This essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the history of the senses as they combine with and are extended by film technologies. It argues that Khomeini's aim was to produce a transformed and Shi'ite Iran by purifying the sensorial national body by means of film technologies.

The study of Iranian history in the Safavid period is at a relatively rudimentary stage. Despite the wealth of chronicle, biographical, numismatic, documentary, and journalistic material available, few monographic studies of Safavid institutions have been produced. As Minorsky pointed out four decades ago, “not until all the available sources have been properly scrutinized and more material…discovered, shall we be able to get to the bedrock of social and economic conditions under the Safavids.”

His admonition holds true for political institutions as well. Certain fundamental features of the political life of Safavid Iran are well known to its students. But aside from the state structure itself, as analyzed by Minorsky in his translation of and commentary on the Tadhkirat al-muluk and in articles by Roger Savory and Ann K. S. Lambton, other aspects of political life—for instance the Safaviyya and the persistence of Sufi loyalties in political, life, the character and evolution of the qizilbash as a political party, the political integration of local aristocrats (e.g., the maliks of Farah and Sistan and the divs of Mazandaran), and the organization and functioning of tribal uymaqs—remain largely unstudied.

It has long been accepted, almost as a Cold War truism, that the first direct confrontation between Soviet Russia and the United States took place over Iran in February, 1946. According to the traditional picture of Cold War origins, Russia's refusal to evacuate her forces--together with her simultaneous efforts to establish a puppet regime in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan--tipped the West off as to her global intentions. America and Great Britain promptly registered protests within and outside the United Nations, and, in the first effort at containment, prevented direct Soviet penetration of the entire Middle East. After Iran, the West was forewarned. As a leading textbook notes, in pointing to Russia's reluctance to withdraw, “Soviet power was prepared to move into any position that the Western states were not willing to defend.”

Most memoirs of American policy-makers stress that the United States had responded, and responded of necessity, to Russian incentive.

From 1928 to 1932 the Pahlavi regime of Iran negotiated with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) to revise the D’Arcy Concession. These negotiations, conducted by ‘Abd al-Hosayn Teymurtāsh and the chairman of APOC Sir John Cadman, ended in failure when Rezā Shah unilaterally cancelled the D’Arcy Concession in November 1932. This article argues that “equitability” was the goal of the negotiations. An agreement was ultimately impossible to reach, due to differing ideas on either side regarding what was equitable, changes in the international oil economy and instability within Iran itself, leading to an unequal agreement in April 1933 that confirmed APOC’s long-term security but served only the short-term needs of Iran.

Yezidi mišūrs are one of the rarest written sources on the history and religion of the Yezidis. The special value of mišūrs is that Yezidism is characterized mainly by the oral transmission of religious tradition. The article provides an overview and a description of the four versions of Mišūr of P’īr Sīnī Bahrī/P’īr Sīnī Dārānī (Mişûr of Pîr Sînî Behrî/Pîr Sînî Daranî), one of which is thought to be produced in 604/1207 or 1208, making it one of the earliest sources of Yezidi history and religion. A collaborative version of the document is presented based on these four versions. Yezidi mišūrs belong to certain lineages of P’īrs and represent certificates of recognition of those lineages and those Yezidi tribes that were attributed to them as Murids. The manuscript that is examined here is rich in historical data related to the establishment of the Yezidi community. The document also lists the tribes that today are not Yezidi. Furthermore, the mišūr identifies a number of previously unknown followers and associates of Sheikh ‘Adi. This data will be instrumental in identifying various features of Yezidism in its formative age.

This article constitutes a preliminary attempt to explore the geographical dimension of premodern Persian lyric poetry from the perspective of the relationship between the historical adherence of a text to external reality and the rhetorics of intertextuality and performativity. The pretext for this exploration is the poem known as “Tork-e Shirazi” or “The Turk from Shiraz,” one of the most celebrated ghazals of Hafez of Shiraz. The analysis focuses in particular on the first two lines of the ghazal, whose rich and ambiguous imagery has challenged the community of readers, interpreters, and scholars for centuries. On the basis of historiographical, formalist, and poststructuralist approaches to the study of lyric poetry, the article outlines a generative paradigm that analyzes a given text from the perspective of its abstract, genre-specific, conventionally negotiated, and referential levels of meaning. The contribution of geocritical studies will be combined with rhetorical analysis to conceive of Hafez’s text as a geopoetic map in which the cities of Shiraz, Samarkand, and Bukhara are put in conversation with the mental and historical representations of Iran and India between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, during the transition from the Mongol to the Timurid models and ideals of power.

Soviet scholarship on Iran is extensive and highly organized. Just in the year 1980, 119 articles and books pertaining to Iran were published in the Soviet Union. The publications dealt with such topics as history, literature, economics, and geology (and do not include journalistic coverage of current events). The scale of Soviet scholarship on Iran since World War II is so vast that it would be hopelessly cumbersome to try to review or even list all the books and articles. This essay will attempt to provide an overview of the history of Iranian scholarship in the Soviet Union and Imperial Russia, to describe how the study of Islamic Iran in the Soviet Union is organized and oriented, and to look at a few of the most interesting works of recent years.

In the early twentieth century, Iranian Baha'is were at the forefront of efforts to promote modern schooling for girls in Iran. Using previously untapped published primary sources and archival records, this article examines the history of the Baha'i schools for girls in the context of modern schooling of Iranian girls and assesses their contribution to female education in Iran. This contribution was significant and all the more remarkable considering the Iranian Baha'is’ numbers and resources and the restrictions under which they operated. Most notably, in the spring of 1933, less than two years before the forced closure of Baha'i schools by the Pahlavi state, 4 percent of all females in Iran's accredited schools were enrolled in Baha'i schools. The Baha'i community's most prestigious school, Tarbīyat-i banāt in Tehran, was by this time Iran's largest girls’ school. Outside Tehran, in some localities, the only girls’ schools were run by Baha'is, and in others a significant portion of all female pupils were enrolled in Baha'i schools.

The major goal of this study is to examine the origins, development and peculiarities of the Iranian peasants’ extra-economic obligations to the landlords and the body representing them, the state, in the period between the fourth and the seventeenth centuries. Defining feudalism as a mode of production, it focuses only on the various obligations of the Iranian peasantry during this; period in an attempt to show that the feudal characteristics of servile obligations existed in Iran, reaching their heights under the Mongols in terms of legal attachment to the soil.

Feudalism is viewed as a mode of production which has two complementary aspects: the productive forces and the relations of production. A feudal economy is marked by a more or less “static” pattern of reproduction since the surplus product is spent for non-productive purposes. The act of production is largely individual in character, and the division of labor is rudimentary. Feudalism is also identified with a natural economy, i.e., an economy in which the product is produced not for sale, but for personal use.

Analysis of British policy towards Iran during the shah's final years has tended to be the preserve of those who formulated it. In general, it has focused on the extent to which British policymakers predicted the events of the Iranian revolution (published accounts by British policymakers include: Anthony Parsons, The Pride and The Fall: Iran 1974–1979 (1984); David Owen, Time to Declare (1991); Ivor Lucas, A Road To Damascus: Mainly Diplomatic Memoirs from the Middle East (1997), and “Revisiting the Decline and Fall of the Shah of Iran” (2009)). This article is different in both its sources and scope. Unlike any other published study on Anglo-Iranian relations, it relies on government records recently released in the National Archives. Instead of focusing on the British response to the Iranian revolution, it seeks to account for the strength of the shah's leverage and illustrate its consequences during one of the most important periods in Iran's history.

Censorship has been as much a part of Iran's literary history as betrayed love, bewitched lovers, and broken love affairs. In other words, it began long before the establishment of the "Imperial Printing Office" during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (ruled 1848-1896).

In earlier times some dissident writers were forced to lick off the ink from pages of their writings. Others had their mouths filled with gold or silver. Some were thrown in dungeons or seas. Others were exiled or executed.

Modern rulers have been no less adamant or imaginative in their methods of silencing opposition artists. "Mohammad 'Ali Shah had the two writers and orators, Malek-ol-Motakallamin and Sur-e Esrafil, hanged in the Bagh-e Shah Garrison, while he himself sat on the balcony facing the gallows and ate an entire plateful of rice and kabob as he watched." Farrokhi Yazdi (1889-1939) had his lips sewn together.

This essay on Qajar architecture in Isfahan is part of a more general investigation of urbanism, politics, and the shape, iconography, and meaning of the city in the nineteenth century. Aspects of architecture and the phenomenology of urban construction will be discussed within a broader thematic inquiry on Qajar Isfahan in two parts. The first discusses the various historical images of the city while the second will focus on the major trends of Qajar architecture in Isfahan within this context.

Research on Qajar art and architecture in Isfahan has been largely guided by an inquest on the former Safavid capital as a center of high politics and culture. This narrow focus accounts for historiographies and interpretational lacunae in the study of Qajar architecture in Isfahan. The following discussion hence is a first exploration of the city's architectural structures and one that frequently raises more questions than answers.

In 1911, The CZECH Folklorist Albert Wesselski Published His Two volume compilation Der Hodscha Nasreddin, still considered one of the most comprehensive and reliable collections of anecdotes on Khwaja Nasr al-Din (Turkish: Nasreddin Hoca), the most widely known protagonist of humorous prose narrative in the Near East. Wesselski chose to subtitle his work “Turkish, Arabic, Berber, Maltese, Sicilian, Calabrian, Croatian, Serbian and Greek tales and anecdotes,” thus indicating the main geographical region in which tales on Nasr al-Din are in circulation. On the other hand, the geographical outline does not suggest a lack of awareness on Wesselski's part of the fact that the Mediterranean cannot be said to monopolize the famous jester. Being familiar with problems touching on the dissemination and spread of popular tales and their protagonists, Wesselski consciously profited from a large number of publications accessible to him in various European languages.

Much of nineteenth-century Iranian history is still written from European materials--travellers’ accounts, private papers, diplomatic or commercial archives--and nowhere is that disadvantage seen more keenly than in social and economic studies. The most recent, exceedingly useful compilation of economic selections for Qajar Iran, The Economic History of Iran 1800-1914, edited by Charles Issawi, has only two extracts from first-hand nineteenth century Persian sources. Inevitably that gives a false perspective to any discussion of the internal economic structure of the country, and likewise social attitudes are glimpsed through the palimpsest of western interpretations. A basic prerequisite is the more systematic collection and classification of Persian material, from government archives, vaqf or private possession; it is only their intensive study that will provide the information about and insight into the social and economic problems that are beginning to be sketched on a more theoretical or discursive level; detailed monographic studies, on regions, towns, communities, classes, individual trades or industries, have to clothe the skeletal hypotheses which otherwise might run the risk of empty theorizing.

Recent research has found that discrimination against Islam and Muslims is deeply rooted in Australia. This report explores whether or how recent Iranian migrants have experienced racism, discrimination, or Islamaphobia in Sydney. These questions are explored by focusing on their experiences and issues regarding their making of new lives in Australia. This article suggests that recent Iranian migrants are experiencing far less discrimination than other Muslim diasporas in Sydney. Concluding that despite recent reports by some researchers grouping various Muslim populations together as regards Islamaphobia, there is a necessity for investigating discrimination, stereotyping, and Islamaphobia against particular diasporas to determine the needs of the Muslim population at large.

This article analyzes Behbahani's narrative and poetic works as they reflect different sociopolitical discourses over decades and discusses her contribution to the rise of new literary discourses in different periods. These discourses reflect the pre-Revolutionary committed and post-Revolutionary feminist literary movements and, in recent years, an emerging trend toward expression of the cultural exigencies of modernity. This new development results from efforts for renewed literary modernity, in which feminist, reformist, and civil society movements find common ground for concern. Behbahani's poem, “I Will Rebuild You, Oh My Homeland,” is analyzed to show that recent re-readings and public performances of this older piece may signify a literary shift regarding issues of modernity.

Political satire has had a prominent part to play in the social and political sphere of journalism in Iran since the appearance of an independent press in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper examines the problems of political satire in the Iranian press during the 2000s with respect to their historical context during the past century. The paper argues that, addressing the essential relationship between satire and criticism, and the primary role that criticism has in the freedom of press, what happened to political satire and satirists in Iran can be seen as an index of the freedom of the press and journalistic expression for an era.