therefore the paintings represent leisure time and love scenes, and the style of painting is very close to Reza Abbasi's paintings. The most popular attributes of European attire merge with the traditional Iranian milieu peculiar to this period.
Afghanistan and the Opium World Market – Poppy Production and Trade
Hermann Kreutzmann
Institut fuer Geographische Wissenschaften, Germany
Afghan poppy cultivation is presented here as a case in point to exemplify the linkages between external influences and local effects. World market and power relations have influenced cultivation patterns, processing and trafficking. At the same time poppy cultivation pinpoints an internal development which is strongly linked to deteriorating state control, warlordism, and regional power politics. Opium production has served as a major source of revenue for the upholding of disparate political structures which reflect the present political map of Afghanistan. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased substantially during the last 25 years from merely 200 tonnes of annual production to 4200 tonnes in 2004, with farmers making use of former development efforts in creating irrigated oases in Helmand and Nangarhar, substantially increasing their incomes after the Taliban's ban on production, making it a cash crop with no competition. Fairly new production zones have been added in recent times, e.g. Badakhshan – the stronghold of the Northern Alliance – has gained third position with major increases in the last few years. Afghanistan's poppy cultivation and opium production has to be interpreted in terms of globalisation and fragmentation. Drug trafficking affects the neighbouring states of Iran, Tajikistan, and Pakistan as they function as consumer markets, and at the same time trade routes for contraband drugs moving towards the west. Consequently the Afghan poppy cultivation is interpreted in a holistic manner in this paper.
Old Iranian Poetics - The Distribution of Similes in Avestan
Maria Kritikou
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Poetic language and form in both Indo-European and Indo-Iranian are a much discussed subject, with considerable work published in the recent decades (Watkins 1995, Elizarenkova 1995, numerous works of Schlerath, Schmidt, Schwartz etc.). Nevertheless, the technical aspects of poetic figures, and in particular the simile, have scarcely been dealt with. Thus, the focus of my research in this paper is the distribution of similes in the Avesta. First, it is remarkable that the Old Avestan texts entirely lack similes, even though these are the main poetic figure in the Rig Veda and their preeminence carries on to Classical Sanskrit literature, too. This absence of similes in the Gathas is especially surprising because the Indic and Iranian poetic traditions are so closely related otherwise, in terms of style and diction. Old Persian also lacks similes, though their absence in this corpus is less surprising than their absence in the Gathas. However, in Younger Avestan there do appear similes. This paper collects the similes in Younger Avestan, discuss their structure and evaluate them both in their own context and in the context of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European poetic language.
Social Science and the Iranian Revolution
Charles Kurzman
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
One measure of the 'greatness' of a revolution is its ability to attract academic attention over the generations. Though it is only a quarter-century old, the Iranian Revolution may prove, by this criterion, to be 'great'. Despite a language barrier and evidentiary difficulties that limit Western scholarship, the Iranian Revolution has already, in less than one generation, offered social-scientific observers at least half a dozen faces. The paper seeks to examine several social-scientific explanations of the causes of the revolution and to summarise the evidence confirming and disconfirming each of them. The presentation hypothesises that ongoing geopolitical conflicts will keep the Iranian Revolution fascinating for new generations of social scientists, and that evolving social-scientific trends and the emergence of new historical evidence about Iran will continue to generate novel explanations for the revolution in the future.
(Still) Exporting The Iranian Revolution: Senegalese Converts to Shiite Islam
Mara A Leichtman
Michigan State University, USA
Incorporating West African cases into discussions about Shiism and global Islam highlights social, political, and cultural change in relation to migration, ethnicity, proselytising and Muslim networking. Whereas the Lebanese Shiite community has been present in Senegal as early as the 1880s, a small Senegalese minority began to convert to Shiite Islam only recently as a result of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Iran has a history of economic cooperation with Senegal from the time of the Shah, but Senegalese President Abdou Diouf closed the Iranian embassy in 1984 for its encouragement of Islamic propaganda. The embassy reopened in the early 1990s, and was careful to stress only economic activities in Senegal. Nevertheless, the role of the embassy and non-governmental Iranian institutions in spreading knowledge of Shiite Islam through sending books to Senegal, bringing Senegalese to Iran, or building a hawza in Dakar, cannot be ignored. Leaders of the Senegalese Shiite movement are drawn to the religion for many reasons - political, spiritual, philosophical, financial, or because Shiite scholars convincingly answer their questions about Islam. They spread the word in Wolof or other local languages through teaching, conferences, holiday celebrations and media publicity. While influenced by the maraje' of Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, Senegalese Shiites emphasise that their Shiism is Senegalese. Indeed, through keeping their feet in both Sunni and Shiite worlds, Senegalese Shiites hope to find their place in Senegal's politics of religion. This paper explores the location of Shiite Islam in national and international religious networks, and the making of an indigenous Shiite Islam in Senegal.
The Influence of Nizari Quhistani on Hafez
Leonard Lewisohn
University of Exeter, UK
Hakim Nizari Quhistani (645/1247–721/1321) was one of the most eminent Persian poets of the Mongol period. His Persian Divan, recently published in an excellent critical edition in Tehran, is totally steeped in the symbolism, imagery and metaphysics of celebrated Sufi poets who were his contemporaries, as well as highly influenced by Ismaili doctrine and esoteric philosophy. Nizari's influence on Hafez's Divan was first pointed out by Jami in hisBaharestan who observed that 'the literary style of Hafez's poetry is close to that of Nizari Quhistani, although in Nizari's poetry there is much unevenness of quality to be found, contrary to that of Hafez' (Ala Afsahzad, Muhammad Jan Umraf and Abu Bakr Dhuhur al-Din ed. Baharestan va rasa'el-e Jami, 2000, p. 148). This influence is also highlighted by Mazahir Musaffa, who presents some twenty-six pages of parallel verses exemplifying the deep influence of Nizari's verse on Hafez in his introduction to Divan-e Hakim Nizari Quhistani, ed. Ali Reza Mojtahedzadeh (1992, pp. 347-73). Many if not most of the parallels cited by Musaffa, however, are of a loosely conceptual nature rather than concerned with metrics or imagery. In this talk I compare some of the key theosophical topoi, theological themes and Sufi ideas in Hafez and Nizari's ghazals in order to assess the precise breadth and depth of the influence of the Ismaili poet's religious views on Hafez.
The Poet and the Courtesan: Eros and Poetics in Mohtasham Kashani's Noql-e 'Oshshaq
Paul Losensky
Indiana University in Bloomington, USA
Since the time of E. G. Browne, literary historians have painted a bleak picture of the state of the poetic art during the long reign of Shah Tahmasp. Under the influence of this stern and pietistic ruler, so the story goes, poets were forced to harness their talents to serve the emerging Shiite state ideology. This image of poets chafing under the reins of a sectarian fanaticism, however, does scant justice to the range and variety of literary expression during the period. The middle of the sixteenth century witnessed striking innovations in poetic language, genre, and thematics, and the rise of the new dynasty seems to have inspired a wave of literary experimentation. Perhaps no poet exemplifies the complex and dynamic spirit of the age better than Mohtasham of Kashan. He is, of course, best known today for his stanzaic poem on the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbala. Such poems, however, make up but a tiny fraction of his vast oeuvre. Far more substantial are two works of a very different tenor, Noql-e oshshaq (1558-59) and Resaleh-ye Jalaliyeh (1572). These proto-novels combine prose and poetry to tell the story of the poet-narrator's stormy affairs with, respectively, an upper-class courtesan and a footman of the royal court. Written in a highly crafted prose abounding in the metaphorical language of deference, innuendo, and politesse, the earlier of these works, Noql-e oshshaq (A Lovers' Confection), purports to give an autobiographical account of Mohtasham's adventures in the sophisticated, urban demimonde of Safavid Persia, where poetry served as the preferred means of courtship and negotiation. To introduce Noql-e oshshaq to a broader audience, this paper gives an account of its genesis, a summary of its plot, and a close reading of two short passages. Literary, historical, and comparative approaches are also outlined for the future study of this engaging depiction of erotic and cultural life in early modern Iran.
Contextualising the Tarjameh-ye Tafsir-e Tabari and the Tarjameh-ye al-Sawad al-A'zam in Fourth/Tenth Century Transoxiana
Mark David Luce
University of Chicago, USA
The Samanids during the fourth/tenth century made a major effort to bring Islam to the Turks and indigenous populations. The advent of the ethnically Persian Samanid dynasty introduced for the first time an element of self-rule which strove to improve general conditions for the population and to win the local and surrounding non-Muslim populations to Islam. While Islam had been introduced to the area for over 200 years, it had manifested itself in a variety of different forms and at times led to revolts, insurrections, purges and civil war. The efforts to bring Islam to the eastern frontier finally triumphed. However, Islam itself evolved and mutated into a number of permutations, which the Samanids considered to be politically threatening. Their propagation of Islam also required that written guidelines for orthodoxy should be established. A contextualisation of both the Tarjameh-ye tafsir-e Tabariand the Tarjameh-ye al-sawad al-a'zam will help us better understand this process. It is most significant that both of these two early prose works were both translated into Persian. This paper endeavours to present a picture of the religious milieu of fourth/tenthcentury Khorasan/Transoxiana, clear up past misunderstandings of the true nature of the Tarjameh-ye tafsir-e Tabari, and examine 'orthodox' Islam as presented by the Tarjameh-ye al-sawad al-a'zam.
Concepts of Kingship and Royal Power in Middle Iranian Anthroponomastics and Toponymy
Pavel B Lurje
Institut fuer Iranistik der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Austria
The present paper examines occurrences and role of royal and high official titles (of Iranian, Turkic, Chinese etc. provenance) in the Sogdian onomastics, especially in toponymy. The high variety of titles in the texts preserved suggests the absence of a unified monarchy in Sogdiana, and a federation of city-states; this fact is well known on the basis of other sources of information, as well. The correspondence of some Sogdian lexemes related to royal power to Ossetic words (and the evidently borrowed character of the former ones) witnesses the Iranian nomadic (Scythian, Massagetan, Dahan) stratum in the development of royal institution(s) in Sogdiana. Several place-names from Sogdiana and neighbouring areas display a pattern: 'royal title/name of ruler' + 'town, settlement'. Consequently, the underlying towns were built or rebuilt by corresponding authorities. Such place-names are most common in the Tashkent area (Chach) and in Semirechye, which are areas of Sogdian colonisation and not mainland, thus displaying important aspects of urbanisation among the colonists and their relation to surrounding nomads.
Modernisation in the Age of Tradition: Urban Transformation in Iran
Ali Madanipour
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Drawing on evidence from urban planning and development, this paper offers an analysis of the Iranian revolution as a stage in the country's troubled process of modernisation. This may appear strange to those who are used to seeing Iran as the archetypal traditionalist country engaged in turning the tide of history backwards. However, by distinguishing cultural symbolism from political and economic practices, by tracing patterns of institutional and physical continuity and change, by considering the revolution as a heterogeneous social movement rather than a homogeneous phenomenon, and by comparing Iran with other countries, a different picture emerges. Ever since its humiliating encounters with the expanding West two centuries ago, irrevocable changes have occurred in the life of Iranians, resulting in tensions between tradition and modernity; tensions that have characterised Iran so far, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. The urban elites that represent these tendencies have often confronted each other, but have also united in at least two major revolutions. They continue to share the same set of problems: how to resist and embrace change at the same time; in other words, how to maintain a confident sense of identity while addressing the need for physical and institutional change. While their approaches towards identity have been different (nationalism versus religion), their responses to change have been similar on many issues: embracing a utopian ideal achievable only through a radical break from the past, which is a hallmark of modernisation. This is often imposed from above on many areas of everyday social life, particularly visible in attitudes towards urban development and transformation, which is characterised by a primarily modernist vision.
Georgian Nobility and their Role in Safavid Court Politics
Hirotake Maeda
Hokkaido University, Japan
Modern scholarship is not always in agreement on the role of the Georgian subjects at the Safavid court. While Georgian historians try to emphasise that the mission and main purpose of these Georgians was to be of assistance in the fight of Georgia for its freedom and independence, other scholars paint a different picture altogether. Namely one in which the Georgians at the Safavid court are represented as members of a slave-military elite, who are very accepting of the authority of their Safavid overlords. The drawback of both these point of view is that it presupposes a very simplistic set of relationships between the individuals involved. It also needs to be pointed out that historians working on these aspects of Safavid history have perhaps relied too much on the writings of Western observers such as John Chardin or Father Krusinski, whose accounts also present a highly simplified version of Safavid court culture. In the presentation the author discusses several recent findings and stresses that the political struggles at the court might be easier explained if one takes into account a variety of ethnic, local, and religious issues. The paper furthermore illustrates the complex webs of marriage alliances with in the court, which makes it evident that some of the events reported by Father Krusinski, and repeated thereafter by many later historians, are unlikely to have a factual basis.
Verbal Negation in the Bakhtiari Dialect
Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari
Tehran University and Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, Iran
Bakhtiari is a dialect of Lori, an Iranian language spoken by nearly 4,280,000 people in southwestern Iran. It should be noted that Bakhtiari is not a dialect of Kurdish in spite of sharing a number of lexical and phonological features with that language, and along with Luri, Feyli, Leki (Laki, Alaki), and Kelhuri, constitute the family of Lori dialects. Linguists have identified two classes of Lori dialects: Lor-e Bozorg, which is spoken by the Bakhtiari, Kuhgiluyeh, and Mamassani tribes; and Lor-e Kuchak, which is spoken by the Lors of Lorestan. This paper deals with the negation patterns in the Bakhtiari dialect, from a typological point of view, provided by Payne (1985), and Kahrel (1994). The data used for the study have been collected from the speech of the settled Bakhtiari people in Kalkale and Miyan Rudan villages, rural districts of Dorud, in Lorestan province.
The Progressive Role of Armenian Women in Twentieth Century Iran
Elham Malekzadeh
Islamic Azad University, Shahr-e-Rey & al-Zahra University, Iran
In the twentieth century, Armenian women of Iran have benefited from a more open environment and have had access to more progressive notions of women's participation in public than their Muslim counterparts. Living in the Caucusus/Armenian–inspired community who embraced Westernisation more readily and earlier than the Muslim mainstream, Armenian women formed an important part of the political, social, and cultural drive for greater social and legal freedom for Iranian women. This paper looks at the legacy of this activism through the study of the various organisations and institutions of the Armenian women of Tehran. In many cases, Armenian women were the first to establish non-profit and relief organisations such as The Armenian Women's Organisation of Tehran, Armenian Benevolent Organisation (Women), and Armenian Women's Organisation (Haigin). The study is based on the written and pictorial materials from the archives as well as interviews with the leadership of these organisations.
Political Economy of the Teachers' Movement in Iran
Mohammad Maljoo
Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran
Unprecedented since the 1979 revolution, a series of demonstrations by thousands of teachers engulfed Tehran and other cities of Iran in the January 2001. The next significant wave of teacher protests began in March 2003, during which many teachers went on strike in several cities, including Tehran. The last significant wave of teacher protests has been based on collective petitions to different levels of the authorities since 2004. These three different waves of teacher protests have had the same content: an attempt at improving their working conditions and salaries through different modes of collective action. This paper provides both theoretical and empirical framework for analysing the political economy of teachers' economic demands in Iran during recent years, narrating the teacher movement in the above-mentioned three waves, according to which it seems that teacher protests have substantially declined since 2001. Such declining trajectory raises an important question: what are the consequences of the decrease in teacher protests in the political arena for teachers' activities in the economic arena? The hypothesis may be summarised as follows: teachers' job dissatisfaction generates the pressure of economic demands among them, which will be channelled into either individual economic action in their everyday economic life or the collective act of communicating their grievances to the authorities in the political scene; the more pressure escapes through individual actions in everyday economic life, the less is available to foment the collective action in the political scene, and vice versa. Considering a decreasing trend of teacher protests in the 2001-2004 period, an increasing trend of economic responses to job dissatisfaction on the part of teachers is expected to have appeared on the employment area. Therefore, in spite of strong dissatisfaction with their jobs, a majority of teachers are resorting to individual and unorganised economic responses rather than collective and organised political responses, a characteristic which has formed teachers' responses to job dissatisfaction into non-movement rather than classical movement, with disastrous but unobtrusive macroeconomic consequences.
Epistemologies of Place: Urban Memory in a 17th Century Local History of Yazd'
Derek J Mancini-Lander
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
This paper serves as part of a larger project that explores knowledge transmission among communities of learning in the Early Modern Persianate world. The present inquiry aims to ground this investigation in an understanding of the urban environment in which these exchanges of ideas occurred, and thus considers how members of such circles of learning conceptualized the spaces in which they exchanged ideas. The very notion of 'city' existed as an imagined reality in the mentalities of those who participated in the complex systems of spaces and institutions that embodied the life of the city as a whole. A true understanding of how ideas flowed within various urban structures is predicated upon an understanding of the particular ways in which urban populations of any given region conceived of the complex urban phenomenon. One must explore their particularly urban epistemologies of place.Using the example of the Muhammad Mofid Bafqi's Jami'-i Mofidi, a local history of Yazd, I begin to map the epistemic topography of one such urban landscape in the seventeenth century Safavi context. Mofid first presents his city's history chronologically, but then departs from this rendering of historical events and retells the city's stories through taxonomically arranged categories of descriptions of its districts, monuments, and personages. Thus, he defines his understanding of 'city' through its history, but pivoted around anecdotes about various classifications of spaces and people who occupy them. The city, for Mofid exists largely through the physical monuments and endowments left by their benefactors, the memory of their history, and the "benefits" this past legacy transmits to the present city. Mofid is particularly interested in the contemporary religiosity of Yazdis, and consequently, in the remembrance of the spiritually charged origins of the spaces in which religious rituals and learning occur. This paper will focus specifically on his treatment of these spaces and the relationship between contemporary realities and the memory of their evolution.
The Philosophical Fundamentals of Belief in the Mystical Poetry of Donne and Rumi
Manijeh Mannani
University of Alberta, Canada
The central focus of this paper is a comparative study of the Persian Sufi poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi (1212-1273) and the English metaphysical poet, John Donne (1572-1631). The study analyses the two schools of thought to which these poets belong as well as their individual worldviews to elucidate the different dimensions of the shared philosophy governing their poetry. This is, in itself, a metaphysical endeavour, namely, to use Dr Johnson's phrase facetiously, 'yoking together' two literary monarchs who appear to be culturally, chronologically, and geographically so distant. The task of comparing the religious poetry of Rumi and Donne is primarily a typological one. After presenting a thorough definition of 'mysticism', the paper illustrates that despite some differences seen in addressing the 'Divine' in the works of the two poets, the two Islamic and Christian mystical systems -- to which the two poets belong -- have much in common. Mysticism, Islamic or otherwise, is generally believed to have originated from the West in the influence it received from Plato and Platonic writings. Also, in voicing the shortcomings of reason in achieving union with the 'Beloved' and in going against mainstream religious thoughts, Rumi and Donne have much in common. The emphasis commonly laid upon logic in gaining proximity to God characterises the religious expressions of the predecessors of both Rumi and Donne. Next, the paper highlights some of the main differences between the two poets, including the distinction that exists between naturalistic pantheism and mystical/philosophical pantheism. The portrayal of the clash between older and new science in Donne's poetry is yet another factor in distinguishing the works of the two poets. This close and comparative study of the two poets highlight the basic principles that underlie the metaphysical poems of Rumi and Donne. In a yet more general sense, the paper sheds more light on the bonds between the two disciplines of religion/mysticism and literature and would thus examine not only the interdependent issues in the two disciplines but also the invisible and yet highly astonishing closeness that exists in the representative works of the two literary and religious traditions.
The Alid Naqib of Rey of the Saljuq Era and his Support of Scientists
Seyyed Mohammad Hossein Manzoorolajdad
Tarbiat-e Modarres University, Iran
The Shiite support of scientists dates back to the tenth century (fourth century AH) when dar al-'elmswere widely established throughout Iran and Iraq. This support is reflected in various books and treatises compiled in the names of, and dedicated to the Shiite rulers and noblemen of the tenth and eleventh centuries (fourth and fifth centuries AH, respectively). Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani and Ibn Sina are two renowned scientists who enjoyed favourable support of the Buyid rulers and wrote books in their names. In addition to the Shiite rulers, the Shiite noblemen of the same period played a prime role in advocating advancement of science and exaltation of the scientists. This paper aims to examine the life and times of one such nobleman, Abu al-Hasan Mutahhar ibn Abulghasim Ali (d. 1098 CE / 492 AH) who is better known as Morteza Zo'lfakhrayn and who served as the Alid naqib of Ray in the late 11th century. Shahmardan ibn Abi al-Khayr Razi and Ali ibn Ahmad Nasavi, two prominent mathematicians and astronomers of this era, paid homage to him and dedicated three of their scientific books to him. Focusing on the life of this Shiite naqib, I examine the key role of influential Shiite individuals in promoting and propagating rational sciences during the Saljuq era. I also try to shed light on the complex relationship between the Shiite religious beliefs and political objectives on the one hand, and certain Shiite individuals' support of the scientists on the other.
Imagining Hafez - Rabindranath Tagore in Iran, 1932
Afshin Marashi
California State University, Sacramento, USA
This paper examines one important aspect of the Iranian state's cultural policy during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1926-1941). It will focus specifically on state-sponsored commemorations and public ceremonies that collectively worked to construct a new Iranian national memory during this period. The empirical focus of the paper will be on the growing prominence of poetry and poets in the Pahlavi state's official culture. In particular the bulk of the paper will analyse the much-publicised visit to Iran, in 1932, by the Indian artist, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. The visit to Iran by Tagore was, as the paper argues, tied to the Iranian state's interest in constructing an Indo-Iranian cultural identity as the basis of a modern Iranian national consciousness. By analysing primary source material connected to the visit, including Tagore's own written account of the event, the Ministry of Culture's official pronouncements on Tagore's visit, newspaper accounts of the public ceremonies associated with the visit, and memoirs of organisers of the event, the paper argues that Tagore's presence in Iran was intended to portray to the public a visual and cultural reminder of a living tradition of Iranian 'authenticity' that had remained dormant, yet vital, in the Indian subcontinent and which was now being revived by the Iranian state. The emphasis on the revival of Indo-Iranian cultural connections was part of the larger cultural policy of the state to disassociate Iranian identity from its Islamic past and revive pre-Islamic historical memory. In this sense the paper I argue that Tagore was represented to the public as a living and contemporary embodiment of a particularly Iranian national identity -- tied to a specifically Iranian historical consciousness and to a distinctly Iranian spiritual style -- first actualised by the classical tradition of Iranian poets and now embodied by Tagore.
A Mid-Thirteenth Century Aghaz va Anjam Work
Roxanne D Marcotte
University of Queensland, Australia
Asir al-Din al-Abhari (d. 663/1264) wrote the Aghaz va Anjam (Genesis and Return). This eschatological work raises a number of interesting questions related to its redaction. Written at the request of 'dear friends', Abhari presents in this work 'succinct' views on mabda' andma'ad. The text ends, however, with the following statement: 'the summary (mokhtasar) which Imam Asir al-Din al-Abhari composed is finished' (mm, 174.3). Is the Anjam va Aghazan original work of Abhari, or did Abhari himself write a summary based on an earlier, or earlier works on mabda' and ma'ad, perhaps even one of his own works? Did Abhari write an original work, or is it merely a summary of an earlier philosophical text, perhaps a Persian summary of an Arabic original work on mabda' and ma'ad? Avicenna (d. 428/1037) wrote an Arabic Mabda' va Ma'ad, but a quick examination of the table of contents of Avicenna's work reveals that it is probably not the source of Abhari's Aghaz va Anjam. What might then be the origin or sources of Abhari's work? This paper focuses on Abhari's Anjam va Aghaz(Sabzavari edition) and tries to provide some answers to these questions. The structure and the content of the work are analysed and compared with other Persian and Arabic philosophical texts on mabda' and ma'ad, mostly from the Avicennan tradition. Avicenna did write other works that included sections on mabda' and ma'ad, as did a number of his disciples who imitated him. One difficulty, however, is the fact that Abhari was both a theologian and philosopher, making it possible for his Anjam va Aghaz to be influenced by theological considerations. One of Abhari's contemporary, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 672/1274) also wrote an Aghaz va Anjam (Amoli edition), which may share elements with the Avicennan tradition.
Architecture and Americanism - Iran in the 1970s
Mina Marefat
United States Library of Congress, USA
In 1976 Iran hosted the first international women in architecture conference. Famous and not so-famous women architects from around the world were invited to a Caspian resort, greeted by the Empress Farah and pampered at the grand Hotel Ramsar. The topics were global and the audience was as select as the panellists and discussants. While it made international news, the local community was oblivious. Was this simply another example of the pomp and ceremony of the Pahlavi regime? Or was Iran in the 1970s the natural locale for such an event? My paper will attempt to address the simpler question of why such an event would occur in Iran and what role if any did Iran play in the international architectural scene? During the last years of the decade, a Who's Who in architecture passed through Mehrabad airport or travelled the road between Tehran and Isfahan— I. M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Moshe Safdie, Robert Venturi, Jacqueline Robertson, and others. The Shah of Iran was determined to modernise the country and oil finally made it possible. Oil became indispensable worldwide and Iran became the new architectural hub as authorities converged to offer well paid advice. Western-educated Iranian architects became instant partners of the world's most renowned architectural firms. Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Perkins and Will, Llewelyn, Davis and expert planners from Harvard University set up shop in Tehran. Entire cities were planned. A new government township called the Shahestan-e Pahlavi, was designed to centralise the multitude of government offices in Tehran. The largest urban park in the world— Pardisan was conceived as an ecological microcosm of the world, designed by an Iranian-American collaborative with landscape architect, Ian McHarg. Then, the 1979 revolution brought an abrupt end to the foreign presence in Iran and the Shah's grand projects remained unrealised. Built and unbuilt projects of the 1970s in Iran have yet to receive any attention in ongoing historical or political debates. Using selected case studies, this paper will attempt to extrapolate the result of the intense exchange that took place in the architectural stage that was Iran of the 1970s.
Hidden Bodies: The Problem of Accounting for Secular Muslims in Modern Religious Studies
Richard C Martin
Emory University, USA
This paper challenges the general trend in Religious Studies and Islamic Studies to ignore and even condemn Muslims who have secular identities, by choice or by default. The main argument is that scholarly writing on Islamic religion has been blind to the significance of what I shall define as the secular dimension of Islamic thought and society. The tendency has been to write about the orthodox traditions of Sunni, Shiite and Sufi Islam. This essentialist thrust has failed to account for secular Muslims who continue to embrace aspects of their heritage, but who are often overlooked as social and intellectual actors in modern Islamic societies. In this regard, the project offers a critique of modern scholarship on religion that has too narrowly defined its subject matter. In recent decades, the relationship of secular modernism to religion has become a global culture war whose combatants include theologians, historians of religion, social scientists, politicians, and journalists, among others. The debate has been particularly acute among Muslims, some of whom, as in other traditions, see secularism as the antithesis of religion, and often strongly associated with Westernisation, and others who see secularism as the most rational basis in the modern nation-state for religious communities to coexist. This project is not about secularism as such, however, but rather it calls for an analysis and critique of the debate about secularism in the mosque and the academy. At the same time, it reflects the global aggressiveness of religious identity, especially since 1990, and thus it invites comparative analyses as well. Ultimately, the project calls for history of religions scholarship to write Muslims with secular identities back into Islamic intellectual and cultural history.
Murder in Bushehr in 1844: the Case of Bibi Assilu
Vanessa Martin
Royal Holloway, UK
This paper will examine the case of an honour killing in 1844 of Bibi Assilu, who was the widow of the Persian writer of the British Residency, in front of her son, still a child. The case was taken up by Hennell, British resident in the Persian Gulf, because of her connection to the Residency, and thus had implications for the possible derogation of British prestige. The paper looks first at the circumstances of the murder, giving an account of the event and of those who either witnessed it or were involved in it. The discussion will then move to the position of the perspectives of some of those involved, considering that of Hennell, and asking why he took action in this case. The paper will also consider the position of the slaves who witnessed the murder, and the implications of their position under the sharia. Finally, the paper will address its main issue, the correspondence between Hennell and Sheikh Hasan Al-e 'Usfur, the qadi of Bushehr, and the rights and punishments due to the individuals concerned under the law. In essence, the paper uses the case to study the effects of proposed legal change in a society not yet prepared for it in social, cultural or institutional terms, and the personal price that can thereby be paid for it. It thereby assesses the way law, and social and cultural values, reflect each other and depend on each other for the resolution of disputes. It finally touches on the significance of the actual absence of penal institutions.
Feminist Historiography of the Early Twentieth Century of Iran
Fatemeh Masjedi
Illinois State University, USA
Studying the recent feminist historiography of early twentieth century, one is faced with a shortage of primary sources about women as well as a lack of theoretical sources on how to compose a diverse (in terms of class, region, ethnicity and religion) feminist historiography of Iran. A shortage of information related to women's historical sources obliged feminist historians to collect what little information was available in primary sources mostly about women's general achievements. The problem one often finds in reading feminist historians is that they tend to obscure women's private lives in the early twentieth century and generalise their diverse experiences. This paper utilises contract marriages which have not been taken into account in feminist historiography, to examine women's experiences in their private lives and their relationship with men based on socio-economic conditions through the surviving marriage contracts of the early twentieth century. These contracts have mostly survived from the legal court system of the constitutional era in the Tehran region and are an excellent source for examining women's issues that were taken to court. Temporary marriages, daily expenditure or nafaqeh and being forced into prostitution were some of the charges against husbands for which women of the time filed suit in a court of law. The other sources used are marriage and divorce procedures in the early twentieth century which were practised according to Islamic law.
Early Modern English Awareness of Sectarian Identities in Islam
Hafez Abid Masood
International Islamic University, Pakistan
The recent past has witnessed a phenomenal rise in studies on Anglo-Islamic relations during the early modern period. The field has gone a long way since the publication of Samuel C. Chew's The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (1937). The publication of Nabil Matar's Islam in Britain 1558-1685 (1998) and Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (1999) is a new landmark in the history of the subject. Similarly, Daniel Vitkus' Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean(2003), Matthew Dimmock's New Turkes' Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (2005) and Jonathan Burton's Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama(September 2005) further illustrate the interest of scholars in the subject. One thing that becomes apparent at a cursory look is that most of the recent scholarship has been working on Anglo-Ottoman relations. The area of Anglo-Persian relations seems to have received little attention by the scholars except a few doctoral dissertations and journal articles. The purpose of the present paper is to explore the impact of Anglo-Persian relations on Early Modern English understanding of Islam. The paper argues that one of the most significant aspects of this understanding was the deepening of English knowledge about the sectarian division of Islam into Sunni and Shiite factions. This awareness was all the more important as it fell into a time when Europe itself was experiencing sectarian divide into Protestant and Catholic groups. The knowledge of Muslim sectarian division must have provided solace to so many in Europe who had anxieties about the state of Christian religion. The distribution of Shiite and Sunni along national lines -- Persia and Turkey, respectively -- might have fired the imagination of the likes of Earl of Essex who intended to exploit this religious division by using Persians against the Turks, going against the policy of Queen Elizabeth to have good relations with the Ottomans. Using plays like The Travels of Three English Brothers (1607),The Sophy (1642), Mirza: A Tragedy (1655), travel narratives of English visitors to Persia and other relevant material, this paper attempts to show to what extant the early modern English people knew the differences between the Shiites and Sunnis, the Turks and the Persians. It further shows how the awareness of this difference affected the English foreign policy towards the Muslim nations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Iranian Cities from Local to Macro System: A Study on Transformation of Iranian Cities during Modernisation
Reza Masoudi-Nejad
University College London, UK
This study is concerned with the transformation of Iranian cities during the Iranian modernisation in the 1930s. The study explains this transformation considering spatial structure, urban social structure and social life in Iranian cities, based on spatial analyses and an investigation of changes in the social life. The spatial analyses, based on space syntax, will compare spatial configuration of traditional Iranian cities with some traditional European cities, as well as comparing spatial configuration of Iranian cities before and after the modern transformation. On a social level, this study is based on interviews with people who remember the urban society and life in the city of Dezful to appraise various aspects of urban life before and after the modern transformation. Moreover the Ashura ceremony, as one of the significant parts of social life, will be socially/spatially compared before and after the modern transformation in Dezful. The comparative spatial configuration analyses show that local spatial system in Iranian traditional cities is stronger than European cases; however they are weaker on the macro level. In other words, the local spatial structure has a more significant role in urban structure than macro or overall urban structure. Moreover, the analyses show that the significance of local structure is replaced by macro structure, which is based on the formation of new streets after the modern transformation. Investigating in social level shows that, urban society was based on mahalleh or quarter, and city quarters were divided into Heydari and Nemati quarters. In other words, urban society was based on local systems, therefore urban society as an integrated social system was difficult to detect. The local-based society is transformed into a macro social system, and social division, based on Heydari and Nemati, vanished after modernisation. The transformation of urban society has had a direct effect on social life and religious ritual likeAshura ceremonies. For instance comparing Ashura ceremonies before and after modernisation shows that it was a local ritual in term of events and its routes within the cities in traditional period; however the ritual events and routes were changed within cities that show an integrated urban social life after modernisation. Consequently, the statement of this study is: the significance of local urban system, in both social and spatial aspect, was replaced by macro system after the modern transformation.
A Theoretical Reappraisal of Pre-Capitalist Iran
Kamran Matin
University of Sussex, UK
Precapitalist Iran has traditionally been theorised in terms of the classical concepts of Asian mode of production and Feudalism, neither of which has proved to be adequate. This paper proposes an alternative theorisation of precapitalist Iran that is informed by Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development. I show that precapitalist Iran cannot be adequately understood through an 'internalist' historical schema theory of geopolitically hermetic successive modes of production; rather, it can be better understood within the context of an internationally augmented Historical Materialism which posits the ontological co-constitution of 'external' and 'internal'. The aims of this paper are, therefore, threefold: to critically re-asses the extant approaches to precapitalist Iran; to theoretically and substantively valorise the historical materialist approach to non-Western precapitalist societies; to evaluate the ramifications of this alternative theorisation for understanding the specific trajectory of capitalist development in Iran.
Marxism and Nationalism as Modern Iran's Myths of Popular Mobilisation
Afshin Matin-asgari
California State University, Los Angeles, USA
From the Constitutional revolution through the Pahlavi monarchy to the Islamic Republic, nationalism has remained the core mythos of the modern Iranian nation-state. Conforming to global patterns, and with little critical self-awareness, modern historiography has been the fountainhead of nationalist mythology. Since the 1980s, however, more critical academic studies have developed two main theoretical approaches to Iranian nationalism: A postmodern school draws on Benedict Anderson and Michel Foucault to analyse nationalist discourses as 'technologies of power', involved with the construction of novel cultural and gender identities and boundaries (Kashani-Sabet, 1999; Najmabadi, 2005; Rejal, 1994; Tavakoli-Targhi, 2001; Vaziri, 1993). A second approach is the Marxian tradition (structural, Gramscian and subaltern) that views nationalism as a hegemonic ideology, articulated primarily within the state and binding various subaltern classes and strata to dominant ones (Abrahamian, 1983; Afary, 1996; Parsa, 1989; Foran, 1994; Vali, 1993). After a brief comparison of the above scholarly trends, this paper will focus on Marxism as modern Iran's alternate ideology of political mobilisation, second in mythic appeal only to nationalism. Using samples of historiography, journalism, fiction, and memoirs, it will demonstrate how four generations of Marxists produced historical narratives that challenged nationalist mythologies empowering existing political regimes. Still, Marxism and nationalism had an ambiguous relationship marked by significant overlaps as well as conflict. The anti-imperialist and populist discourses of Iranian nationalists and Islamists were heavily indebted to Marxism. Less studied is the phenomenon of most Marxists identifying utopian images of socialism with existing nation-state, i.e. the Soviet Union, China, or Cuba.
Christians in Safavid Iran: Hospitality and Harassment
Rudolph Matthee
University of Delaware, USA
This paper subjects the treatment of Christians in Safavid Iran to a fresh examination. Using modern Western standards as a yardstick, historians have typically addressed the place and role of Christianity in Iran -- represented by indigenous Christians, Armenians and Georgians, and by resident missionaries and visiting travellers and merchants -- to rank the various Safavid rulers in terms of the degree to which they accorded tolerance to 'minorities'. The result has been a schematic portrayal of progressive 'decline', represented by a slide from the 'tolerant' Shah Abbas I to increasing repression of Christians (and other 'minorities') under later rulers, as religious officials gained in prominence and came to set the agenda of the state. Focusing on the seventeenth century, my presentation revisits the issue within the context of the internal dynamics of the Safavid state and society, and against the backdrop of 1) the cultural ambience of the Safavids as heirs to a Central Asian Turko-Mongol legacy, and Iran's proximity to and close interaction with ancient Christian lands such as Armenia and Georgia; 2) the foreign policy objectives of Iran's rulers, especially with regard to their struggle against the Ottomans. Persian court chronicles, European missionary accounts, and Western travelogues will serve to complicate the picture of degeneration from 'tolerance' to 'intolerance' and to substantiate the argument that 3) Christians generally enjoined not just the tolerance typically accorded to dhimmisbut also the fruits of the traditional Iranian respect for freedom of consciousness. 4) Various Safavid rulers and many intellectuals, including religious scholars, showed a genuine interest in Christian doctrine and philosophy. 5) Fiscal rather than simply religious motives often determined the treatment of non-Muslim groups within the population, and the unmistakable deterioration in the position of 'minorities', including Christians, must be attributed more to the worsening of Iran's economic conditions than to an increase in religious bigotry.
In the Search of Ram Shahrestan - The Capital of Sistan during the Sasanian Period
Reza Mehrafarin
Sistan and Baluchistan University, Iran
During the Sasanian era, it was the custom for the most important Iranian provinces to be governed under the supervision of the king's son or someone who was close to the imperial family. Sakestan Province, having an important position in this period, was controlled by the crown prince and thus his title became Sakanshah. One of the major outcomes of this standing presence of the Sasanian princes in Sistan was relatively heavy urbanisation in the region. The oldest city of Sistan which was mentioned by Muslim historians and geographers is Ram Shahrestan or Abar Shahr, the capital of Sistan during the Sasanian period. Authors such as Jayhani, Ibn-e Hughal and Estakhri have all written descriptions of this city. According to geographers the city was abandoned because of a disconnection with its adjacent river and was then removed to another place under the name of Zarang at the end of the Sasanian era. However, identifying the actual location of Ram Shahrestan is difficult because of contradictions in geographical writings and because of the existence of manifold foothills in the Sistan plain. In this research, I have tried to specify the real location of Ram Shahrestan according to historical analysis and systematic archaeological surveys. By studying the available evidence, Ram Shahrestan's first establishment and final abandonment have been identified. On the basis of these, today's Tappa Shahrestan, 25 km southeast of Zabol, is the actual location of Ram Shahrestan which was occupied from the third century BCE up to the end of sixth century CE.
The Effects of Uneven Development in Northern Khorasan
Matin Mehryar
Iran
The province of Khorasan, in the northeastern part of Iran, after approval by the government in 2004, was divided into three separate provinces which were named Northern Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan, and Southern Khorasan. Northern Khorasan, with Bojnurd as its capital, is the subject of this paper. Since the creation of Northern Khorasan province, the cost of properties such as residential, agricultural and commercial lands has been increasing rapidly. On the other hand, not only Iran's government but also the private sector has supplied greater financial resources to this province in order to accomplish industrial and construction projects. These policies have caused rapid economical growth of this area in less than one year. But the indexes of social and cultural development have not grown in the same direction of economical development because of the lack of previous planning and management. In Northern Khorasan, Bojnurd and other cities have been seen economical development but with the same social, cultural and ethnic situations that they had before this spurt of growth. In this paper, I have tried to compare the socio-cultural situation of this province with its economical situation. This research is based on principles of social psychology and I have attempted to predict and analyse the short-term and long-term consequences of uneven development in this zone. Analysing some indexes such as ethnic features, traditional life style, rural and urban mentality, social participation of women, historical background, geographical position, public participation in politics of central government (before and after revolution), literacy levels (education, familiarity with laws, familiarity with the world's political and scientific events) and so on, I have tried to show that the separation of Northern Khorasan in this specific historical section has numerous unanticipated consequences not only in the same area but also in relation with the rest of Iran.
Forging an Image of Chingiz Khan
Charles Melville
University of Cambridge, UK
It is well known that the Mongols themselves produced very little historical literature that reveals their own version of their rise to power under Chingiz Khan, and that most of our evidence comes from the records of the peoples they conquered. Even in Iran, contemporary accounts of the Mongol conquests are few and our main sources, such as Juvayni and Juzjani, are already writing a generation later. More significantly, they are writing at a time when the Mongol regime was consolidating its conquests and beginning to settle down to its new and less destructive role of ruling and governing: a time for image formation to back up empire formation. When Ghazan Khan's minister Rashid al-Din compiled his celebrated 'Compendium of Chronicles' (Jami' al-Tawarikh), the Mongols had converted to Islam. His work is the first to give a truly detailed account of the rise of the Mongols in their steppe milieu, based largely on first hand material deriving from Mongol sources. It is a seminal account, which exercised a great influence on later historiography. This presentation focuses on two little-known works that claim to be based directly on Rashid al-Din's chronicle. The first, a verse epic by Shams al-Din Kashani, was completed during reign of Oljeitu (d. 1316) and is stated by the author to have been commissioned by Ghazan Khan himself, to render the Jami' al-Tawarikh into poetry. The second, by a certain Sati ibn al-Hasan al-Kunavi, is a prose abbreviation of the Jami', also written as a commission, in 1377. Bot