When the Iranian Revolution of 1979 Overthrew Pahlavi Power in Iran the attention of historians was suddenly attracted towards a study of the antecedents of the revolutionary movement and of opposition to the Pahlavi dictatorship in general. This redirection of attention produced, during the 1980s, quite novel historical and historiographical analyses of modern Iran. The army, however, largely escaped these revisionist approaches. Yet it is clear that the image of the army conventionally accepted, the military structures a bedrock of monarchical rule and the officer corps a key element on which the regime could depend, is a considerable oversimplification. Although ideological trends within the army tended to be dominated by secular nationalism and modernism, political attitudes towards the Pahlavi shahs were always capable of marked variegation. The relationship between the shah and the officer corps, both senior and junior, especially during periods of political crisis and uncertainty such as the early years of Pahlavi rule or the oil nationalization crisis, was susceptible to considerable tension.

This Paper Shall Deal with the Formal Aspects of the Storytelling technique employed by Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73 C.E.) in his Manavī-yi Maᶜnavī (henceforth Manavī). I shall begin with the assumption that there is some kind of form to this work and shall try to investigate the nature of that form.

To the casual observer the Manavī, as a whole, seems to have no narrative sequence with its plethora of apparently unconnected and disjointed stories. Moreover, the narrative order of a particular story may be interrupted by other stories, sermons, expositions of Qurᶜanic verses, aḥādīth, stories of prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāᵓ), popular Islamic lore and glosses, etc. Throughout this entire exercise Rumi's goal is to drive home various precepts of Sufism via the use of these means.

The Haydariyyah and Niᶜmatiyyah were Widespread, Mutually Hostile urban factions of Safavid and post-Safavid Iran, sparsely documented and virtually unstudied. From at least the middle of the tenth/sixteenth century up until recent decades, a number of cities and towns of Iran were perceived as being divided into two groupings of adjacent wards (maḥallah), one grouping known as the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the other as the Niᶜmatī-khānah, the respective (male) inhabitants of which would profess mutual contempt and antagonism, and would periodically clash in massive public fights. The origin of the terms and the cause of the antagonism were not generally known to the participants; the topography and composition of the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the Niᶜmatī-khānah (which in some places extended into the adjacent countryside) was apparently irrelevant; and membership in either of these factions corresponded to no other social, political, or sectarian affiliation.

The Belief that Persia is the Center of Magic has been Deeply ingrained in Western culture. In fact, the generic term for magic is derived from the name of the Zoroastrian priests, the magi, and Persia has been depicted from antiquity up to the present age as the ancient fountainhead of magic and wonders in Western literature. When in the second century B.C.E. the young philosopher Apuleius of Madaura married a woman fifteen years older because of her wealth, he was suspected of having used magic.

The Persians are Obscure in the Archaeological Record, and the routes and dates of their migration into Iran are uncertain. When the Persians appear in the textual record, it is in the context of their interaction with the regional powers of Elam and Assyria. Examination of the relevant sources highlights two areas of Persian settlement in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E.: the central Zagros Mountains region and modern Fars, the latter the core of the first Persian Empire (Old Persian Parsa and Greek Persis). Since there are no extant Persian inscriptions dating before the mid-sixth century, this analysis relies upon Assyrian and Elamite sources.

The Persians may have begun their arrival in southwestern Iran as early as the mid-second millennium. During the Middle Elamite period (c. 1600-1000 B.C.E.), Fars and its primary city Anshan (modern Malyan) were part of the kingdom of Elam. Sometime around 1000 B.C.E., Anshan was abandoned. Large-scale settlement cannot be traced in Fars after that until the Achaemenid period, over four hundred years later.