Trends in intra-family relationships in Iran point to fast changes in regional and class-linked cultural patterns following the rapid spread of the national culture and of modernist ideologies and practices. People redefine their responsibilities and expectations as small nuclear families increase, women aspire to higher education and employment, and the bad economic situation necessitates various adaptations. Analysis of recent ethnographic data suggests that the shift from traditional authoritarian intra-family relations to relationships based on autonomy, individuation, independence and companionship creates new intimacies but also conflicts. The prevailing ideology of “progress” in Iran likely will further weaken patrilineal ties and kin relations while strengthening ties based on friendship and collegiality.

This article presents some of the general findings and, in particular, the information on family planning practice in Isfahan City and Ostan compiled in two phases of the Isfahan Communications Project (ICP). In terms of information generated, the project had two main stages: (1) the ostan-wide sample presurvey (May, 1970), and (2) the ostan-wide mass media campaign (August, 1970-March, 1971). The presurvey was made to obtain demographic information and data on the knowledge, attitudes, and practice (KAP) of family planning among the population and their exposure to the various media. The media campaign was directed at those couples who because of their media behavior and previous experiences with contraception were thought to be predisposed to adopt modern family planning methods.

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.

Pre-nineteenth century Iranian history is short on numbers, or at least on reliable ones. Lack of quantitative data is perhaps the greatest obstacle confronting historians of pre-modern Iranian economy and society, and the Safavid period is scarcely better provided than earlier ages. The Safavid archives were destroyed, the Persian histories provide few hard facts, and the accounts of visiting Europeans, though often full of comment on social and economic matters, are generally unreliable when it comes to quantitative information. Safavid Iran thus presents a depressing contrast to its neighbours to East and West, where the earlier and deeper European penetration has left arich record in the archives of several European countries, while in the case of the Ottoman Empire, the survival of extensive state archives can only remind the historian of Iran of how much was lost through the destruction of their Safavid counterparts.

The early drafts of the constitution of 1979 have represented a crucial moment in the creation of the post-revolutionary Iranian state. This article makes use of primary sources of the time and recently revealed material in order to provide a systematic analysis of the events which led to the production of the key versions of the draft constitution and the reaction to them by the multitude of political movements which were then active. The aim of this study is to clarify events and processes which have been left unexplored by the existing academic literature.

One of the more pervasive implicit assumptions about Amīr Kabīr in both Persian and Western sources is that he was an innovator who wished to transform Iranian society. Not unrepresentative of such an assumption are comments like the following: “If Amīr Kabīr had not been killed at the hands of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh's executioners, how much he would have entangled the fate of Iran in a significant transformation.” In the same vein there is a tendency to view Amīr Kabīr as a visionary of political freedom. This tendency is perhaps most evident in two rather popularized Persian accounts of his life and career, that of Hāshimī Rafsanjānī and that of Ḥusayn Makkī. But with the advantage of hindsight, many less exaggerated accounts, also, attribute more to the intentions of Amīr Kabīr than can perhaps stand up under scrutiny. It is not uncommon, as Algar points out, for Amīr Kabīr to be reckoned among the precursors of the Constitutional Revolution.

Despite extant, though often indirect references to women in manuscript and archival sources, modern historians of Safavid Iran have paid little attention to the active role of women in the formative period of its history.

Those who are familiar with the history of Muslim civilization in Southeast Asia in general, and in Thailand in particular, might be conversant with traces of the Malay or Arabic cultural and religious influences in this region. Cultural interchanges between Iran and maritime Southeast Asia during the pre-Islamic period have been studied by a number of scholars including Brian Colless who wrote several works on the activities of Nestorian and Armenian Christians in the region during the Sasanid period. Much more work has been done on Iranian influences in the spread of Islam into Southeast Asia although the interpretation of the phenomenon often depends on the religious perspective of the writer. Much of the modern literature focuses on actual or alleged Persian elements in Malay language, literature, and culture.

The purpose of the present paper is to review some of the literature to date on the Iranian community in the Siamese Ayutthaya kingdom in the seventeenth century and to highlight the main problems those studies have focused on.

Understanding the determinants of attitudes toward war is important for the prevention of military conflicts and the promotion of peaceful conflict resolution. To examine American and Iranian attitudes toward war, questionnaires were administered to American and Iranian college students in the United States and Iran respectively. The results of the study revealed that American students generally have more positive attitudes toward war than Iranian students. Since most Iranians in the sample experienced eight years of war with Iraq whereas Americans never had direct experience of war, it was predicted that direct experiences of military action could explain this cross-national difference. Among Iranians those who experienced the Iran–Iraq war had more negative attitudes toward war compared to Iranians who did not have such experiences. The results further demonstrated that being authoritarian, religious and male were independently related to having positive attitudes toward war in both samples.

Modern scholarship on Arabs in the pre-Islamic period has focused on Rome's Arab allies—the so-called “Jafnids” or “Ghassānids,” with much less attention paid to Persia's Arab allies, the so-called “Naṣrid” or “Lakhmid” dynasty of Arab leaders at al-Ḥīrah in Iraq. This article examines select pre-Islamic sources for the Persian Arabs, showing that even with the meager evidence available to us, and the lack of archaeological material, it is possible to draw a relatively complex portrait of the Persian Arabs. This article situates the Persian Arabs as important figures in some key themes and phenomena of late antiquity, such as the growth of Christian communities, the conflict between Rome and Persia, and the struggle for influence in the Arabian peninsula.

The word “Sufi” is believed by some to be derived from the word “suf,” denoting a kind of woolen garment worn by ascetics. The wearing of this garment symbolizes the Sufi's renunciation of material, worldly concerns and his complete absorption in God. Throughout the history of the Sufi orders, this symbol of the humble woolen cloak has often stood in contrast with the actual economic status attained by many Sufi shaykhs. In her book Mystical Dimensions of Islam, A. Schimmel drew attention to this contrast:

This article analyzes the work of the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) and its influence on the writing of Iranian national history in the 1920s and 1930s. Herzfeld's life and work illuminates the relationship between Germany and Iran and between orientalist scholarship and nationalist history in the first half of the twentieth century. Through the method of what he called “archaeological history,” Herzfeld wrote an interdisciplinary history of Iran and its Aryan foundations that contested the assumptions of decades of European orientalist scholarship.

Paradoxical though it may seem, I would like to begin my discussion of Qajar photography with a little-known painting (pl. 1). The work of an anonymous mid-nineteenth-century artist, this image marks an aesthetic watershed. Here, an unknown artist is photographing Nasir al-Din Shah who is posing for a portrait. The image, of course, is meant to capture the power of Nasir al-Din Shah, a figure so grand he is simultaneously painted and photographed by court artists. As a “dynastic image,“ the painting focuses on the grandeur of the shah's power, symbolically represented by his opulent dress, royal pose, and attendant technology—he is the subject of the newest form of representation, i.e. photography. What is remarkable about this little-known, perhaps even aesthetically insignificant, image is the powerful way it speaks to the shift from painting to photography in mid-nineteenth-century Iran.

Towards the end of the 19th century, different parts of the Islamic world, occupied with various attempts to cope with the European power play, became aware of a country that seemed to have “made it”: Japan, remote and in self-imposed, almost complete isolation from the Western world for more than 200 years up to 1853, fascinated Muslim viewers. In different aspects, Japan's situation lent itself to comparison. It had been a military confrontation with economic incentives that had forced Japan to come into contact with the West. In the first military confrontation with the American warships sent to force the opening of Japanese ports in 1853, Japan could not withstand the Western threat and thus confirmed the stereotype of the inferior traditional Oriental country retreating in the face of the superior, advanced West.

The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV), established in Moscow in 1921 and closed in 1938, presents a unique experiment in Soviet Orientalism. KUTV was the first communist educational institution set up specifically for students from the Orient to study their own countries in their native languages through a Marxist lens. Its purpose was not only to train teachers and revolutionaries for work in their native countries but to bring about a paradigm shift in the study of the East. Orientalism was to be freed from the imperialist prejudices of the past by redistributing the tools of Orientalist scholarship to Orientals themselves and by emphasizing contemporary social and economic history over an idealized and nationalistic antiquity. Iranians made up a strong presence at KUTV among both students and teachers, some of whom returned to Iran to spread learning and revolution, while others remained in the Soviet Union as scholars of Iran, influencing the development of Soviet Orientalism and often serving simultaneously in the Soviet political apparatus. With their students, they produced research and compiled massive collections of reference materials that formed the foundation for future Soviet scholarship and foreign policy. By the second half of the 1920s, KUTV developed into one of the most important centers of Soviet Orientalism, spawning a parallel Research Institute (NIA) that offered graduate programs and published its own periodical, Revolutionary East. With its aim of empowering the oppressed while simultaneously projecting Soviet influence, its attempt to rise above nationalist conceptions while at times succumbing to them, and the repression of its faculty in the Stalinist purges, KUTV exhibits many of the contradictions of the Soviet project itself. Among other sources, this paper uses Soviet case files on Iranian students and teachers at KUTV to shed light on their motivations and backgrounds.

Russian Orientalists participated—often in a close but precarious relationship with the state—in the transformation of Central Asia from a tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an “Empire of Nations.” One of them was the former tsarist colonial clerk Aleksandr Semenov (1873–1958), who together with such prominent representatives of the region's Persian-speaking elites as Sadriddin Ayni or Bobojon Ghafurov, and with the support of his academic mentors, such as Vasilii Bartol'd and Sergei Ol'denburg, effectively—albeit somewhat reluctantly—lobbied for the official recognition of the Persian/Tajik language and of Tajikistani statehood. The study of their cooperation shows how Central Asian cultural heritage was researched and preserved, but also how it was reinvented in national terms and codified; and how these processes were negotiated between local intellectuals, scholars and the state.

The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced hegemonic categories of “bourgeois” knowledge, notably concerning language and national identity. This becomes especially clear in the case of Soviet studies of Kurdish, a language subaltern with respect to Persian, Arabic, and, increasingly, Turkish. In the 1920s and early 1930s, native scholars like Erebê Shemo, Qanatê Kurdo, and Heciyê Cindî pioneered the creation of both an alphabet and a literature in Kurdish and of scholarly linguistic studies. Their work was shaped (and encouraged) by Nikolaj Marr's rejection of the idea of genetic links between Indo-Persian languages, and of the reification of “national characters.” Marr's “japhetic” linguistics dovetailed with Stalin's nationality policies in the 1920s and 1930s; it is rightly rejected as unscientific, but it did have positive emancipatory effects. It criticized ethnocentric and racist assumptions in contemporary Indo-European linguistics, and emphasized the value of spoken subaltern vernaculars like Ossetian and Kurdish against hegemonic written languages like Sanskrit and Persian. It also had the paradoxical effect of both countering bourgeois nationalism and encouraging national consciousness. The article concludes with a discussion of how the Soviet experience may affect our view of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and of the linguistic turn in later postcolonial studies.