This article discusses the reasons why Ferdowsi does not begin the Shahnameh with the episode of Zoroaster, which he quotes from the version of Daqiqi, but rather with an account of the creation of the world that, in contrast to Islamic historians writing before Ferdowsi, does not attempt to accommodate a Qur'anic view of creation and human history, but neither does he give a cosmology dominated or well informed by Zoroastrian theology. Similarly, Ferdowsi tends to present pre-Islamic Iran as having a consistent religious history, and perhaps avoids beginning with Goshtāsp's conversion to the religion of Zoroaster, as he makes Daqiqi appear to do, in order to minimize the role of religious conflict in Iranian history, again diverging from historians of the Islamic period writing before him. The article also explores the role of God in the Shahnameh and the absence of theodicy.

No documents chart more accurately the difficult road to liberation and the arduous journey of the Iranian woman than her poetry. It is a rich, virtually unexplored record of the development of her consciousness and identity, experienced within, but not limited by, traditional Iranian culture. Furthermore, an evaluation of the Iranian woman's poetry is indispensable to an understanding of her life and the cultural pressures she experiences.

I am talking about the poetry of, among others, Tahereh, better known as Qorratol'ayn (1819-1852), ᶜAlam Taj Zhaleh Qa'em Maqami (1884-1946), Parvin E'tesami (1907-1941), Parvin Dowlatabadi (b. 1922), Simin Behbahani (b. 1927), Lo'bat Vala Shaybani (b. 1930), Mahin Sekandari (b. 1940), Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), and Tahereh Saffarzadeh (b. 1936).

Unfortunately, most criticism of Iranian woman's poetry is rife with misconceptions, sexually biased assumptions, and tenacious refusals to confront this poetry on its own terms.

Poverty and insecurity in Afghan cities are intricately intertwined with conditions of “informality.” The term and the realities it describes refer to living situations in which basic needs and activities such as work, housing, and social security are unprotected by laws and standards. Immersion into such a convolution of informality determines the life of a majority among urban populations in Afghanistan and conveys a deep sense of insecurity for the urban poor. The paper looks at how rapid and unprecedented urban growth in Afghanistan goes along with rising levels of livelihood insecurity and explores how the urban poor cope with livelihood risks through a range of informal arrangements. Conceptually, the notion of “informal security regimes” helps capture informality as a coping strategy and how it relates to urban poverty in Afghanistan. Informed by extensive empirical fieldwork, the paper identifies different elements of the “informal security regime” in urban Afghanistan and explores their specific operations. The paper is mainly focused on the Afghan capital, Kabul, supplemented with evidence from other urban sites in Afghanistan.

In the late 1950s, when Iran was witness to the withering away of social norms and everyday practices concomitant with the country's rapid urbanization, a group of young Iranian film directors embarked upon a new cinematic trend, in attempts to screen the ethereal quotidian of Iranian life. Defining itself against what was perceived to be the “cheap” and “repetitive” commercial “Film Farsi” industry of the time, this alternative (alter-)cinema fused the local and global, by incorporating international cinematic elements in socially and politically conscious national films, and projecting them on local and international screens. Problematizing a homogeneous conception of historical time that subsumes the history of cinema into a conventionalized grand narrative of the Iranian 1979 revolution, this article works with a conception of heterogeneous historical time that first interrogates cinematic temporality autonomously and then in relation to the political history of Iran, especially the events of the 1978–79 revolution. This article explores how the distinct cosmopolitan alter-cinema of pre-revolutionary Iran was born from a cinematic rupture in the 1950s, prompted by series of critiques and professional expectations that colored the attention paid to the vernacular and quotidian in film production.

The fascination for the Western world with Iranian cinema lies primarily with the fable-like developments of its stories which often plunge us into a world of exoticism and lured us with its singularity. Iranian war cinema born during the war between Iran and Iraq is not as well distributed in Europe and films with English subtitles are difficult to get hold of. Whether it is interpreted as an anthropological document which opens a dialogue between the protagonist and the spectators, the “I” and the other, Iranian war cinema by Tabrizi, Sinayi, Hatamikia and Ghobadi, among many others, can be seen as a spiritual voyage where the soul hovers between absence and presence. In the wake of war cinema in general, one can draw parallels with mythology, the Judeo-Christian tradition, literature and art. Its function is not only didactic but cathartic, and the particularity of Iranian war cinema like no other is that it participates in the mourning process of a whole nation fighting against its own ghosts and in search of its identity. This article attempts to decipher the myths hidden behind the images presented by Iranian war cinema, paradoxically interweaving the traumatic with the aesthetic.

This article reconsiders the religio-ritualistic interpretations of the use of the rhyton within eighth-century CE Sogdiana. Through a close art-historical analysis, it argues that three eighth-century wall paintings from Panjikent illustrate a drinking game. This proposal expands the current breadth of meaning attributed to the imagery decorating Sogdian homes. Not only could the paintings illustrate epic narratives, religious veneration, or moral didacticism, but they could also celebrate conviviality, fun, and humor.

Over the past four months, the brutal, extralegal, and violent repression of protestors during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran has taken observers and participants by devastating and sometimes fatal surprise. Although not a drastic departure from past practices, the large scale and seemingly random acts of violence, such as the beating of protestors to death on the streets, the shooting of passersby and nonviolent demonstrators point blank, and the fatal torturing of detained protestors and activists, have marked new levels and scales of violence. In what follows I analyze this brutal repression campaign in relation to the institutional history of the Islamic Republic's armed units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as the most controversial entity among all. I contend that the IRGC's historic endorsement of firing at will as an accepted practice among its ranks has enabled the decentralized radical instances of violence. I will discuss how, despite the continued reliance on decentralized forces, their firing at will is not unanimously endorsed this time around, due to the different nature of the current movement and the deepening uncertainties and schisms in both the forces on the ground and the ruling elite.

The establishment of Jami‘at al-Zahra, the first official female seminary in post-revolutionary Iran, opened new possibilities for women to enter the male-dominated clerical hierarchy. The rapid growth of female seminaries increased the presence of seminary-educated women in the official religious sphere. However, as opposed to the male seminaries whose dominant role is to train mojtaheds who can issue a competent legal opinion, the primary role of female seminaries is to train educators and propagandists. Drawing on interviews, documents issued by seminaries and secondary sources, this paper concludes that in spite of the rapid growth of female seminaries, very few women reach the rank of a mojtahed, and thus, in no way weaken the male-centric seminary system in contemporary Iran.

This paper re-examines the causes of outbreak of Second Russo-Iranian War and the factors that played a role in its escalation into fully fledged war. The paper challenges the common perception that Qajar Iran played a major role in the outbreak of the war and proposes that the Qajar court took a defensive posture vis-à-vis aggressive Russian provocation originated in Tiflis and was merely reacting to it. The paper then examines policy differences between Tiflis and the court of St Petersburg as a contributing factor in the outbreak of the war. Finally, the paper examines two different and contradictory views of imperial Russia and its internal politics and military capabilities among Qajar Iran's decision makers during 1825–28. It is argued that the two perceptions eventually translated into two factions, each lobbying the shah for and against escalation of hostilities with Russia.

J. R. Walsh's Comments on the nature of historiography may appear strikingly simple and obvious, yet they provided the stimulus for this paper, which compares three minor Safavid historical works and aims to show that every document can: a) supply some historical information; and b) provide us with information about the author and the intention of the work.

In recent years, a number of Iranian American women have written and published memoirs of a return to Iran. One motif that these memoirs share is their concern with language as a key element of cultural identity. The article examines these memoirs as negotiations of identity through language. Relying on Joshua Fishman's anthropological definition of language and ethnicity as being, doing, and knowing, and on Taghi Modarressi's notion of “accented writing,” this article examines these writers in terms of their relationship to Persian as a key component of the self. As these memoirists narrate their journeys between Iran and the United States, they perform a translation of self across the boundaries of language. Some narrate an “accented identity” that celebrates hybridity; others acknowledge their assimilation into American society and into the English language. All attempt to reclaim Persian as an artifact, if not a medium of cultural belonging.

Recent archaeological excavations in Iran have contributed fundamentally to our understanding of the economic subsistence patterns in man's earliest communities. Excavations at the sites of Tepe Yahya in Kerman, Ali Kosh in Khuzistan, and Ganj-i-Dareh in Western Azerbaijan, to name but a few within different environmental zones and ecological niches, show that within the area of present-day Iran the cultural and economic transition from an earlier subsistence of hunting and gathering to settled village agricultural communities took place. This transition has been documented in other areas, i. e. Palestine, Anatolia, of Southwestern Asia. The development from a hunting and gathering economy to settled village agricultural productivity, often referred to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’, was not an historical event (taking place in a moment of time) nor restricted to a single geographical area, but a cultural process which necessitated millennia for its achievement. The important role which Iran played can perhaps best be documented by summarizing the developing economic subsistence patterns in three loosely defined periods of time about 7000, 6000, and 5000 B.C.

By bringing to bear previously unstudied Soviet archival documents and conducting firsthand interviews with former diplomats, the article traces the ways in which the Soviet Union sought out opportunities to reinvigorate deteriorated Soviet‒Iranian ties through cultural organizations and events in Iran during the decades following World War II. A variety of Soviet cultural representatives—from wrestlers to classical musicians to scholars of Iranian literature—were marshaled for this effort, which bore unexpected fruit considering the modest expectations of the Soviet leadership, ideological differences between the two countries, and increasingly dominant US cultural projection. The connections between cultural ties and state goals, Iranian perceptions of Russia, and the Soviet/Russian sympathies of some members of the shah’s government are among sub-themes examined.

As We Enter a New Century and Millennium, We Tend to View More entities as forged, made up, invented—constructed is the more professional term in scholarship—than we did at any time in the past. Not only poems, paintings and other artifacts, but a whole range of phenomena, from an individual's sense of identity, to categories of knowledge or scientific disciplines, to feelings of belonging to professional, ethnic, or national entities, are thought of not as “natural” or “given” but as imagined, constructed. Languages and cultures themselves are said to be constructs, more or less fictional occurrences set forth as real by the force of massive belief in their “realness.” Under such circumstances we might well once again raise the question of how one conceptualizes—or evaluates, to move the matter on to the axiological plane—those epitomes of collective cultural construction, namely culture-specific encyclopedias, works of scholarship that were once thought of, rather naively, simply as “research tools”?

Although ezafe has been studied by many scholars for many years, it does not yet have a transparent grammatical status. Grammarians have regarded ezafe as a polysemous “word” carrying over ten different “meanings/functions.” After a brief review of the previous treatments of ezafe, this paper will present a syntactic analysis, followed by a morphological description and a semantic analysis of this ubiquitous morpheme. It will also compare the distributional properties of other relevant bound morphemes with those of the ezafe. It will finally conclude that ezafe is a dummy clitic-like morpheme which is semantically void, while syntactically it functions as an “associative marker” which subordinates its [+N] host, on the left, to its following complements.

The article presents a systematic appraisal of the essential Russian- and English-language scholarship on Russian Oriental studies and particularly on Russia's Iranology. However, the main target of this article is to trace the discursive continuities and epistemological shifts which have existed in late imperial, Soviet and, partially, post-Soviet Russia's Oriental studies since the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the sources of the main Russian political, military and academic archives, the article offers an assessment of the question of rupture or continuity, which is based on a synthesis of the above-mentioned scholarship from an entirely new angle. Dealing with the seemingly overwhelming watershed of 1917, an analysis is provided that transcends the unhelpful continuity/change dichotomy, putting forward a new interpretation, which is informed by the Foucauldian conceptualization of the productive nature of the power/knowledge nexus.

In his Provocative Work The Continent of Circe, The Anglicized Bengali Writer Nirad Chaudhuri recasts the legend of Circe and Odysseus as a metaphor for India's relation to her “European” conquerors. In his version Aryan tribes who migrated into and/or invaded the Indian subcontinent in the second century B.C. were the first such conquerors to be ensnared by the allure of India's wealth. Once there they utterly forgot their Eurasian homelands, abandoned their vigorous steppe culture and degenerated into the colonized Hindus of whom Chaudhuri spoke with caustic contempt during the Indian nationalist movement in the twentieth century: