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.

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.

It is not yet possible to say with any certainty what the total number of Babis may have been. According to the Bab himself, in a work written in the latter part of 1848, 100,000 adherents had been converted during the first four years of his career (MacEoin, 1982:117-18), a figure also referred to by the Russian Ambassador Dolgorukov in February 1849, by the Iranian chief minister, Amir Kabir (Dolgorukov, 1966:19), and by the British minister Sheil in May 1850 (Momen, 1981:7n). That this figure was very much a guess, at least where the two diplomats were concerned, is underlined by Sheil's reference to an alternative (but presumed to be less likely) figure of 50,000. Whatever the case, no detailed support for any figure can be supplied because of the semisecret nature of the Babi organization.

This article highlights the continuities and discontinuities between the settlement policies of the late Ottoman state and early Republican Turkey. It argues that although there was a certain degree of evolution in the language employed by the state between the late Ottoman and Republican periods, there is a significant amount of overlap between the policies pursued by the Committee of Union and Progress which seized power in 1913 and the Kemalist regime established in the early 1920s towards the Kurds. In short, the emergence of settlement policies aimed at assimilating the Kurds into the Turkish nation are not an innovation of the Kemalists; it is possible to trace them to the late Ottoman period. This is substantiated through a comparison of two laws relating to settlement; the 1916 “Ordinance Outlining the Transfer and Settlement as well as the Sustenance and Maintenance for Refugees arriving from Conflict Zones” prepared by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Tribes and Refugees and the Settlement Law of 1934, which was implemented in Republican Turkey and which remained on the statute books until 2006.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries diverse, and sometimes competing, movements of cultural renaissance emerged in the Middle East. Within this context, the Kurdish cultural renaissance in the Kurmanji dialect appeared relatively late and moreover its fruits were curtailed by two major events: the First World War and the establishment of the Turkish republic. From 1923 onwards, the task of animating the Kurdish cultural renaissance fell on the Kurds exiled first in mandatory Syria and Lebanon and then in Europe. In exile, Kurdish intellectuals benefited from some advantageous conditions such as freedom of speech and organization. Yet Kurdish intellectual endeavors in the Levant were to face political, social and economic challenges. Using French records and Kurdish newspapers, this article explores both the opportunities and the constraints for the consolidation of the Kurdish cultural renaissance under colonial rule. In doing so, the article intends to enrich the debate on the formation of nationalisms in the interwar era on the one hand, and the relationship between colonial powers and minorities in the Middle East, on the other.

This paper assesses the extent to which the modern historiography of Iran is indebted to a nationalist construction of Iran’s past, rather than proceeding from impartial and critical historical research. The paper pursues this aim by applying the distinction between history (as a scholarly discipline) and memory (as a nationalist construct) to one of the central tropes of the country’s historiography. According to that trope, Iranian history can be summarized as a succession of violent invasions by foreign “races,” which never stamped out Iran’s separate ethnic identity. This resilience is attributed to Iranian civilization’s inherent superiority, which Iranianized the invaders and thus ensured Iran’s survival as a primordial nation. The analysis shows that—counter-intuitively—twentieth-century Iranian historians, instead of subjecting this narrative to critical assessment, have in fact played a central role in developing it into a self-serving historiography. Special attention is given to Zarrinkub’s seminal Two Centuries of Silence.

Zoroastrian Dari, also known as Behdini or Gavruni, is an endangered Iranian language spoken by the Zoroastrian minority who mostly live in Yazd and the surrounding areas as well as in Kerman and Tehran. Zoroastrian Dari is a unique Iranian language on account of its historical background and large number of subdialects. This language is only a spoken language and not a written one, but it seems that remnants of this language are attested in the Avestan manuscripts, particularly in the colophons. This paper provides a study of the existence of Zoroastrian Dari in the personal names in the colophons and Sālmargs of the Avestan manuscripts.

By conceiving two emergent nation-states as a single region linked by conjoining roads, shared technologies and circulating researchers, this essay traces the emergence of a common “intellectual infrastructure” that during the interwar decades enabled European, American, Iranian, Afghan and Indian scholars to promote archeological and architectural interpretations of the Iranian and Afghan past. Taking Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana as a fixed point of reference, the following pages survey the motor-linked sites where these new disciplinary approaches were developed and disseminated. By positioning Byron amid a larger cadre of investigators publishing in Farsi, Dari and Urdu no less than English, French and German, the essay shows how shifts in Iranian perceptions of the ancient and medieval past were part of a larger regional development, unfolding not only in familiar dialogue with Europe, but also in conversation and to some degree competition with nationalist scholarship in Afghanistan and India. Together with the journals, museums, learned societies and congresses which were launched in the 1920s and 1930s, cars and cameras—those key tools of the “age of speed”—were central to these learned ventures. Far from generating uniformity, this shared intellectual infrastructure enabled multiple interpretations of the archaeological and architectural past that were nonetheless mutually intelligible and methodologically consistent.

This study concerns the native language of Shirazi Jews, most of whom live in diasporic communities outside Iran. The language Judeo-Shirazi belongs to the Southwest Iranian group, as do most other native languages spoken in southern Iran. As such, Judeo-Shirazi shows general agreements with native rural varieties spoken in inland Fārs. There are, however, phonological features suggesting that Judeo-Shirazi is an insular survivor of the Medieval Shirazi language, from which a sizable literature has survived dating back to the fifteenth century.

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.

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.

This article explores the relationship between academic studies concerning Iran in Meiji Japan (1868‒1912) and Orientalism in Western scholarship. Many researchers who have limited their definition of Iranian studies to the professional works published since the 1930s have concluded that there is an indirect relation between Iranian studies in Japan and Orientalism. In contrast, this paper takes it in a wider sense to mean all academic studies regarding Iran. The paper focuses on two such important proto-academic fields regarding foreign countries in Meiji Japan: geography and international politics. It concludes that the pioneering Iranian studies scholars in the Meiji period were not totally immune to Orientalism on the one hand but, on the other, that their research on Iran was less closely connected to imperialism than the Western scholarship that Edward Said famously critiqued.

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.

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.

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:

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”?

The article examines the travelogues kept by the Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah during his European tours in 1873, 1878 and 1889. To the monarch, Europe appeared to be an exotic and at times troubling place and he recorded his experiences with delight, criticism and humor. Focusing on his notes on Germany, the article explores Nasir al-Din Shah's encounters with people on the streets and at court, and in particular his perception of the female sex. Scholarship has either neglected the diaries or rejected them as a historical source, referring to the strong influence of literary convention and the Shah's alleged lack of understanding of the political, social and cultural conditions in Europe. Drawing on the uncensored versions of the diaries, the article argues that a closer look at the texts reveals fruitful, often amusing, insight into the monarch's experiences with social roles and cultural patterns alien to him. It suggests that a more careful reading of the diaries will also be beneficial in regard to the Shah's perception of European history and monuments, technology and scientific innovations, and landscape.

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.

Abbas Kiarostami's filmmaking draws on the aesthetics of modern Persian poetry, especially the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri. In his films, Kiarostami, impacted by Sepehri and Farrokhzad's “de-politicized” poetry, “de-experiences” our perception of reality. Kiarostami aestheticizes everyday life by employing non-manipulative film stylistics. In films such as Through the Olive Trees and Where Is the Friend's House? he uses a minimalist approach by employing amateur actors and children, depth of field, and minimal camera work to enhance Sepehri's philosophy of novel outlook. Through a masterful intermingling of poetic discourse with his film sensibilities, Kiarostami has achieved a profoundly humanist approach to cinema. Kiarostami mixes the two genres of documentary and fiction to remind the audience of the artificiality of constructing a factual point. To attain this goal, he sometimes uses an ironical and witty cinematic language that is harshly self-critical and self-reflexive. Kiarostami is a poet/philosopher who “writes” his poetic films with camera.

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.