Travelers to Iran in the 19th century often decried the startling rate of infant mortality. Writing in 1856, Lady Mary Sheil, wife of the British envoy to Persia, Sir Justin Sheil, remarked that “the mortality among children is immense, owing to neglect, ignorance, and laziness.” Citing the Shah's French physician, Sheil continued: “Dr. Cloquet … expressed to me his conviction that not above three children in ten outlived their third year.” Sheil faulted the local culture of child rearing, including women as the traditional caretakers of children, for this deplorable condition. She described a society in which fairly affluent mothers apparently disliked nursing infants and one that purportedly allowed “nurses” to calm children with bits of opium. Nearly four decades later, the British official George Nathaniel Curzon documented other scenarios to explain the high mortality of women and children. Upon visiting Iran in 1892, Curzon cited a report by the Austrian physician Jakob Polak that one of the “main causes of the decline of population” in Iran was related to the “unfavourable position of women, including the facility of divorce, early marriage, and premature age, the length of the suckling period, and the thereby impaired fertility of the sex.” Other possible reasons for population decline included the “decay of sanitary police, and consequent greater ravages by typhus, dysentery, cholera, plague, and, more particularly, owing to the inadequacy of inoculation, by small-pox—the mortality of children in the second year of their age being very striking.” Though pinpointing different reasons for the prevalence of infant mortality, Sheil and Curzon recognized this issue as a consequential social problem facing 19th-century Iranian society.

[Fade in from commercial, sonorous male voice advertising the evening news.]

Once again a cinci hoca, once again a sexual harassing…

Recently in our country, this exorcizing of spirits, witchcraft, fortune-telling, and mediumship, which are all products of primitive, magical thought, have been spreading like an epidemic. For years, either knowingly or unknowingly, they have been given extensive advertisement in newspapers and on television stations that seek to increase their circulation with dramatic news.

—Dr. Orhan Öztürk, Cumhuriyet, 1997

[It was a] mistaken belief that if 10,000 did so it would be recognized as an official religion. —A British statistical spokesman on the more than 390,000 people who listed their religion as “Jedi” on 2001 census forms

The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions.

—Benedict Anderson

The fact that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were Saudi citizens inevitably raised serious questions about the social conditions that have produced such violent personalities capable of the mass taking of innocent lives and devastating an entire city, if not a nation. Answers were quick to come by, as the U.S. media pointed to the Saudi culture. Charges were made that the youth were brainwashed by the most extremist school in Islam, namely, Wahhabism. The Saudi educational institutions were also blamed for promoting anti-Semitism, anti-Western attitudes, and intolerance of other religions. Saudi society was also condemned for having a corrupt and backward political system. Naturally, in this land of intolerance and authoritarianism, resorting to violence by its inhabitants became a foregone conclusion.

In his landmark study of historiography in the Islamic world, Franz Rosenthal identified the biographical dictionary associated with a particular locality and prefaced by a topographical introduction as a characteristic form of “theological local historiography.” What Rosenthal described as the “theological” nature of these dictionaries relates to their origins in hadith scholarship, a field of religious studies devoted to preserving an accurate record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet and his Companions passed down orally through an unbroken and authentic chain of trustworthy transmitters. Thus, the original motivation for composing such works, the earliest extant example of which dates to the 9th century, was to catalogue hadith scholars who had lived in a city to facilitate the assessment of their plausibility as transmitters of particular traditions. Furthermore, as expressions of local pride, these dictionaries allowed Muslims to celebrate the contribution made in their town to the sustenance of the most authoritative body of knowledge, after the Quran, in Islam. Although by the 10th century these works began to include notables who embodied a city's political, literary, and economic claims to fame, the defining feature of the majority of the biographical entries remained the individual's engagement with the religious sciences, particularly hadith studies.