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.

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.

Although the first Persian language newspaper was published in Iran 170 years ago, Iranian journalism is a twentieth century creation, indeed a product of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The press played a significant part in the revolution, especially by promoting the demand for the rule of laws enacted by parliament, rather than decrees issued by the king or the religious leaders. Once a constitution had been declared, many journalists felt relieved of all restrictions and engaged in bitter, personal attacks on their opponents, including the monarch and his family. Many papers also opposed a press law that was passed soon after the revolution, arguing that it was meant to suppress their newly-gained freedom. Five more press laws have been passed in Iran since then, but the debate over press freedom and the rule of law in the country does not appear to be anywhere near resolution.

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.

The earliest historical references to the Persian Gulf appear to stem from the time of the Sumerian rulers of Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., when, for instance, the trade with Dilmun (on the western shores of the upper part of the Gulf) of Ur Nanše, King of Lagash (2494–2465 B.C.), is mentioned. The Gulf itself is specifically named in a historical text of Lugal Zagesi, King of Uruk (2340–2316 B.C.), where it is said that “then from the Lower Sea, by the Tigris and Euphrates, as far as the Upper Sea, [the god Enlil] provided him with clear routes”; and, in an inscription of Sargon of Akkad, it is said that Enlil gave him the Upper Sea and the Lower Sea.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is seriously challenged by a secularizing intellectual force from within. It may seem ironic for such a movement to appear in a clerical-dominated regime, initially thought by many to embody the victory of religion and tradition over secularism and modernization. But the Iranian revolution came in the wake of at least a century of exposure to secular ideas and institutions, an experience whose impact continued to be discerned during and after the revolution by observers who could see beyond the rhetoric of Islamism.

The social history of Iran in general and that of the Qajar era in particular, has been little studied. The subject of this paper, private life in the late Qajar period, has barely been touched upon, probably because it is a subject on which there is not much primary material. There are no comprehensive accounts of people's daily lives of any class or occupation. In this article an attempt is made to give an account of the daily domestic life and activities of the household in the Qajar period. As there were major differences between the daily life and households of urban and rural areas, the discussion is limited to urban areas and Shi'i households. The article discusses the roles of the various members of the household as well as the consumption patterns of the family and those from inside or outside the household who catered to its needs.

Higher education at Iran's state-run universities is not supported by a deeply-rooted tradition of quality assessment. For several decades, Iranian universities have not been able to monitor themselves and develop efficient, internal structures of quality assurance. The academics' attempts at internal monitoring have failed, giving way to a system of bureaucratic supervision and control. Recent changes in Iran have given rise to new concepts, including the principle of universities' self-evaluation, based on academic autonomy and scientific freedom. But the dominant tendency in Iran's political structure and administration is still toward external, bureaucratic control. The conflict between more or less advanced texts and typically solid structures is a reflection of inconsistencies within the Iranian society, pursuing its transitional stage.

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.

A major characteristic of traditional politics is that their policy-implementing and policy-formulating roles are less differentiated than those in more politically developed societies. Consequently, the bureaucracy in a traditional setting plays a crucial role in system-maintenance, not only through its recruitment function and socialization of the new recruits, but by reinforcing the system's goals and mores. Without the development of an effective bureaucracy as an agent of political integration, the traditional system either remains traditional or breaks apart. The possibility that the bureaucracy would be able to perform its herculean task is further reduced by the fact that as a subsystem within the larger traditional political system it mostly symbolizes the general systemic patterns. For example, if the ascriptive norms are prevalent in the society, one may expect to see inheritance of offices and nepotism on the institutional level. Political development, therefore, is a painfully slow process which more often than not may never come about.

Historians have tended to ignore the structure of tribalism in writing the history of Iran. Numerous references to tribal leaders can be found in the literature (Turkoman, Bakhtiyari, and Qajar khans appear and reappear as important figures in Iranian political history), but the nomadic societies that produced these leaders and shaped and limited the contours of their actions have been left to the researches of anthropologists and other social scientists. While historians have undertaken detailed studies of urban and agrarian institutions, they have continued to ignore tribalism as a factor in Iranian history.

Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, pastoral nomads comprised approximately one-fourth of the population of Iran. Forming over two hundred separate tribal units divided into five major ethnic groupings (Turkoman, Iranian, Kurdish, Arab and Baluch), these pastoral groups have been and continue to be integral elements in the shaping of Iranian history.

The completion of this article preceded the triumph of the Revolution in Iran. During the previous regime, critical studies on the subject of political economy of Iran, either went unpublished or were sufficiently diluted to cause no alarm and thus no harm. We write from personal experience and from knowledge of the experiences of other colleagues.

This study is not free from the effects of such constrictions since most available official data generated in Iran during the past regime were tampered with somewhat to satisfy political interests and concerns. The data at hand fail to reflect what we think of as the “economics of growth and destruction.” By using available data, reaching for alternative sources when possible, and pointing out the observed inconsistencies, we have uncovered a bleak picture, despite the distortions by authorities who, unwilling to reform the condition of life in Iran, kept reforming the data.

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).

In their “recreation of the Persian nationality” and their proclamation of Shiᶜite Islam as the official state religion of Persia, the Safavids performed a crucial historical role. They formalized, institutionalized, intensified and politicized the Sunni-Shiᶜite doctrinal and regional schism within the Islamic world. Coming in the wake of the four centuries of Turko-Mongol invasions which had already helped to “harden the division of the Muslim lands into separate Arabic, Persian and Turkish regions between which literary communication was confined to the restricted circles of the educated,“ the triumph of the Shiᶜite revolution in Persia formalized the division of Islamic Asia into three major Muslim political entities: Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. Safavid Persia drove wedges between the Sunni Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire and Central Asia. Safavid and shicite Persia, however, was not a monolith. It was an ethnic, linguistic, and religious mosaic.