This paper will discuss the role of the jesters at the court of Nasr al-Din Shah, with more particular reference to Karim Shire′i, whose humor gained a lasting place in popular memory. It will look at the jesters in the context of their essential role, to remind the king that he was human. This poses a number of questions with regard to who the jester was and how he carried out his function. First, there is the question of the relationship between the Shah and jester, the degree to which it could become personal and why. Second, the paper will look at the jester's identity and the way it is defined by his relationship with the Shah. Third, it will consider the jester's relationship with the court as a whole and his function within a strictly related hierarchical environment. All of these required that the jester constantly maintain a delicate and sometimes dangerous balance, which could only be carried out by one who inherently possessed a particular kind of wit. Consideration will be given as to what the jester represented both to the court and to the public, specifically with reference to the widely held concept of the wise fool, and its religious implications. This relates to the issue of ‘innocence,’ (‘the mad have cast upon their tongues words from the unseen’) whether natural or assumed and its purpose in allowing freedom to the jester to draw the ruler's attention to unpalatable truths. Further points to explore are the relationship between the jester and chaos in an ordered environment and how far the jester pressed the boundaries, or even exerted political influence, and how far his function was in fact conservative and destined to help preserve the existing order. Last, the paper will look at the origins of the court jesters as far as they are known and consider their implications for the rise of these individuals. It will attempt to establish if each was characterized by a particular kind of buffoonery by comparing and contrasting them. In particular, the jokes attributed to Karim Shire'i will be discussed both in terms of how far it is possible to identify him as their author with any certainty and how far they may be considered as constituting a genre of humor. Finally, the legacy of this humor within the popular memory will be assessed.

The life and works of ‘Abd Allah b. al-Muqaffa', probably the Abdala the Saracen with whose mention the Christian humanist Pico della Mirandola opens his great Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), have received some attention in modern scholarship. His life and work, however, have not been systematically studied in the context of the revolution of his time—namely, the ‘Abbasid revolution. This paper will try to show that Ibn al-Muqaffa's impressive intellectual output appears in a new light when it is properly put in this context, and is seen from the perspective of the breakdown of the Umayyad state and the ensuing process of revolution.

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, many causes have spurred a renewal of interest concerning the reign of Reza Shah, unmatched perhaps since his fall. Firstly, one must mention the increasing interest and curiosity about the modern history of Iran, manifested in this country and abroad. Secondly, the opening of government and some private archives has provided new perspectives on the era. Thirdly, one can point to a kind of nostalgia for the period, as reflected by the many popular histories and biographies of debatable value published in recent years.

Several archival repositories, such as the National Archives (sāzmān-e asnād-e mellī), the Institute for Cultural Studies and Research (mo'assaseh-ye moṭāle'āt va pazhūheshhā-ye farhangī), and the foreign ministry, began publishing documents rather than opening their archives and making their documents available for research.

Languages have their own distinctive styles of argumentation. It seems some languages like Arabic and Persian have a preference for using the “oral” features of parataxis, formulaicity and repetition as persuasive devices in argumentation. The purpose of this article is first to examine these “oral” characteristics in Persian argumentation, and then to tie together the two areas of research: the study of orality and the study of metadiscourse. The article claims that these oral characteristics in Persian are means of gaining rhetorical effectiveness. Therefore, they should be considered as metadiscourse devices used to create a bond between writer and reader.

The history of Iran, in the years just before World War I is dominated by a general institutional crisis called the Persian Constitutional Revolution. Although the narrative line most often followed through those years is a sequence of political and military encounters, the revolution was in fact a systemic crisis which affected nearly all of the institutions that contained the Persian people. Like all revolutions, however, it had its own idea of what it was up to; in fact, it had several. In common with other modern revolutions, it held the principle to be self-evident that through the revolution a new freedom was being created and a corrupt tyranny destroyed. Such views were, of course,rationales not interpretations of history, but like the latter they extended backward in time to describe the period before the revolution. In short, they explained not only what the revolutionaries themselves were doing, but what much of the history of Qajar Persia amounted to.

A central controversy in the economic history of Iran revolves around the nature of the changes that occurred in the nineteenth century: was there an economic “decline” or, on the other hand, can one see the “beginnings of modernization” in the long reign of the Qajar dynasty from 1800 to 1925? Did living standards rise or fall? Did the level and type of consumption improve or deteriorate for the majority of the population? And were the dominant trends positive or negative within the subsectors of peasant agriculture, tribal pastoralism and urban production and trade? The Qajar period has found a number of good historians but has been plagued by problems of conceptualization and interpretation. Two very different judgments have arisen: on one side, Nowshirvani, Gilbar and Nashat have advanced analyses highlighting progress, in terms of “commercialization of agriculture,” “modernization of institutions,” “rise in per capita incomes,” and so forth. On the other, Issawi, Bharier and Keddie have painted more sober portraits emphasizing “relative economic stagnation and very slow development,” especially compared with Egypt and the Ottoman empire.

This paper examines the relationship between remediation and intertextuality in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008), arguing that the act of absorbing and transforming other texts and media within one film creates new conditions for collective vision within the post-revolutionary Iranian discourse of visuality. Focusing on the faces of 114 actresses as they watch a film adaptation of the story of “Khosrow and Shirin,” Kiarostami challenges the post-revolutionary modesty laws and their emphasis on not looking at women and at avoiding a spectator–image relationship based on the fulfillment of the desiring male gaze. By making women the spectators, the film suggests that there is no collective vision without women's vision.

This article looks at the origins of the army of Nader Shah (reigned 1736–1747) and the nature of the Persian armies in the Safavid period before considering in more detail the composition and structure of the army at its peak in the early 1740s. It suggests, building on work by Rudi Matthee, that it was only under Nader's tutelage that Persia fully embraced gunpowder weapons and that this initiated a Military Revolution (not just a revolution in technology, but in drill, discipline, and army size as well as ethos) that, but for Nader's untimely death, could have brought about the wider social and economic changes that Geoffrey Parker and others have associated with the Military Revolution in Europe.

The question of the continuity of rulership and governmental structures between the Sāsānid and early Islamic periods merits detailed study, but has not yet received it; yet it is evident to the most superficial observer that this continuity was in many spheres a close one. Obviously, there was a violent change in the field of established religion and cult; the state church of Zoroastrianism was overthrown and the new faith of Islam introduced. Yet even here, it is not impossible to discern some elements of continuity. Islam could conceivably be viewed as a new, purified form of Zoroastrianism brought by a new prophet. Allāh and Iblīs could be equated with Ahūra Mazda and Ahriman; there was a common belief in a creation story, in a resurrection, heaven and hell, and in angels and other spirits; both religions had the practices of worship and prayer and sacred texts; and the fatalistic aspects of Zurvanism, the form that Zoroastrianism took in the later Sāsānid period, was not unlike the determinist views that became influential, if not universally acknowledged, in early Islam.

Qajar irredentism brought Persia to make some advances in Baluchistan in the 1830s and 1840s, but in early 1860s, the continuation of this advance was threatened by one of Britain's main imperial interests and needs: the Indo-European telegraph line, which was to cross the Makran Coast overland. Persia sought to use this need for getting British recognition for its claims over Baluchistan. This put the British under pressure, for they did not wish to alienate Persia, through whose territories the line was to pass. The British government tried to appease the Persians with a simple declaration that the telegraph would not affect their claims and by taking the telegraph away from disputed territories. One major thing was faulty in this “solution,” for it was the British who decided which territories were “disputed” or “undisputed,” not the Persians.

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.

The history of cosmetics in the Iranian world has suffered from neglect, perhaps because the subject has been deemed to be too frivolous for serious research. Yet, not only does the study of cosmetics shed light on the evolution of taste in fashions and canons of beauty, but more importantly it gives additional information on trade relations and cross-cultural influences. Conversely, the history of trade relations helps Us to clarify some elusive issues in the history of cosmetic fashions.

In this article, a brief introductory section on the Iranian concept of haft qalam ārāyish (or “the seven items of cosmetics“) will be followed by a historical overview of the evolution of cosmetics in antiquity and the relevance of fashions in the Mediterranean world to those in pre-Islamic Iran. In the Islamic period the focus will be on the haft qalam ārāyish in Iran and in regions under the influence of Irano-Islamic culture.

The relationship between economic factors and political development has received considerable attention from scholars, historians, and social scientists. The classical formulation of economic factors and political violence is to be found in the much-discussed and opposing views of Alexis deTocqueville and Karl Marx. These two views explain revolutions either through economic development or economic destitute. According to deTocqueville's analysis of the French Revolution, steady prosperity and general economic improvement were responsible for the onset of the revolution. The Marxist interpretation of revolution in capitalist societies sees it as the culmination of class warfare between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—a process in which the proletariat and the masses find themselves increasingly impoverished and degraded.

Numerous other studies of revolutions have elaborated or modified either the Marxist or the Tocquevillian hypotheses. Crane Brinton's investigation of revolutions indicates that revolutions tend to take place in societies undergoing economic growth.

Matthew Canepa's recent study of the cultural and political interactions between Rome and Sasanian Iran, has provided an opportunity to reassess Sasanian rock reliefs in light of the claims and counter claims between these two empires. Since victory over Romans meant a victory over an-Erān, and generated the most potent of all farrs, i.e. the Aryan farr, many rock reliefs were conceived to show its reflection on the king. What is most interesting, though, is the array of nuances that are incorporated in them to account for the differences that were particular to each situation.

Avetis Mikailian, better known as Sultanzade, was born in 1890 in Maragheh, a small town in northwestern Iran, to an extremely poor peasant family. According to an Armenian source, he attended a small Armenian school in his native town between 1903 and 1906, where the first section of Hnchak (the Armenian left Social-Democratic Party) had been founded in 1896. A former director of that school, Alexander Der-Vartanian, has reported that the young Avetis was sent to Djamaran, an Armenian ecclesiastical college in Ejmeyasin, near the city of Yerevan, although his father, Husayn Sultan, and his mother, Maryam Badji, had already embraced the Muslim faith. The school director relates that the young Avetis had, during the course of his studies, been strongly influenced by the Hnchak Party, a majority of whom later turned to Bolshevism.

Comprising some 900 pages in the Furughi edition, the works of Sa'di include a variety of genres. The Kulliyyat (Complete Works) opens with six “Risalahs” (Homilies), containing orthodox religious and moral teachings. The homilies precede the worldly and anecdotal “Gulistan” (Rose Garden) and the more profound and spiritual “Bustan” (Orchard)--Sa'di's best known works. Next are the “Qasa'id” (Elegies, or Odes) in Persian and Arabic, the “Marasi” (Thronodies), and the “Mulamma'at” (Bilingual poems in Persian and Arabic). The “Tarji'at” (Strophe Poems), the “Tayyibat” (Sweet Poems), the “Badayi’” (Cunning Odes), the “Khavatim” (Gems), and “Ghazaliyyat-i qadim” (Old Sonnets)--altogether 300 pages in the Kulliyyat--consist mostly of love poems, covering the whole gamut of this emotion from the secular love of women and boys to the mystical love whose object is union with the divine. Miscellaneous shorter pieces appear at the end of the Kulliyyat under the headings “Sahibiyyah,” “Masnaviyyat” (Couplets), “Qata'at” (Short Poems), “Ruba'iyyat” (Quatrains), and “Mufradat” (One-liners).

This paper argues that the mature form of the political doctrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89), Iranian Shiite religious authority and architect of the Islamic Republic of Iran, grew out of an encounter with the modern understanding of the state and the concept of sovereignty. Khomeini’s political doctrine, called the Absolute Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, although based on a religious foundation, should be studied as a break with the traditional understanding of political power in Shiism. It will be argued that such a political doctrine can play the same role as the Christian rhetoric of the early modern political thinkers played, pave the way for modernization of Shiite political thought, and prepare the ground for a modern temporal conception of politics.

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.