The concept known in Shiᶜite jurisprudence as wilāYat al-faqīh has been interpreted in various and contending ways over the course of time. In order for us to examine these differences, we need to establish a few points. First, although the Qurᵓanic revelation bears principally on issues of morality and piety, early Muslims deemed it essential to relate these issues to practical matters in the exercise of authority. Second, rulership in the Islamic community (ummah) was a prerogative of the Prophet, whose mode of governance was to blend the approximately six hundred verses of the scripture that dealt with social affairs with the customary law (ᶜurf) of Western Arabia. After the Prophet's death, it was necessary to add to this mix a third ingredient, namely, the interpretation, by those knowledgable in the law, of how the Prophet would have met unanticipated contingencies.

Human rights issues loom large in the contemporary history of Iran. Under the reign of the late shah, Iranians were deprived of basic rights and freedoms and suffered from pervasive violations of human rights, many at the hands of the regime's notorious security forces. Ironically, in official representations to the international community, the shah's government posed as a champion of human rights. In the 1960s and 1970s Iranians took a leadership role at the United Nations in promoting international human rights law, and Tehran was selected as the venue for the important 1968 UN International Conference on Human Rights. Under the shah Iran ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the United States failed to ratify until 1992 (and then only conditionally). Individual Iranians also contributed to the development of human rights principles.

This essay explores the toponymy of Great and Little Tonb (pron. tōm), two islands at the entrance to the Persian Gulf overlooking the main shipping lanes near the Straits of Hormuz. In view of their close proximity to the Persian coast, the Tonbs are considered geographically Persian islands.

This essay will provide, first and foremost, a consolidated record of the islands' nomenclature, with a view to ascertaining the etymological origins of the islands' many names. Toponyms tell us about physical and human geography in a historical context. To that extent, a study of place names is not free from political and legal implications.

Judeo-Persian literature is one of the most neglected areas of both Jewish and Iranian studies. Although Judeo-Persian texts—New Persian documents in the Hebrew alphabet—date as far back as the second half of the eighth century and constitute, in fact, the first recorded texts in New Persian, they are still largely unexplored for two major reasons. First, most Judeo- Persian texts are available only in manuscript form, and these manuscripts are located in largely uncatalogued library collections. Second, the study of Judeo- Persian manuscripts requires a thorough knowledge not only of several languages (Persian, Hebrew, and Arabic) but also of Judaism and Islam in their respective religious and secular literatures.

Strides have been made in the study of Judeo-Persian texts since the latenineteenth century. Nevertheless, much remains to be done, especially in the realm of editing texts, the first and most important step toward their comprehensive study.

On 5 May 1850 the Babis of Zanjan rose in arms against the Qajar governor of the town. Led by a charismatic cleric known as Hujjat-i Zanjani, two thousand Babi fighters with their families held part of the town against a much larger government army. Nine months later, when the army captured the last ruined houses held by the Babis, fewer than a hundred Babi fighters survived to face execution.

There is never a neat answer to the question of why a historical event occurred, and the question is that much harder to answer when the information is in fundamental ways incomplete and when the participants themselves differed deeply about the meaning of the event. There were two other major Babi revolts1— Mazandaran in 1848–49 and Nayriz in 1850—and at least four other instances where Babi uprisings might have been expected: Shiraz, Qazvin, and Isfahan in 1846, and Tehran in 1852.