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.

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.

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.

Beginning with their first confrontation in 1514, the Ottomans and the dynasties ruling over Iran fought over the borderlands extending from the Persian Gulf to Mount Ararat. The transformation of this indeterminate borderland into a clearly defined and increasingly monitored border took almost four centuries. It became an internationally recognized border only after seven decades (1843–1914) of intermittent work by mixed international commissions. Despite such a tangled history, a well-entrenched tradition of Middle Eastern history suggests that the Iranian–Ottoman frontier was firmly established by the Qasr-i Shirin/Zohab Treaty of 1639; and it is one of the oldest boundaries of the world. The myth of 1639 is powerfully enshrined in the historiographies and nationalisms of the countries sharing this boundary. Questioning this myth in the light of Ottoman–Iranian relations, this paper analyzes different versions of 1639 Treaty that were brought to boundary negotiations and exist in various chronicles, and suggests an alternative reading of this foundational myth.

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.

In The Early 1920s Two American Companies Battled for the Rights to develop an oil concession in northern Persia: Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later to become Exxon) and the smaller, but none the less formidable, Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation (later to merge into ARCO). American industry was a new variable in the equation, since Russia and Britain had been the primary beneficiaries of concessions granted by the Persian government to outsiders. Ultimately neither company won out—for several reasons. The British did not welcome the new presence and sought to stymie it; the Persian press misunderstood the relationship between business and government in the U.S., leading some Persians into unrealistic expectations; and one of the competitors, Sinclair, became tangled up in scandal.

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.

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.

This incident occurred in 1943, a year after the Shah had succeeded his father and was recounted by A. C. Millspough, then financial advisor to the Iranian government.

By the 1970s, however, the Iranian government was denying the relevance of the “guns versus butter” tradeoff for the country. The Shah posed the problem differently, “What is the use of having an advanced industry in a country which could be brought to its knees when faced with any small asinine event?” Asked on a subsequent occasion whether the desire for maximum national power implicit in such defense expenditure was compatible with the efforts to achieve maximum economic development, he replied, “It is not only compatible but essential.

One of the most exquisite illustrated books produced under the patronage of Shahrukh is a copy of Majmaʿ al-Tawarikh which was widely dispersed during the twentieth century. The dispersal of the manuscript has strongly influenced and limited its scholarly examination. The present research has traced the folios of this manuscript in numerous collections. By means of comparison with other dated codices, the illustrations of the dispersed manuscript can be classified into three distinctly different groups. This article gives an explanation of why these three styles appear side by side in the manuscript. Thereafter, it focuses on the problem of the authenticity of some of the illustrations of the manuscript.

This paper explores how children of Iranian immigrants engage with internet media in processes of identity formation. It conceptually centralizes places of home in order to bring together literatures on diaspora and digital media in order to understand the case of the second-generation immigrant home. It argues that this partially mediated home is both connected/mobile and emplaced/embodied. It is in this sense that the article discusses processes of locating home, in the sense of both a narrated discovery and a materially situated formation. The findings are generated from ethnographic fieldwork among second-generation Iranian Americans in Los Angeles carried out over a period of twelve months as part of an ongoing doctoral project with a focus on respondents' everyday practices of internet usage.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Parsis reestablished ties with Zoroastrians in Iran that had languished due to decades-long internal unrest in Iran. In 1854 reformists in India established the Society for the Amelioration of Conditions in Iran and sent a representative to Iran—Maneckji Hataria. Hataria was charged with eliminating the onerous non-Muslim tax owed by the Zoroastrians (the jaziyeh). Hataria also organized the Iranian Zoroastrian community, and funded a variety of community projects. He also brought Parsi reformist ideas to Iran, and attempted to reshape Iranian religious practice and belief along Parsi lines. This article explores the effects of Parsi reformist ideas on Iran, and Hataria's own writings concerning Zoroastrianism and its relationship to Iranian national identity.

“It is true that the Japanese have copied Europe. There is no Such Obstacle there as in our case, for their religion is not so strong.” So said the famous Persian statesman Mirza Malkom Khan in an article that was published in an English journal in 1891. The first statement seems obvious enough, but what about the second? Is it true that the Japanese encountered no obstacles in their emulation of Europe? Even more fundamentally, why did Japan play so prominent a role in the eyes of Persian and Ottoman observers to begin with? Reform-minded statesmen and intellectuals in both countries looked to this Far Eastern state because it seemed so easily to take over European technologies and to avail itself of the progress led by the West.

Much Scholarly Ink has been Spilled over the Question of What constitutes dance in different societies. Several attempts have been made to create a universal category for dance that would enable dance scholars to transcend this fundamental question and get down to the business of conducting research, secure in the knowledge that all of their colleagues understand the basic definitions of “dance.”

None of the current definitions takes into account dance and dance events in societies such as those of the Islamic areas of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa where the term for dance (usually the Arabic word raqṣ) can possibly bear powerfully negative or, at least, ambiguous connotations. While dance, and a word to denote that activity, exists and we can perhaps come to an agreement over what constitutes dance, an even more crucial issue is what dance is not in an Islamic environment.

The Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī of Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi in Many Respects Represents a late medieval summa, or codification, of the Persian genre of ethical and advice literature. Designated variously as andarz, pand, naṣīḥat, siyar and akhlāq, the genre of political advice literature is an ancient one in Persian culture, going back to Late Antiquity and exhibiting concordance with Greek and Indian sources. Most works of Sasanian political wisdom literature, such as the Advices of Anushirvan, Buzurjmihr, and Ardashir, as well as those attributed to the ancient Greek sages Aristotle, Plato, and others, are of indeterminate authorship. Many have been preserved only in late manuscript copies dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and some, like the famous Letter of Tansar, may even have been composed in later periods.

If viewed in full historical perspective, Isfahan may reasonably claim to have been the most important city on the Iranian plateau. It is also the most studied. However, although its unique historical monuments may possibly have (compared with the historiography of other great cities) received scholarly attention commensurate with the city's historical role, relatively little attention has been paid to its social and ecological history. Why did Shāh ᶜAbbās choose Isfahan for his capital? What are the geographical factors that distinguish the city of Isfahan from the rest of the plateau? What were their implications for the social and political history of the city? More specifically, what was the role of the river, the Zayandah Rud, in the growth of the city? Is it profitable to seek a cause and effect relationship between the organization of irrigation for the agricultural base of the region's economy and the political and economic development of the city?

This article intends to give a comprehensive picture of women's participation in the scientific field in Iran in the last four decades, among students and members of academia. One major fact is that despite the legal and cultural impediments the proportion of young women in the universities has risen above 50 percent. Another is that this increase has occurred much more at the undergraduate level than at the graduate and post-graduate levels. In the academic world, women are still far outnumbered by men, particularly at the higher levels of the hierarchy. We intend to show how the discrepancies are structured between the undergraduate and the graduate levels on the one hand, and between the lower and higher levels of academic hierarchy on the other, and propose an interpretation of these two major tendencies.

It has traditionally been taught that Iran, a Sunni polity for many centuries, was converted to Twelver Shi'ism virtually overnight when the armies backing the Safavid house took power in 907/1501. In recent years scholars have begun to question the manner and rapidity of the process of conversion, what it meant to be “Shi'i” or “Sunni” in sixteenth-century Iran, and what, if anything, can be said about Safavid Sunnism.

It has been noted that Sunnism in Iran was phased out only gradually. For example, there are references in the Persian chronicles to persecution of Sunnis as late as 1017/1608. Some sources suggest that Sunni influence persisted at the court of Shah Tahmasp and name prominent Sunnis during his reign. As late as the second decade of the eighteenth century, the conqueror of Isfahan, Mahmud Afghan, attempted to alter the balance of population in the city by relocating 5,000 Sunni families from Hamadan.