Despite being one of the pioneers of Iranian cinema's “new wave” in the 1960s, Daryush Mehrjui has maintained his position in the cinema as an influential filmmaker. He is still capable of making films which are both popular with public audiences and highly acclaimed by Iranian critics. Mehmaneh Maman (Mum's Guests), a social comedy he made in 2004, is one such film which has received little critical attention outside Iran. In this paper, the representation of “the nation” in Mum's Guests and the latter film's reception by local critics is contrasted with that of Ejareh Neshinha (The Lodgers, 1986); another popular social comedy which Mehrjui made almost two decades earlier. This comparison aims to examine the differences between the two films in the light of theories of postmodernism and globalization. It is argued that Mehrjui's representation of the nation in Mum's Guests demonstrates a more conscious acknowledgment of differences based on class, gender, ethnicity and religion; and a more inclusive approach to marginalized sections of Iranian society. The collapse of boundaries between “the local” and “the global,” as well as that of “high-art” and “low-art” are other key elements of Mehrjui's more recent film. The two films also differ in terms of their portrayal of themes such as happiness and solidarity, political/ideological conflict, and science and consumerism, which are explained with reference to the impact and consequences of globalization.

As a key primary source for the history of the eleventh-century Isma‘ili majlis, the Fatimid chief missionary al-Mu'ayyad fi al-Din al-Shirazi's autobiographical Sira offers a prime opportunity to consider the application of centralizing features of the Fatimid state in eleventh-century Buyid Shiraz. Previous studies on the Fatimid majlis have raised questions about an Isma‘ili core curriculum as well as the intended audience/s of Fatimid da‘wa teachings. This article situates al-Mu'ayyad's memoir in the broader context of the Persian and Arabic historiographical traditions in order to provide new insights into the transmission of Isma‘ili doctrines in different social settings outside of Fatimid Cairo. It concludes that Abu Kalijar's study sessions with al-Mu'ayyad suggest that Qadi al-Nu‘man's Kitab Da‘a'im al-Islam was used as a core text for introducing some of the main principles of Fatimid religio-political rule in addition to Isma‘ili doctrines to non-Isma‘ili audiences.

This essay discusses the various dimensions of diversity at Alborz, both when it was run by the American missionaries and when it was under Iranian management. In the first part, the ascriptive traits of human beings are the object of the analysis: gender, race, language, religion and class. In both periods Alborz was characterized by its openness to Iranians of different religious backgrounds, both teachers and students. The second part of the essay discusses the variety of the educational experience enjoyed by students, and concludes that it gradually diminished, as education came increasingly to be defined as instruction and extracurricular activities were reduced after the mid-1960s.

How could one translate into any European language a Persian poem as culturally and aesthetically embedded as this hemistich by Hāfez: beh may sajjādeh rangin kon garat pir-e moghān guyad. This is the central question Mohammad-Rezā Shafiʿi-Kadkani addresses in his essay titled “On Poetic Untranslatability.” For Shafiʿi, translation is primarily a function of cultural—and not linguistic—affinity. Therefore, he argues that Hāfez’s poem is all but untranslatable in European languages given their fundamental cultural difference from Persian. This article critically engages Shafiʿi’s essay by outlining and analyzing the set of problematic assumptions embedded in its rubric of untranslatability. It places Shafiʿi’s view on translation in conversation with theorists of untranslatability in comparative literature and translation studies. Ultimately, it outlines why untranslatability is not a useful conceptual framework for the analysis of linguistic and cultural difference.

The overthrow of the government of Mosaddeq has received considerable attention, scholarly and otherwise. The scholarly explanations differ in emphasis, but not in the general contours, particularly regarding the significant role of the Anglo-American secret services. There have also long been attempts to portray the overthrow of Mosaddeq as an isolated event taking place on 19 August 1953 and representing a conflation of royalist and traditionalist sentiments among soldiers and civilians. More recently it has been contended that it was not the Anglo-American secret services but the clerical nexus—prompted by Ayatollah Borujerdi, the highest religious authority in the country—which played the crucial role. This paper argues against reducing the overthrow of Mosaddeq's government to the events of 19 August, and views it as a protracted process. It further argues that assertions regarding the crucial and active role of Borujerdi are, on the basis of available evidence, untenable.

It is difficult to give more than a rough sketch of Iranian agriculture in the nineteenth century or to indicate any but the most general developments that took place in it. On the one hand, the government made very few studies of rural conditions and kept practically no statistics on land acreage or output; on the other, most foreign observers had little interest in the condition of the peasantry or agriculture as a whole. Nonetheless, because of the importance of silk in Iranian foreign trade foreign observers, especially British consuls in Rasht, took a special interest in various aspects of its culture and trade.

This paper sets itself the objective of studying production and trade in raw silk in Iran during the nineteenth century.

The Persian wine production myth centers on the relationship between a male vintner and his female vine and her daughters, the grapes. This myth, the earliest extant examples of which are found in qasīdas by the Samanid poets Rūdakī and Bashshār Marghazī and which was much developed by Manūchihrī and his contemporary Farrukhī, contains images of femininity, the mother–child bond, separation, violence, execution, and ultimate redemption. The grape harvest comes in the late summer and culminates in the Mihragān festival, a celebration focused on the grape and grape wine, at which poems containing versions of the wine production myth were recited. The present study maps the evolution of this myth over the span of a century through a close reading of eleven poems with specific reference to variations in narrative structure.

The coincidence of the appearance of two Circassian women as wives of ambassadors on the Anglo-Persian diplomatic and political stage has generated more than passing interest in academic and lay literature. Though the story of Sir Robert Sherley and Lady Teresia Sherley is better known in British circles, and has even generated renewed interest with two simultaneous exhibitions in 2009 in London, the story of Fath Ali Shah's Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Abol Hassan Khan, has not received sufficient attention, and has certainly not been fully explored in the context of the politics of Regency England. The present article revisits key moments of the life of the Sherleys and of Abol Hassan Khan and Delaram, his Circassian wife, but goes beyond the retelling of their journeys to focus on how the latter two's visit to England generated bawdy depictions in the popular press and became the vehicle for political satire quite unconnected to their persons.

In the late nineteenth century, Qajar Iran, like its neighbor the Ottoman Empire, faced the dual challenges of colonialism and modernity. This paper considers the role of art education and art production in its response to these forces, focusing on the leading court painter of the late Qajar period, Mirza Muhammad Ghaffari, Kamal al-Mulk (1848–1941), whose career bridged the late Qajar period and the early twentieth century. Early in his career, Ghaffari was recognized as the leading exponent of academic painting, yet by the constitutional period his art had evolved into a style representing contemporary Persian life, a style which was informed by nationalistic discourses current in intellectual and political circles. This paper's consideration of the evolution of his style from a European modernism to an authentic Iranian modernism includes Ghaffari's training as a painter, the role of photography in the development of his style, his travel to Europe, and parallels with the art and career of the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi.

In the majority of Islamic countries, the art of painting has been restricted to non-figural and geometric designs in the public sphere, and strictly limited to small-scale narrative illustrations of manuscripts in the private sphere. By contrast, Qajar Iran witnessed the development of large-scale figural painting. Such a decisive break with Islamic tradition—where religious and social beliefs were primarily expressed through textual and calligraphic means—indicates that Iran possessed a distinctive, strongly visual culture. Nevertheless, Qajar painting has been perceived in the past as an offshoot of European easel painting.

In fact, Qajar painting, most particularly during the reign of the second ruler Fath ᶜAli Shah (1797-1834), represents the culmination of a long-standing indigenous tradition of imagery in both monumental painting and sculptural formats, primarily utilized for the decoration of palaces, exemplified by the bas reliefs and sculptures of the Achaemenid palace of Persepolis. Wall painting predated and subsequently coexisted with the better known traditions of decorative and manuscript painting.

Iranians were aware of Sasanian history through traditional historical writings, but they knew nothing about Achaemenid history. Following European travelers to Persia from the fifteenth century, who were well prepared by reading the classical and biblical texts, Persepolis and Pasargadae were rediscovered and Achaemenid history re-established in the nineteenth century. The rise of Reza Khan to power and his grand emphasis on nationalism and ancient Iran that characterized his reign also left a deeper impact on Achaemenid studies in this period. In this paper the re-establishment of Achaemenid history and its development in nineteenth and twentieth centuries are discussed and reviewed.

Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.

One of the most prominent features of Iran's 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising has been the diverse profusion of songs created in its wake. Music has played an important role in Iran's social and political movements at least since the Constitutional Revolution when the poet and musical bard Abolqasem Aref Qazvini (d. 1934) effectively transformed the musical concert into a political congregation. Since then, musicians have given rhythm and rhyme to contentious movements all through modern Iranian history, most prominently during the 1979 revolution and again for the 2009 Green Uprising. Considering the important role of music in Iran's political movements, scholarship on music remains surprisingly marginal in Iranian studies.

The late Ilkhanid period saw a florescence of intellectual and cultural production in northwestern and west-central Iran. This article argues that a regional network with its center at Isfahan contributed to this creativity through the production of translation-adaptations between Arabic and Persian. In a period of episodic sectarian tensions, especially in the wake of Öljeytü’s efforts to declare Twelver Shiʿism the official religion of parts of ʿIraq-e ʿAjam, this local network produced a set of five bilingual treatments of parts of the literary legacy of ʿAli b. Abi Tālib (d. 40/661). The article argues that the authors and copyists of these texts sought, through their focus on the figure of ʿAli and their exploration of the ambiguities facilitated by bilingual composition, to expand a non-sectarian middle-ground.

How was Persian literature disciplinized in the twentieth century? This article addresses this question by focusing on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlining the sociohistorical processes that helped to transform scholarly and literary production into a social enterprise. A major outcome of these underexamined processes was the making of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949–79) in Kabul, the first modern encyclopedia produced in Persian. The article explains the multilayered significance of Āryānā's literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reified Persian literature as an object of academic study and national veneration in Afghanistan. A close reading of Āryānā's account of Persian literary history illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 1950s and its contributors’ adherence to a modern methodology. The present study places Āryānā squarely within a transregional ecosystem that brought about the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.

Boir Aḥmad is the territory of the largest tribe (or confederation of tribes) of Kohkīlūyah in South Iran, located roughly south of the Bakhtīyārī and west of the Qashqā'ī. Its population (75,000 in 1966) subsists on a mixed economy of agriculture and animal husbandry, which in the highly segmented mountainous topography necessitates a variety of nomadic and transhumant adaptations.

The political position within the wider Iranian context of the area presently called Boir Aḥmad has had a variegated history. Under the rule of the Atābegs of Lur-i Buzurg (12th-14th cent.) it was fairly well integrated and administered, with a flourishing economy and a largely sedentery population. In the following centuries, less stable "anarchic" forms of political organization seem to have prevailed, until the Qājār rulers tied the area to the center by appointing the local khāns as tax collectors and through interfering in their power struggles.

The paper presents an account of the founding of the Arya-Mehr (now Sharif) University of Technology, and the role that Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi had in its creation in 1965. The paper describes the landscape of science and technology in Iran in 1965, the year in which Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi appointed Mojtahedi to establish this university. It describes the various challenges that Mojtahedi faced in establishing the university, such as avoiding crippling government regulations and bureaucracy, hiring qualified faculty, attracting top students, developing an appropriate milieu for the cultivation of scientific and technological culture and, most importantly, setting the course for the university to become not only Iran's leading institution, but also one of world's credible institutions in science and engineering. The paper also discusses Mojtahedi's unique approach to these challenges, and how, despite his best intentions, he created the animosity and intrigues that resulted in his ousting in 1967. The university did in fact become Iran's leading institution in sciences and engineering, a position which it holds even today.

Only three out of her 36 short stories are available in English (two translated by the writer herself), and yet Simin Daneshvar (b. 1921) is Iran's first woman novelist and one of the country's most significant fiction writers. Daneshvar has published Savooshoon (the most popular Iranian novel), three collections of short stories, ten translations, and a memoir about her late husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Having retired from her teaching position at Tehran University, she lives in Iran and is now working on her second novel, The Wandering Island.

Daneshvar's literary work is a celebration of the feminine—her taste for life and love, her art of endurance and strength. While most of her female characters manage to survive, none reveals such stamina or resilience as the narrator of Jalal's Sunset. Confronted with the unexpected death of a husband, a colleague, and a collaborator, Daneshvar in this text portrays a real survivor.

This paper analyses Iranian television production on Public Access TV channels in Germany. It is based on a broader study with qualitative interviews, hermeneutic content analysis of 40 hours of aired TV programs and a ?dense description? of the production background. Iranian immigrants were amongst the most active mother-tongue TV producers on local Public Access Channels (so called ?Open Channels?) since these were first launched in 1984. These non-commercial channels aim to make alternative themes and voices heard in the local public. However, the 9/11 attacks led to increased difficulties of access for immigrants from the Middle East, such as limited airtime and the obligation to translate programs. These measures diminished dramatically the opportunities to present Iranian TV shows on Open Channels. From the perspective of Communication Studies, this paper aims to analyse the intentions and strategies of Iranian immigrant media participation, but also the difficulties of access to the public sphere in Germany.