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.

Several works in Persian and English have detailed Iranian women's participation in social, political, and literary activities of the Constitutional Revolution. The present essay attempts to look critically at the discourses that informed, and were in turn rearticulated and transformed by, these activities. It will be argued that in the early years of the 20th century the very concept represented by the word zan was a contested one; that its homonymic ambiguity (meaning both woman and wife) signified the ambiguity of womanhood itself. Further, it will be argued that this ambiguity resided in the integration into the Constitutionalist language of two conflicting discursive elements regarding women—a contestatory rearticulation that charted the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of defining a new womanhood.

This paper aims to understand the consequences of US-led sanctions on two important industries in Iran: the oil and gas industry and power plant construction. Using qualitative methods and providing empirical evidence, this paper demonstrates the shortcomings of the pro-sanctions argument in the Iranian context. This paper argues that pro-sanctions literature is more inclined towards American politics; it ignores socially recurring effects such as empowering self-reliance in the target country. In the Iranian context, while sanctions regimes are beyond the control or power of industry managers, they have acted as a double-edged sword. On one hand, the sanctions have imposed extra costs on domestic companies in acquiring technological knowledge. On the other hand, they have stimulated policy-makers' determination and empowered a self-reliance doctrine amongst them.

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.

Women's sport has always been a challenging subject in Muslim countries and Muslim women have had to face various constraints regarding their participation in sport and exercise, which also influence their attitudes to sport. This study aims to explore the attitude of Iranian female university students toward sport by survey method (N = 1,120) and qualitative interviews (N = 50). The results indicate that the majority of the participants have negative attitudes to sport, and accordingly they do not practice it. Various macro-, meso- and micro-level factors were found as perceived barriers. From the results it can be concluded that the media as a tool for raising awareness to providing role models and shaping the social values of mainstream society does not take a positive role in order to develop the culture of women's sport, and to change the attitude of female students and their social environments to sport in Iranian society.

Young people play an important role in shaping Iran's politics but have only a marginal role in its economy. Youth (ages 15–29) are more than one-third of the country's population and are better educated than the generation they are replacing, while accounting for more than two-thirds of the unemployed. Demographics have thrown the marriage market out of balance, with a “shortage of men” of about 25 percent, while economic pressures have reduced the ability of youth to get married and form families. The higher education system has expanded to absorb ever greater numbers of youth but because education quality is low this has not helped in reducing unemployment. The demographic pressures have amplified since 2008 when the economy entered a period of stagnation. The economic crisis has hit Iran's youth particularly hard, especially those from lower economic backgrounds because the country's rigid formal labor market preserves jobs for older workers. The record number of youth entering the labor market has to wait longer for a regular job or has to take up part-time and informal jobs. In either case, their difficulties in marriage and family formation are intensified.

Numerous observers have noted that a feminist generation of educated young women appears to be emerging in Iran, despite the anti-feminist discourse of the Iranian government. Evidence from three surveys conducted in 2000–2003 confirms and complicates these observations. Educated young women are significantly more likely to espouse feminist attitudes of various sorts than other Iranians, including educated young men. In addition, educated young women are significantly more likely to work outside the home, marry later, give birth later, have fewer children, and have more egalitarian marriages than other Iranian women. However, surprising proportions of older Iranians also espouse feminist attitudes, and a majority of respondents in one nationally representative sample of urban Iranians identify themselves as proponents of women's rights.

The Iraqi invasion of southwestern Iran on September 22, 1980, appears to have halted, though not reversed, one of the most intriguing experiments in modern history: Khomeini's attempt to create a Shi'ite theocracy in which the state is totally subordinated to the clergy and its powers are drastically circumscribed. What follows is an analysis of the theoretical foundations of this attempt, and of the way it has been carried out in practice.

In the chapter of Economy and Society devoted to the analysis of the church-state problem, Weber states:

The precondition for the strength of hierocratic charisma is its autonomy, an autonomy which the world religions of salvation grant in principle but which does not always find adequate institutional translation.

At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, it may be said that Afghans began to form exilic communities in Iran rather than simply intermittent groups of seasonal migrant workers. The binding institutions of these communities, in particular the community of Shi‘a Afghans in Mashhad, were political parties and groups of mojahedin, religious centers and leaders, and cultural figures—notably poets. Poetry (both oral and written) in court Persian and local vernacular, has a long tradition in Afghanistan—much of which is shared with Iran—and continues to be the most respected and most widely practiced of the arts. It has also always had a direct, but not always approving, relationship with power and politics. Among refugees, it has been a vehicle for political commentary and incitement to jihad; for dialogue between Afghans and Iranians; and (in lyrical forms such as the classical ghazal or contemporary blank verse) for expressing subjective experience, thought, and emotion, particularly love or the pain of exile, with some license to criticize or subvert social convention. In this ethnographic analysis, I examine the role of poets and poetry in the cultural life of Afghans in Iran since 1979, focusing on the latest generation of young poets and tracing the influence of modernist Iranian literary developments on their work in the context of the gradual depoliticization of Afghan communities in exile, in particular after September 2001. I also argue that literary activities have been important in sustaining a separate ‘Afghan’ identity that has helped many young people transform their sense of marginalization to one of pride both in their non-Iranian origins and in their common heritage with Iranians.

A major ambiguity attaches to the zurkhanah, the traditional gymnasium of Iran. It is celebrated as an abode of chivalry and traditional values such as generosity, forbearance, and fair play, but it also has a reputation of harboring unruly elements on the margins of legality, men who are willing to rent their strong-arm services to whomever pays most. In this article I propose to explore this ambiguity and trace its roots in the social history of the institution. To do this, I shall first provide a quick update on the state of traditional athletics today, then expound on the paradox, and finally attempt to explicate it by discussing the identities of three social types that frequented the zūrkhānah.

The Iranian zūrkhānah, literally “House of Strength,” is the traditional gymnasium in which athletes practice a series of gymnastic and bodybuilding exercises that have been called “ancient sport,“ varzish-i bāstārī, since 1934.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-09 was a major watershed in Persian history. It ended the traditional system of government in which the Shah, as the Shadow of God on Earth, ruled his people without any legal and institutional limitations. And it introduced the constitutional system of government in which “the people” were sovereign, and their elected representatives made and unmade ministers, laws, budgets, concessions and foreign treaties. In this revolution the political crowd played a prominent role. An organized procession in April 1905 raised the issue whether the Shah could freely choose his administrators. A larger assembly, nine months later, initiated the demand to limit the monarch's arbitrary powers by creating a “House of Justice.” Spontaneous riots in June 1906, and the killing of demonstrators, poured a stream of blood into the wide gap between the government (dawlat) and the nation (millat). A general strike in July, and the exodus of 15,000 from Tehran into the British Legation, forced the court to grant the country a written constitution with an elected House of Parliament.

The historical accounts of pre-Islamic Iran have diverse allegorical meanings. These meanings are embedded in narrative structures that terminate in the Muslim conquest of Iran and the death of Yazdigird III (d. 31/651 or 652), the last Sasanian king. In early “Islamicate” historiography, the accounts of ancient Iran served as an allegory of the Persian (differentially identified as Furs, 'Ajam, and Majūs) submission to Islam. The narrative termination of Persian sovereignty (sal ṭanai) coincided with the commencement of Islam and the closure of the cycle of prophecy inaugurated by Adam. The co-termination of Sasanian dynastic rule and the cycle of prophecy mark the transition to a new and “superior” moral and political order—divinely sanctioned to last until “the end of time” (ākhir-i zamāri).

“Forced migration” is defined for the purposes of this study as the transportation of a considerable number of a population group (whether nomadic or sedentary), normally in family units and accompanied by livestock and chattels, to be permanently resettled in a region remote from their home; and undertaken as an act of policy by the ruler or his agents. It does not refer to attempts to sedentarize nomads on lands adjacent to their pastures, or to simple dispossession of lands without alternative provision.

Examples of forced migration have been noted in Iran and its imperial appendages from the earliest to the most recent times, chiefly as punishment of stubborn opponents or refractory subjects by a vigorous, centralizing monarch.

From the 12th to the 14th centuries three major Sufi orders took shape in Central Asia: the Yasavīyah, derived from Khoja Ahmad Yasavī of the town known later as Turkistan; the Kubravīyah, founded by Najm al-Dīn Kubrā in Khwarazm; and the Naqshbandīyah, named after Bahā’ al-Dīn Naqshband of Bukhārā. Of the three, the Yasavīyah remained an almost exclusively Central Asian ṭarīqah with particular appeal to the Turkic population, while the Naqshbandīyah became a truly international order active throughout the Islamic world, rising to phenomenal power and prestige within Central Asia and spreading far beyond its confines, most dynamically to India and the Ottoman lands. The Kubravīyah, however, found its greatest development outside Central Asia, and indeed, by the end of the 16th century, was almost entirely displaced in its native region by the increasingly dominant Naqshbandīyah.

This article reviews the ways in which class, status, social mobility and their cultural ramifications have been considered (or failed to be considered) in recent ethnographic studies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It argues against the trend of privileging “resistance” to an oppressive state as a theoretical frame for documenting social phenomena in Iran: lifestyles and consumption patterns cannot be interpreted merely as signs of political rebellion because they are endowed with symbolic value as status attributes in a society whose class configurations are shifting. I present a number of sources and concepts that help to rethink these phenomena, and show how the experience of Afghan refugees living on the margins of Iranian cities illuminates both the opportunities and constraints created by the Islamic Republic's uneasy mix of political Islam, populism and neoliberalism. A focus on aspiration to upward mobility becomes a useful analytical lens that allows us to sidestep reductive dichotomies such as tradition/modernity or religion/secularism that are in practice blurred by its very pursuit.

Although theater forms as we know them in ancient Greece (circa 490 B.C.) and India (from the first to the fifth centuries A.D.) did not exist in Iran, some fascinating rituals and entertainment evolved into various dramas and performances.

Archeologists believe that certain figurines, seals, and stamps from western Iran dating to 4000 B.C. (depicting men with ibex-horned heads, hairy bodies, wearing shoes with turned-up toes and carrying wide collars receding down the back into bird tails) could represent ibex gods or “masters and protectors of game” or “mythical sorcerers playing the part of animals or humanized animals.” It is possible, however, that they were masked men, half sacred, half profane, who served as we shall see later on, as entertainers.

In October 522 B.C., a magi who had usurped the Iranian throne was killed by Darius of the Achaemenian dynasty, thus beginning a general massacre of the magis.

The social scientist studying the modern world is inevitably struck by the importance of peasant rebellions. In some countries--such as Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, China, Cuba, and Vietnam--peasant rebellions have helped bring about communist revolutions. In others--such as Mexico, Algeria, Kenya, and recently Angola--they have contributed toward the success of nationalist revolutions. In yet other countries--including Spain, Greece, Peru, India, Phillippines, Malaya, and Indonesia--they have helped shake, even though they have not destroyed, the foundations of the old order. The social scientist studying Iran, however, is struck not by the importance but by the conspicuous absence of any large-scale peasant rebellions in the modern era.

Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world is noted.