The under-appreciated role of the press as a tool of public diplomacy was rooted in its origins as a Qajar state project in the nineteenth century, but also cultivated by a shared impulse of Iranian journalists and statesmen to represent Iran effectively in the court of world opinion. Moreover, foreign governments often reacted to the Iranian press generally, not just the official newspapers and not just newspapers produced in Iran, as a forum though which to advance or protect their interests in Iran. The Pahlavi state integrated the press as part of a larger state-run mass communication policy in the 1930s that would eventually include new technologies such as radio, and retained public diplomacy as an essential purpose of the media. This study draws upon archival material, press accounts, and memoirs.

In the 18th century, rather remarkably, Iran formed a navy. Up to that time the shahs of Iran had relied on other powers to maintain security in the Persian Gulf. The dominant naval power in the gulf during the 16th century was Portugal, while the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the English, were supreme during the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries. Because Iran's southern borders were safe and secure after the conquest of Hormoz in 1622, it did not need a navy. Hence, Iran relied for a time on the Dutch and the English to maintain security in the gulf.

English naval assistance in the conquest of Hormoz set the pattern for the next century. This reliance on other powers for maintenance of security in the gulf proved to be a workable policy as long as there was no real threat to Iran's coastal borders in the south.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 saw the mobilization and cooperation of a variety of groupings that were brought together by their shared determination to overthrow the Shah. However, it was not only opposition to the Pahlavi regime, but also suspicion of and disdain for that regime's Western backers that united these revolutionary groups. Religious leaders (ulama), merchants (bazaaris), intellectuals and students alike all espoused the strong anti-Western sentiments that had been developing in Iran over the previous two decades. But what particular factors can be seen to have encouraged the adoption of these sentiments in the lead-up to the revolution, and in what ways were they articulated and subsequently put into practice by the leaders of the new regime? This article suggests that various domestic and international influences can be seen to have shaped the emergence of Iran's revolutionary discourse of “economic independence.” In particular, the paper argues that a peculiar blend of Shi'i concepts of social justice and Marxist-Leninist discourses of class struggle and anti-imperialism not only informed the economic outlook of Iran's burgeoning revolutionary movement during the period 1953–79, but was also enshrined in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic.

One of the least-studied eras of Iranian history is that between the invasion of Changiz Khan (Genghis Khan) in the early 13th century and the establishment of the Safavid Empire early in the 16th. This was a time of unprecedented political upheaval when much of the Iranian world became subject to rule by Mongols and Turks. The period between the collapse of the (Mongol) Il-Khan dynasty in 1335, however, and the consolidation of the empire of Timur (Tamerlane) in the 1380s was an age of regionalism par excellence and one of cultural florescence. The most important of the minor dynasties that flourished at this time were the Muzaffarids in Fars, Iraq-i ‘Ajam and Kirman (1314-93), the Jalayirids in Iraq, Kurdistan and Azarbaijan (1336-1432), and, in Khurasan, the Karts at Herat (1245-1389) and the Sarbidars at Sabzavar (1336-81).

This article offers a chronology of climate events in Iran over the last millennium to challenge traditional chronologies of the Iranian past based on politics, war, and economics. Using insights gleaned from the historiography of climate in Iran, and from neighboring regions, especially the Ottoman Empire, four episodes of climate cooling show how climate-induced environmental processes affected more people for longer in Iran than did the policies of the empires ostensibly ruling over them. Thus, the article aims to put climate more squarely on the agenda of historians of Iran so that the conjectures advanced here can be confirmed, revised, or discarded through future empirical research. Moreover, the article seeks to bring Iran into wider conversations in environmental and global history.

The Arab conquest of the Sasanian empire (633-651 A.D.) provided the Iranian peoples with their first extensive contact with Islam. Prior to this, encounters between Zoroastrians and Muslims had generally been restricted to the lower reaches of the Mesopotamian plain. More importantly, this conquest installed Islam as the religion of the new rulers, replacing Zoroastrianism, referred to as the good religion (Phl. weh dēn) by its followers, which had enjoyed royal favor under the Sasanians. The conquest of the Sasanian empire resulted in large numbers of Arabs entering and eventually settling on Iranian territory. The presence of these Arabs on the Mesopotamian plain and Iranian plateau, and their eventual settlement there, naturally resulted in coexistence and social interaction between Muslims and the native Zoroastrians. This interaction would initially have been slow, as the Arab troops were confined to military garrisons (Ar. Amşār).

The history of Iran is still told very much in terms of events on center stage. A common enough lament: the intrigues at court, the deeds—edifying or otherwise—of the ruler and his entourage, the marching of armies and squashing of revolts, the rise and fall of dynasties, these seem to be the main stuff of history. When recognized for what it is, the tossing of waves, we blame the sources for the fact that we can't see below the stormy surface. There is some truth in this, of course; the main narrative histories are notoriously palace-centered or, later, camp-followers. The regions of Iran tend to come into focus only when they are, in fact, briefly transformed into centers. An example of this is Sistan, one of the few provinces to be the subject of detailed modern studies. Even then, it tends to be the same sort of story, writ small.

This article studies an early Safavid chronicle, Futuhat-e Shahi by Amini Haravi. In 1521, the founder of the Safavid state, Shah Isma‘il, provided Haravi with a number of veterans from the early days of the Safavid uprising as informants. Their narrative presents an alternative view on the early career of the shah that differs from the dominant version current in modern scholarship. From the perspective of the Futuhat, the rise of the Safavids did not occur as a wild apocalyptic explosion, but was a carefully planned and cautious campaign run by experienced commanders who kept a tight rein on the teenage Shah Isma‘il.

The Omission of the Achaemenids from Indigenous Accounts of Iranian history has puzzled many and led to the assumption that the Sasanids were unaware of the Achaemenids and did not have any historical memory of them; that, if anything, the Sasanids were heirs to the Parthians. The argument put forth is that, with some exceptions, sources from the Islamic period do not really show that the Sasanids knew about the Achaemenids. Indeed, it is correct that the Islamic sources have only a vague recollection of the Achaemenids. But does the vagueness in Islamic historiography in the ninth and the tenth centuries prove that the Sasanids (A.D. 224-651) were unaware of the Achaemenids (550- 331 B.C.) during their rule? The question of why the Achaemenids, in spite of their outstanding political and military achievements, were omitted from the national tradition during the reign of the Sasanids--who originated from the same region--has remained unanswered.

For the nationalist elite of early Pahlavi Iran, the regime's military successes over tribal opposition, whether real or imagined, were welcomed and celebrated. These successes were interpreted as confirmation of their views of tribal power as hostile to modernity, archaic and outmoded, and of Riza Shah as the deliverer of Iran's national salvation. This conceptualization of the “tribal problem” had appeared in tandem with and as a product of modernist ideology in the late nineteenth century, acquired the backing of state power with the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty, and endured until the revolution of 1979. It communicated itself, in diluted form, to Western scholarship, which has been largely content to depict Riza Shah's tribal policies as regrettably brutal, but an unavoidable stage in Iran's progress and “modernization.”

Yet this version of tribe–state relations is clearly an ideological construct rather than an historical analysis. The account which follows begins a re-evaluation of tribal politics in modern Iran, focusing especially on the Riza Shah decades when these politics were a site of intense conflict and where the nationalist template was most starkly delineated, and concludes by tracing and re-examining the evolution of the tribe–state dynamic in the decades of land reform and revolution.

This issue of Iranian Studies is Devoted to the Late Medieval Persian Preacher and polymath, Kamal al-Din Husayn b. ᶜAli Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi, and it coincides roughly with the quincentenary of his death in 910/1504–05. It is based on a panel of papers delivered at the Fourth Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies, which was held in Bethesda, Maryland, May 24–26, 2002, under the sponsorship of the Society for Iranian Studies, and co-sponsorship of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies. It brings together papers on a number of Husayn Kashifi's works with the aim of demonstrating the breadth of his oeuvre, and in particular his contribution to the codification, primarily in Persian, of knowledge in fields covering the entire spectrum of learning in medieval Iran at the turn of the sixteenth century. As such, the volume seeks to “rehabilitate” Kashifi, who has usually been regarded merely as a compiler or popularizer, and to present him as a figure who was instrumental in the preservation and transmission of the state of the art of knowledge in a wide variety of fields in late medieval Iran.

Triumphant or turbulent, cultures are at once symbolized by and constituted from their arts and sciences. Literature celebrates, as law canonizes, the grand ideals of a living culture. Traditional or transitional, societies and their institutional structures of authority find elaborate expressions in the literature they produce.

This volume of Iranian Studies is devoted to an examination of the modern Iranian writer and contemporary Persian literature in their dialectical, interaction with a transitional Iranian culture and society. Its focus is on a revolutionary literature within a revolutionary social context. The term "revolutionary" is used here in its fundamental cultural sense, embracing both the social and the political.

This paper is devoted to a sociological examination of the problem of "commitment" in modern Persian literature. To reach for the political nature of the problem, it traces the formation of the intelligentsia in modern Iranian society.

This article is actually an outline of history of anthropology in Iran. In part, it traces the development of the field and the problems that some of its practitioners have been endeavoring to overcome. In part, it recounts some of the experiences of the author and the frustrations she and others encountered in trying to broaden the scope of the permissible range of study of anthropology.

Beyond the esoteric deliberations of Islamic jurists and their exegesis of criminal and private law doctrines, Iranian law lives a life of its own. It is a life of routine practices of judges, court clerks, lawyers and clients, each of whom is striving to turn the law to their own advantage. It is also a life of contested legality, a relentless struggle over the right to determine the law in a juridical field which is infused with strife and hostility. These conflicts are reproduced daily as two competing conceptions of law, and their corresponding perceptions of legality clash in pursuit of justice. The Iranian judiciary’s concept of law, its reconstruction of Islamic jurisprudence and methods of dispensing justice, which on the surface are reminiscent of Max Weber’s “qādi-justice,” collide with the legal profession’s formal rational understanding thereof. However, Iranian judges are not Weberian qādis, and the legal profession is not a homogenous group of attorneys driven by a collective commitment to the rule of law. To understand their conflict, we need to explore the mundane workings of the legal system in the context of the transformation of Iranian society and the unresolved disputes over the direction of its modernity.

For over a thousand years imaginative Persian literature has more directly and comprehensively than any other art medium reflected and nurtured distinctively Iranian cultural themes and orientations and has more than any other single indigenous phenomenon defined Iranian culture for literate Iranians themselves, who through the centuries have often pointed to this literature as a sign of their special place in and distinctive contributions to human cultural expression.

Now the phrase “imaginative Persian literature” can refer to various distinct traditions on the Iranian plateau. There is a folk tradition that emerged upon the heels of the appearance of the neo-Persian language in the 9th century. Then there is the better known belletristic court tradition that began in the same era and that persists today, albeit without court patronage, in the writings, particularly verse, of literary traditionalists who feel that the norms, forms, and themes of poets from Rudaki (d. 940) to Jami (d. 1492) constitute still relevant prescriptive standards.

The disintegration of the Timurid empire after the death of its founder, Timur, in 807/1405 followed the normal pattern for Central Asian nomadic empires based on a military tribal elite. The charismatic Timur had exercised a tight hold on the government of his realm, mainly as a result of the highly personal nature of his rule and the flexibility which the absence of a formal administrative apparatus afforded him. But, after his death, the traditional Turko-Mongol concept that territory was held collectively by the patriarchal, agnatic clan and that all lineal male descendants shared the right to claim political sovereignty over it, reasserted itself.

This corporate claim to sovereignty created a free-for-all situation in which individual members of the princely Timurid clan clamored to assert their claims to rule in the steadily shrinking territory under Timurid control, frequently resorting to the time-honored steppe tradition of guerilla struggle (qazāqliq) .

According to the few available cursory biographical accounts of Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926), a prominent Cambridge Orientalist who was to become the leading British authority on Iran in the years immediately preceding WWI, his initial interest in Iran was a byproduct of the affection he developed for Ottoman Turkey in his youth. In his own words, “It was the Turkish war with Russia in 1877–8 that first attracted my attention to the East.” Having developed an “admiration” for Turkey at the age of sixteen, in the process of learning Turkish Browne was to discover “that for further progress … some knowledge of Arabic and Persian was requisite.” Thus began what was to become his lifelong fascination with the Persian language and Iran.

As is still the case in many parts of Iran, the distribution of languages and dialects in Ilam Province, western Iran, is unevenly documented. There have been several studies on specific language varieties spoken throughout the province but, in large part because of conflicting perspectives on the relationship between language and ethnicity, the situation for the region as a whole has until now remained unclear. The present study first of all brings together existing sociolinguistic and demographic data on language distribution and highlight areas of uncertainty. The main part of the study provides an overview of local perceptions of language distribution and language use based on field research and interviews conducted in each of the province's ten regions (shahrestān) and their twenty-five districts (bakhsh). Here, respondents' assessments of the geographic extent of the province's four main languages—Kurdish, Luri, Laki and Arabic—as well as more minor languages spoken by immigrants from elsewhere in Iran are summarized. For Kurdish in particular, which is the major of the four languages, the article shows the perceived geographic distribution of each major dialect and its affiliation within one of two major Kurdish dialect groups: Ilāmi (or “Feyli”) and Kalhōri. This analysis is followed by a brief discussion of multilingualism. The results of the study are brought together in a map of the province's languages.