More than any other Factor, The Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 and its aftermath have contributed to the growth of the Iranian diaspora population worldwide. The revolution precipitated the exodus of Iranian exiles or political refugees, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran further discouraged the return of many Iranians already abroad. As a result, by about 1990, 637,500 Iranians were enumerated in official national censuses of the following ten countries on four continents: U.S., Canada, West Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, France, Norway, Australia, Israel, and Japan.

With an Iranian population—defined as persons either born in Iran or of Iranian ancestry—of 285,000 in 1990, the U.S. contained nearly half (45%) of the Iranians living in the above-mentioned Western and Asian countries. This overwhelming concentration, an availability of good data on immigrants (including Iranians), and a number of Iranian students who have become social scientists in the U.S., have encouraged research on this group.

Iran has often been the subject of many nonfiction films and television programs produced by Western countries, particularly Britain and the United States. Although these films about Iran were made by a diverse group of private and governmental agencies, overall they have tended both to emphasize the supremacy of West over the ancient, backward East and to support the evolving policies and ideologies toward Iran held by the Western governments and their multi-national corporations.

Western audiences who viewed these films and programs as enployees of corporations, members of armed forces units, students in schools or the general public, must have experienced a certain self-congratulatory gratification with their own ideological and material conditions and a confidence in the policies espoused by their governments toward underdeveloped countries such as Iran. From the scant information available, it seems that the responses of the Iranian audiences (especially of those educated in the West and whose views of Iran, as we shall see later, partially coincided with those of Westerners) to these films were composed of a mixture of shame for their failure to modernize, and exasperation at being incorrectly or insufficiently represented.

As in Many other Countries Around the World, A Gender based double standard (one set of social and moral norms governing the male and another governing the female) has always existed in Iran. In modern Iran, prior to the 1978-79 revolution, the traditional Iranian family was patriarchal and patrilineal. From early childhood, members of each gender were initiated into their respective roles and were socialized to a double standard of sexual morality. For instance, women who sought and experienced the same privileges of sexual freedom as men were not respected, but rather became victims of social ostracism. Women suffered from many social disadvantages, and their position, in most cases, was far from equal to men's.

Because pre-revolutionary Iran was a traditional society, the issues of dating and intimate relationships, especially for young women, were sensitive. Some of the sharpest contrasts between Western values and traditional Iranian values existed in these areas.

In this essay, Iranian exile cultural production is examined via a cultural studies approach, applying Hamid Naficy's work on the concept of liminality and its productive potential to analyze the Iranian women's memoir phenomenon of the past eleven years. Focus is placed primarily upon Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis, which is analyzed as part of this larger memoir phenomenon. I will argue that Persepolis is a prime example of exile cultural production—as a site for experimentation within various genres (here, that of the memoir and graphic novel), and also for identity negotiation, self-reflection, and cultural translation—thanks to the liminality and hybridity of an artist and author who feels she is “in-between.”

On 3 December 1979, almost one year after Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi left Iran, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran replaced the monarchical constitution of 1906. The new constitution was to guarantee that the monarchy was abolished and the Islamic Republic system of government was enforced in its place. The constitution was to observe the Islamic and the nationalistic aims of the revolution with regard to the demands of a public that came from various social, religious, ethnic, and political backgrounds. Thus the 1979 constitution included differing components, which necessitated the amendments and the modifications that were added to the constitution in 1989. The constitution and its development are subjects that have been discussed in detail by scholars of modern Iran, among whom Asghar Schirazi stands out for his comprehensive study of the constitution. The following translation of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran highlights the relationship between the 1979 text of the constitution and the 1989 amendments in an attempt to contribute to the ongoing discussions on this subject.

In late 1997 Iranian football made international headlines. In an article on the Islamic summit held in Iran, The Economist wrote that almost "anything can become a political football in Iran, including football." This attention was precipitated by the political ramifications within Iran of the national team's tie against Australia in Melbourne on November 29th, which secured it a place in the 1998 World Cup in extremis. Since then, major international soccer games have often given rise to massive street demonstrations by young people. That football should cause so much excitement in Iran is not astonishing if one looks at it from a global perspective. Football is a game in which each team works together to try to occupy as much of the "territory" of the other as it can, culminating in attempts symbolically to "conquer" the other side's stronghold by kicking the ball into the goal. The playing field thus becomes a metaphor for the competition between communities, cities, and nations: football focuses group identities.

Drought, increased population, war, air pollution, climate change, industrial and agricultural production, sanctions, inefficient water and natural resource use, and lack of enforcement of existing environmental regulations have contributed to Iran’s current environmental crisis. Insufficient water resources are forcing people to migrate, putting pressure on others. Aquifers are being drained. Air pollution has made living conditions in Iran’s cities increasingly challenging. Wind erosion is furthering the desertification of agricultural land, creating greater production demand on remaining arable areas. Biodiversity is under threat. On the other hand, Iran’s environmental future can be positively influenced by the collaboration of the public, private and non-profit sectors. Awareness and education, along with greater financial and human resources, will be necessary to tackle the problem.

The Safavids evolved from a Sufi order (1301) into a messianic movement (1447) before they finally established their imperium with world-conquering aspirations (1501). Isma'il, the first pīr (spiritual guide) of the Safavid order to assume the political role of shah, claimed to be the reincarnation of a host of prophets and kingly heroes from Iran's cultural past. “Prostrate thyself! Pander not to Satan! Adam has put on new clothes, God has come,” writes Isma'il in his poetry (Divan), composed as he, together with his adepts, the Qizilbash (Redheads), conquered Iran and Iraq (1501-13).

In the spring of 1939, Tehran's recently Constructed Amjadieh stadium hosted a part of the public celebration of the wedding ceremony of crown prince Mohammad Reza and Princess Fawzieh of Egypt. Several thousand spectators, mostly men and women well-clad in ‘international’ dress, enjoyed a spectacle featuring short presentations of over a dozen so-called ‘new’ and ‘old’ sports such as soccer, acrobatics, and zūrkhānah exercises. Wearing his Boy Scout uniform, Mohammad Reza was present(ed) as the energetic leader of these sportsmen and women and reflected in persona the hope for a healthy productive nation, while the athletes on the ground below were proving to the Egyptian guests that not only the husband-to-be of Fawzieh, but also many of his countrymen were imbued with the spirit of modern sport and a healthy life.

It was not the first time that the Pahlavis had placed sport at the center of a public celebration. After the crown prince's return from schooling in Switzerland, similar spectacles—although on a smaller scale—had been organized on his birthdays, and he often appeared in public as the leader of the Boy Scout movement, too.

This paper explores the ever-shifting symbiosis between the village motif, social justice and populist politics in Iran over the past three decades. The village has remained a recurring motif in Persian literature, employed by a variety of writers and state institutions for a range of means. As a symbol, it has been a conduit into which any ideology can be poured; the village allegory can be manipulated to both condemn and support the official policies of the state. A comparison of Iran’s pre- and post-revolutionary literature sheds light on the ways the state literati perpetuated an idealized picture of the village as an authentic, sacred space, increasingly associated with religious nationalism during the 1980s. The paper examines the key socio-political influences on the evolution of the pastoral motif, the work of state-sponsored official poets, and the impact of the village on the cultural doctrine of the Islamic Republic.

Khaqani's opening verse in his famous qaṣīda of Ivan-i Mada'in has a recognizable resonance in the works of many Persian writers, poets, and historians of pre-modern times who tried to make sense of the events and upheavals of the past. For them ‘ibrat, which in this context may loosely be translated as a grievous sense of historical consciousness, was the essence of the past. It made them see in the ruins of the once mighty empire, or the records of kings of bygone times, the never-ending cycle of the rise and fall of worldly powers. The Sassanian arch of the palace of Ctesiphon in the above verse was a powerful metaphor for the believer and the skeptic alike.

In modern Persian historical accounts, for all intents and purposes, this sense of ‘ibrat was lost to the multitudes, if not to a handful of the adept.

The role of religion and of clerics in the events leading to and during the Iranian revolution of 1977-79 provides an instructive exercise in formulating a theory of cultural influence. The institution of religious training (the madrasah system) has been in decay and under political pressure throughout this century. That the clergy should have emerged as central actors in the revolution, therefore, says something about their cultural, rather than institutional, centrality. The popular idioms of Islamic protest—deriving from the story of Karbala and from the modernist reformulations associated with Dr. Ali Shari'ati—are elaborated with reference to the learning of the madrasahs. That forms of open, secular, political discourse were suppressed under the Pahlavi monarchy helped ensure that Islamic rhetorics would become the idiom of political debate and helped give clerics (both preachers and teachers) extra leverage. The struggle over the role of the clerics continues, a struggle in which Ayatollah Khomeini himself has intervened by drawing ambiguous distinctions between obfuscatory clerics and revolutionary ones, and by chastising clerics for meddling beyond their competence.

In 1990, The U.S. Census Reported that 226,123 Iranian immigrants were living in the U.S., a growth of slightly under 100,000 in a tenyear period. These were individuals who either were born in Iran, or were of Iranian ancestry but born outside Iran in a country other than the U.S. The almost doubling of this population over a short period of time, combined with the group's variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, has created some of the most diverse ethnic geographies in the U.S.

Traditionally, academic theories have focused on issues regarding chain migration, port of entry, the assimilation process, ethnic economy, and labor market participation to explain the geographic distribution of various ethnic groups and their shifts over time.

Ali Shariati was born in Azar 2, 1312 (November 23, 1933) to a deeply religious family in the provincial capital of Khurasan, Meshed. His forefathers were all important local religious scholars in the suburb of Sabzavar, one of whom, Allamah Mahmanabadi, received a royal invitation from Naser al-din (1848-1896) to move to Tehran to teach Islamic philosophy in Sepahsalar theological center, which he did for a short period. His father, Muhammad Taqi Shariati, still living, is a well-known religious scholar of national fame and an expert on Quranic exegesis. Muhammad Taqi broke two traditions: he moved to the city for good at the age of 20 and he stopped weaving, as he had been the traditional garb of the ulama. Ali attended modern schools, entered Teachers Training College, the newly founded University of Meshed, and finally left for Paris to study at the Sorbonne on a government scholarship.

Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has attempted to bring about a cultural revolution, aimed at replacing the old value system with new norms, building an ideal society based on Islamic criteria, and creating a New Islamic Person. In fact, one of the most important slogans of the postrevolutionary period has been: “Our revolution is a revolution in values.” Recognising the importance of the school in the process of character formation, the Iranian government has assigned the task of bringing about a revolution in values to the educational system.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Islamic Republic's efforts to create a new generation of committed and doctrinaire Muslims through the study of socialization in schools. Socialization in this context is defined as “the process by which people learn to adopt the norms, values, attitudes, and behaviors accepted and practiced by the ongoing system.”

Iran has a long history of effective and sustainable water resource management under arid and semi-arid conditions. However, today the country is faced with serious challenges in the water sector, including rising water demand and shortages, declining groundwater levels, deteriorating water quality, and increasing threats to the environment and various ecosystems. If these issues persist, tragedy will be the inevitable result. Over the last three decades tremendous efforts have been made to supply water, primarily through an extensive program of development, with dam building at the forefront. This paper offers an introduction to the different factors and elements influencing the water balance in today’s Iran and presents a perspective on the trend of dam building in recent times.

The question of who ran the Mongol Empire has long challenged historians, and various theories have emerged and retreated in answer to this problem. As far as the question of who ran the Persian part of the empire the answer has been made more elusive by the nature of the sources. Though excellent primary source material for this period abounds, for the most part it is written by the bureaucrats of the Il-Khanate themselves, most of whom were Persian. Very little Mongol material survives. It is this lack of Mongolian material that has prompted historians to speculate that perhaps none ever existed and thus that “the Mongols were happy to leave the tedious minutiae of government to those best qualified to cope with them.” In the case of Persia “those best qualified to cope” meant the traditional bureaucratic classes, and such individual luminaries as ᶜAta Malik Juvaini and Rashid al-Din and families such as the Qazvinis and Simnanis spring to mind.

The great nomad conqueror Timur set out to conquer the whole of the former Mongol Empire and almost succeeded. Although the dynasty he founded lasted a relatively short time, he became a legendary figure within the Turco-Mongolian tradition of the Middle East and Central Asia, the subject of an elaborate myth connecting the Timurid dynasty with that of Chinggis Khan.

The dynastic claims formulated by Timur's successors remained alive and relevant to those within the tradition up to the nineteenth century. Timur's myth assumed its final form well after his death, but it had its origins in Timur's own formulation of his legitimacy and his personality as a ruler.

Timur's achievements as the founder of a dynasty and a myth are the more impressive because he operated under severe restraints within both the traditions to which he belonged, the Turco-Mongolian and the Islamic.