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.

The Rise and Demise of the 1920-21 Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran in Gilan played like an intense drama in modern Iranian history. It provided Iran with an example of a national liberation movement and a peasant-backed guerrilla force; it introduced to the country the founders of the Iranian Communist Party, exercising social authority and power in what they considered to be a liberation movement; it offered a brief experiment with socialism which ended tragically. Its principal leader, Mirza Kuchik Khan, combined an intense radical nationalism with a strong sense of politically engaged Shi'ism, thus providing Iranian opposition movements in the twentieth century with some of their archetypal characteristics. The defeat of the republic led to the death of Mirza Kuchik Khan (1880—1921) and the continued domination of Iran by Britain.

In the course of the 19th century Iran was drawn into the network of the international economy mainly through foreign trade. Immigration into Iran was negligible, unlike some other countries of the Middle East and North Africa and, until the very end of the period, foreign investment was very small.

This survey of foreign trade emphasizes mainly the first half of the period and attempts to answer five broad questions:

1. (1) What was the growth in value and quantum of trade?

2. (2) What was the composition of imports and exports?

3. (3) With which countries did Iran trade?

4. (4) What were the channels through which trade flowed?

5. (5) Who carried on the trade?

I have converted all figures into pounds sterling, since the pound was both the stablest currency and the one most widely used in international trade.

This article examines the nature of Iranian–Russian diplomatic relations in the half century after the death of Shah ᶜAbbas I in 1629, probing the conflicts and mutual interests that prompted the two states to exchange envoys in this period of diminishing high-level contact. In particular, it seeks to reconstruct the Russian mission that visited the court of Shah ᶜAbbas II in 1664. By all accounts, this mission was treated in a most humiliating way in Isfahan, seemingly in accordance with what outsiders describe the contempt the Iranians felt for Russians. A careful examination of the available sources shows that the poor treatment of its members was due as much to concrete geopolitical concerns and anxieties as to the sense of civilizational superiority the Iranians may have felt vis-à-vis Russians.

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.

This paper surveys the history of American support for Iranian counter-narcotics policy between 1945 and 1989. In particular, it explores the general failings of Tehran's attempt to ban the domestic production and consumption of opium. The significance of this period is two-fold. First, this essay argues that American-backed efforts to combat the opium trade in Iran highlighted the detrimental effects narcotics had upon both state and society in Iran. Second, it suggests that the Iranian ban upon narcotics helped to stimulate a rise in Afghan opium production before the Soviet invasion of 1979.

The history of Isfahan in the pre-Mongol period has not yet received its due measure of scholarly attention; the focus of research has tended to be on the seventeenth century, when Isfahan was the brilliant capital of the Safavid empire. Nonetheless, it is quite evident that the city was, in pre-Mongol times, no less brilliant a center of Islamic culture as articulated in both Arabic and Persian. No book-length study on the city's earlier history is known to me. This article does not aim to fill this gap, but to follow the theme of the present issue which is historiography rather than history. It focuses on the “history” of Isfahan written by Mufaddal b. Saᶜd b. al-Husayn al-Mafarrukhi al-Isfahani, Kitāb maḥāsin Iṣfahān.2 The work was written most probably between 1072 and 1092. Nothing is known about the author except that he came from a respected Isfahani family with many generations of learning and nobility behind it.

This essay explores two primary concerns in the art and artistic practice of contemporary Iran, namely “identity” (i.e. local, historical, imagined and collective identity and also self-identity) and “exoticism” (which appears inevitably related to the first), both of which (identity and exoticism) involve challenges relating to the “self” and “other” and the issue of “expectation”. It suggests that these issues see broader contextual socio-political parallels. The first apprehension relates to the concept of identity which addresses how artists have interpreted contemporary aesthetics in the light of national and indigenous ideology. The second refers to the ever-present obsession with cultural and frequently social concern with which Iranian artists are engaged within the country. The two concerns are integrated, in the way that the second is seen to be the outcome of the first. Some critiques are based on the issues of cultural commodification, anti-canonical West, cultural formulation, and also the stereotypes rooted in the preference and interest of the market.

The biographical dictionary is perhaps the best known and commonest type of local history at least for the pre-Mongol period of Iranian history. It is well known that for quite a few Iranian cities, just as for cities, towns, and regions in other parts of the Islamic world, dictionaries of this type were written from the third/ninth to the seventh/thirteenth century. Until the seventh/thirteenth century, the standard language for this literary genre was Arabic even in non-Arabic-speaking countries. Later, starting with the seventh/thirteenth century, some of the works were translated into Persian. But the translators did not limit themselves to a more or less truthful rendering of the original text, but took many liberties with it. Thus, because of the often important changes introduced by the translators, it seems more appropriate to speak of Persian versions or adaptations rather than translations.

In the first part of this article the books belonging to this genre known to be extant are presented, with a brief look at their translations.

We commonly think of Iran as a unified entity with a political history beginning somewhere between the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., a period roughly corresponding to the time of the religious figure Zoroaster and the political figure Cyrus the Great. Culturally, Iran reaches further back in time through an epic mythology that pictures Aryan heroes in struggle with Turanian invaders and links the ancient and the mythic with the modern and the real. Conceptually, Iran begins as an empire and ends up as a nation-state, following a path similar in our minds to the movement from imperial Rome to modern Italy. The reality, however, is distinct from the myth. Iran has always been a multi-cultural society divided into a number of socioeconomic formations—a sedentary agricultural formation based in the Central Iranian Plateau, surrounded by pastoral nomadic and seminomadic formations located in the Zagros Mountains and other border regions.

The Russians with the British, some now cheer,
have made a solemn oath this very year,
that within the politics of Iran,
they will not interfere from this time on.
It's a shame that the appeased of this land,
are content with the matter now at hand,
for when cat and mouse together lie,
the grocer may's well kiss his store goodbye.
Iraj Mirza, 1907(On the Anglo-Russian Treaty)

This paper is a study of early U.S. policy towards Iran and its significance in the field of twentieth-century Iranian-American relations. The paper also has the broader objective of investigating the roots of Iran's hostility towards America during the 1979 Iranian revolution. The early history of Persian-American relations has rarely been examined but, as I will argue, it was during this time (i.e., 1856-1921) that Iranians conceived an image of America as a sympathetic power—an image which the United States government falsely promoted and which resulted in Persia's overly heightened expectations of America. When these expectations were not met in later periods (i.e., 1953-1979), Iranians reacted with a magnified sense of hatred for the United States. The hostility expressed during the revolution came as a great shock to the United States.

One of the major trends in experimental theater refashions the representational and presentational techniques of ancient rituals, medieval dramatic forms and popular performing traditions to create new forms of dramatic expression. In pre-revolutionary Iran, the proponents of this trend included those who worked with Iran National Theater and Theater Workshop. The 1979 revolution heralded the arrival of a different kind of drama in response to a host of new subjects and restrictions. However, unlike the political upheavals of previous periods which led to catastrophic discontinuity in the development of Iranian theater, it did not result in a complete breach. The post-revolutionary practitioners continued working with the templates devised by their pre-revolutionary colleagues, creating a dramatic tradition that has produced several masterpieces during recent decades. The purpose of this paper is to put the history of this experimental trend in perspective and examine the works of three of its major post-revolutionary practitioners. As such it will not focus on the history of indigenous forms or western-style theater in Iran, but on the recent history of this experimental mode and how its practitioners have refashioned Iranian performing traditions.

In 2005, Iran outlined its goals in economic, science and technology for the next twenty years, Sanad-e- Cheshm Andaz-e Bist Saleh (The Twenty-Year Vision Document), a working plan to raise the country's ranking to that of the first in the region. This article aims to map Iran's scientific and technological performance over five years since the ratification of the plan. Three main areas of science and technology—the percentage of GDP invested in knowledge, scientific performance and technological performance—were used to compare Iran's scientific output with a set of regional countries. The study revealed that Iran's investment in science to inspire technology (the linear model) has been able to nourish scientific performance in the form of rising publication, whereas the neighboring countries followed a more diversified pathway and inspired science from technological advances. Thus, the number of countries in the region capable of competing with and even outstripping Iran in terms of technological and hence scientific performance has increased.

Alevis, the largest religious minority of Turkey, also living in Europe and the Balkans, are distinguished from both Sunnis and Shiʿites by their latitudinarian attitude toward Islamic Law. Conceptualizing this feature as “heterodoxy,” earlier Turkish scholarship sought the roots of Alevi religiosity in Turkish traditions which traced back to Central Asia, on the one hand, and in medieval Anatolian Sufi orders such as the Yasawi, Bektashi, Qalandari, and Wafaʾi, on the other. A new line of scholarship has critiqued the earlier conceptualization of Alevis as “heterodox” as well as the assumption of Central Asian connections. In the meantime, the new scholarship too has focused on medieval Anatolian Sufi orders, especially the Bektashi and Wafaʾi, as the fountainhead of Alevi tradition. Critically engaging with both scholarships, this paper argues that it was the Safavid-Qizilbash movement in Anatolia, Azerbaijan, and Iran rather than medieval Sufi orders, that gave birth to Alevi religiosity.

This paper has two purposes. One is to look carefully at the way that the stories of Sālih and Samson are told in the Edinburgh fragment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History and its accompanying illustrations, and the messages that these convey. The second is to explore the interplay of text and image in what might be termed “the Moses cycle” and to consider the motivation for the unusual textual and pictorial emphasis on Moses. Several aspects of the cycle are analyzed: Moses as an antetype of Rashīd al-Dīn himself, the impact of the Qur’anic text and Moses as a precursor of the Prophet Muhammad.

Islamic chronicles have always been an important source, and in most cases the only source, for studying the history of the Middle East and Central Asia. Consequently, scholars have, as a rule, concentrated on the facts contained in them while overlooking their narrative styles. Moreover, the complexity of many chronicles has made it difficult for scholars to grasp their contents on the one hand while making it easy for them to be critical of these sources on the other.

However, a number of scholars have formulated a quite different approach to the language of medieval works. For example, I. Yu. Krachkovskii has concluded that it is necessary to consider the Quran not only a religious, philosophical, and legislative composition, but also a work of fiction. A. K. Arends has the same opinion of Bayhaqi's eleventh-/fifth-century chronicle, Tarikh-e Mas'udi.

This paper examines a partnership between the British Council and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) that emerged in March 2001 as a result of their shared aspiration for collaboration in scientific, academic and cultural arena. The alliance came as a surprise because after twenty-three years of antagonism on the part of the government of the IRI, the hostile attitudes were put aside virtually overnight to reunite with an old adversary for a mutual collaboration. The present qualitative study examines the reasons behind the start of the partnership, the domains within which the British Council was permitted to operate in Iran, and the reasons behind the end of the partnership. The data were gathered from various sources, including field-notes, policy documents analysis, personal interviews, and various online sources. The findings reveal that the duration of the partnership was closely intertwined with the rise and fall of the reformist administration, under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). The partnership began mainly due to efforts made by the reformist administration to take the IRI out of its international isolation and thus became inactive not long after the reformist administration, and eventually came to an end in January 2009, under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This paper discusses the role of social entrepreneurship and the discourse of techno-nationalism in defining national selfhood in contemporary Iran. To examine the issue, this paper develops an in-depth case study of the development of stem cell research, and shows how an alliance between the leaders of the scientific community and Iran's politico-religious authority contributed to building technological capacity in the field of stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The paper also highlights how the preliminary success of stem cell research, along with other knowledge-intensive technologies, has created a shared feeling of national pride and has served as the material base for the contemporary discourse of techno-nationalism. The paper concludes with the notion that the techno-nationalist discourse has the inherent potential to unwittingly help to redefine the dichotomy between Iran and the West in such a way that it becomes less antagonistic, should other factors permit.

This article deals with the emerging discourses and concerns that have dominated the Iranian art community mainly since 1997. It discusses the existing, or rather conflicting, views of the current situation of the visual arts in Iran as expressed in recent artistic events, productions, and exhibitions as well as in critical reviews. It does not fully discuss the variety of artistic genres in Iran, but examines the dominant ideas from the main opposing factions of cultural and artistic thought. It also aims at identifying the structural changes in Iranian art as well as the prevailing artistic policy of recent years.