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.

Gholamhoseyn Sa'edi, also known by his pen name Gowhar Morad, is one of the two or three most prominent writers of prose fiction in Iran today. His first published work appeared in 1956, and since then he has published some twenty volumes of short stories and plays, and several monographic studies of rural Iranian communities. Initially trained as a physician, Dr. Sa'edi has for some years now devoted himself almost wholly to writing. Most recently he edited four volumes of a new literary journal, Alifba, for the publishing house of Amir Kabir.

The present story is the first in a collection of three, entitled Gūr va Gahvārah (“Cradle and Grave“), that was first distributed some seven years ago and later confiscated.

When we got off the bus, the old man said, “Here we are.” There was a big rectangular square, and at each corner a long street like a hallway that stretched off into the darkness. The old man leading the way, we walked down the street across from us until we reached an open space and a long concrete bridge.

The Persians are Obscure in the Archaeological Record, and the routes and dates of their migration into Iran are uncertain. When the Persians appear in the textual record, it is in the context of their interaction with the regional powers of Elam and Assyria. Examination of the relevant sources highlights two areas of Persian settlement in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E.: the central Zagros Mountains region and modern Fars, the latter the core of the first Persian Empire (Old Persian Parsa and Greek Persis). Since there are no extant Persian inscriptions dating before the mid-sixth century, this analysis relies upon Assyrian and Elamite sources.

The Persians may have begun their arrival in southwestern Iran as early as the mid-second millennium. During the Middle Elamite period (c. 1600-1000 B.C.E.), Fars and its primary city Anshan (modern Malyan) were part of the kingdom of Elam. Sometime around 1000 B.C.E., Anshan was abandoned. Large-scale settlement cannot be traced in Fars after that until the Achaemenid period, over four hundred years later.

As an acclaimed work of twentieth-century Persian fiction, Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl has stirred much scholarly contemplation. Identical characters obscure the work; the resemblance amongst them seemingly originates in some mysterious old man. The paper first demonstrates how every male character resembles this old man. Thereafter, he is argued to be non-existent; all the characters, therefore, become Baudrillardian simulacra bound together through family resemblances. A language-game is then fashioned to represent the family. The metamorphosis of the narrator is followed to manifest how this language-game haunts the characters—other language-games. The paper hopefully sheds some light on an ambiguous aspect of the work and provides a model as to how one language-game takes over another.

Based on the discourse analysis of the statements of the university student organizations in the period between 1996–2006, this paper will address the pros and cons of five approaches to politics in the post-reform movement era based on five discourses among university students in the past decade of Iranian politics and their consequences for reshaping the Iranian polity. This article first discusses five socio-political processes, i.e., Islamicization, social differentiation, limited political competition, transformation of Shi'ite authority, and personalization of power, which led to four social and political schisms in Iranian society; inequality; political, social, and cultural discrimination; and secular/Islamist tension. Referring to these schisms, political discourses shape the ideologies and actions of Iranian student movements. These discourses are social justice, tradition, totalitarianism, pluralism, and Islamic democracy. Even if these discourses were no more than intellectual pronouncements by the university students, they have been powerful enough to extend to the Iranian political society.

This study employs keyword searches of literary databases such as Literature Online (LION) in an attempt to map the image of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry as it was molded by a proliferation of thoughts and ideas in a variety of contexts. Completeness is not possible, of course, but the article aims to identify and explore some of the major categories within which the image of Persia was formed and disseminated in the nineteenth-century. The scope of the study is not confined to a corpus of poetic works that were written specifically on or about “Persia,” but takes account of a broader range of poems, and attends to the structure, texture and variations of the presence of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry.

In a previous paper, on the basis of the definition of feudalism as a mode of production, it was shown that the extra-economic obligations of Iranian peasants in the period between the fourth and the seventeenth centuries resembled those obtaining under feudalism, though these obligations exhibited, also, certain peculiarities that could be attributed to the specific conditions of Iranian history. In the present paper, I will examine the other aspect of the exploitative feudal relations in Iran for the same period, i.e., the economic obligations of peasants to landlords and the state in the form of feudal rent. I will examine, more specifically, the extent of and the forms in which rent was exacted from the peasants by the landowning class and the state during the period in question.

The Armenian general Smbat Bagratuni's remarkable rise to military and political preeminence in the late sixth- and early seventh-century Sasanian Empire presents a fascinating historical question: how did a liminal figure, a Christian from a frontier region, become the “Joy of Ḵusrō” and “Warrior of the Lords” of king Ḵusrō II Aparvēz (590–628 CE)? This essay argues that Bagratuni's accomplishments were rooted in Sasanian patterns of political decentralization, provincial regionalism and strategic politics. The Sasanians were ethnically Persian, but Parthian and Armenian aristocrats from the periphery of the empire played a central role in upholding the regime. Granting titles, wealth and personal support, the king sought to turn aristocratic families against each other to enhance royal authority. Simultaneously, regional aristocrats like Smbat Bagratuni used royal patronage to advance their local interests, often at the expense of the royal center. The life of Smbat Bagratuni illustrates how complex negotiations of individual and collective identity shaped relations of “center” and “periphery” in Sasanian Iran.

This article focuses on the development of the tobacco industry in Iran during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It uses this discussion as an entry point to inquire about the early modern Iranian economy. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it makes several historiographical interventions. In explaining what the development of a completely new agrarian industry means in Iranian society, the paper suggests that innovation and intensification may not have been completely absent in agriculture and that in contrast to the way some of the available literature tends to argue, the Iranian economy may not have experienced continuous decline in all sectors throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, this article contends that the tobacco industry helped bring about the rise of merchants and landowners in Iranian society, and with that the further development of mass consumption and ever-increasing cycles of production and accumulation that expanded the commercialization of agriculture, domestic and international trade networks, and Iran’s agrarian economy.

The Gāthic stanza Y 30.3 has always been at the center of various interpretations and controversies in Western scholarship on Zoroastrianism. Those who believe they have discovered in the Gāthās a monotheistic religion armored with an ethical dualism have made this stanza one of the pillars of their thesis. The so-called Twins stanza shows, according to this view, that the good and evil primordial spirits exist as a result of their choice between Good and Evil, which preserves not only the absolute goodness of the supreme god but also his uniqueness. More recently Kellens and others following him have given a completely different reading of the stanza. According to their account, this stanza is a speculation on the hidden processes of ritual. What the poet expresses in Y 30.3 is not a dualism, ethical or otherwise, but a psychology of the process by which man makes his choice of ritual conduct. Aside from the question of coherence, one must ask whether these accounts are borne out by the text they claim as their basis. This article addresses these two questions.

The history of Iranian metalwork has yet to be written. Published material is scanty compared with the number of pieces on record in public institutions, not to mention private collections. But no period has been so blatantly neglected as the Safavid period and the half century of Timurid rule during which the foundations of much of Safavid art were laid.

The first substantial body of material was if not published stricto sensu, at least illustrated in the Survey of Persian Art. Fourteen bronze, brass, and tinned copper vessels, plus a number of “steel” implements and weapons, a couple of bronze ensigns and astronomical instruments which will not be considered in this paper, were dealt with in a short text of general content. Alas not a few errors, which crept into the text as well as the brief captions, marred the reader's pleasure. There was no attempt to read the Persian and Arabic inscriptions except for dates.

This article proposes a new approach to three of the most persistent problems in the study of Iranian art and religion from the coming of Alexander to the fall of the Sasanians: the development of Iranian sacred architecture, the legacy of the Achaemenids, and the development of the art and ritual of Iranian kingship after Alexander. Canepa explores the ways in which the Seleukids contributed basic and enduring elements of Iranian religious and royal culture that lasted throughout late antiquity. Beyond stressing simple continuities or breaks with the Babylonian, Achaemenid or Macedonian traditions, this article argues that the Seleukids selectively integrated a variety of cultural, architectural and religious traditions to forge what became the architectural vocabularies and religious expressions of the Middle Iranian era.

This paper suggests the interpretation of the images woven on Safavid precious textiles in their historical context. The thesis is that the mythical and literary subject of the discovery of fire by Shah Hushang was used by the Safavids in their negotiations concerning the supply of the firearms to Iran. The images of Hushang slaying the dragon on the silks of the third quarter of the sixteenth century reflect different stages of this diplomatic mission and the objects sewn out of these textiles served as meaningful presents to the interested parties.

To the memory of my ustad, K. Allin Luther, in appreciation of his teaching and example.

Abu'l-Fazl Muhammad B. Al-Husayn Bayhaqi (385-470/995-1077), A Khurasanian scribe of the Ghaznavids, wrote a history of this Perso-Islamic dynasty (388-582/994-1186) in his work referred to as the Tārīkh-i Bayhaqī (composed in 450/1058). The Ghaznavids ruled in an area now comprising eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northern India. With the loss of greater Khurasan to the nomadic Saljuqs at the battle of Dandanqan on 9 Ramadan 431/24 May 1040, the empire was reduced to parts of Afghanistan and northern India, chiefly the Punjab. The downfall of the Ghaznavids in Khurasan also divides the period of the first three kings from those of the later ones. Bayhaqi himself organized the history of the Ghaznavids in terms of “principal” (aṣl), versus “minor” (far˓) territories. For Bayhaqi the principal territories are Khurasan and Jibal, but especially Khurasan, as opposed to the minor territories in India. He wrote his history when he was an old man and after 29 years had passed from the loss of Khurasan. The only surviving volumes of Bayhaqi's history of the Ghaznavids cover the reign of the third Ghaznavid ruler Mas˓ud (421—31/1030-1040), who lost Khurasan to the Saljuqs.

Back in the fall of 1980, Edward Keenan, then Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, asked whether I would organize an oral history project on Iran. A Soviet specialist, Keenan saw certain similarities between the Russian and the Iranian revolutions and considered the immigration to the West of hundreds of former Iranian officials to be an exceptional opportunity to collect and preserve valuable historical data.

In our subsequent discussions it became clear that an in-depth study of the internal workings of Iran's former regime was difficult, as few reliable primary sources are available for this purpose. Because of the autocratic nature of Iran's political system, government papers, documents, and reports were (and still are) infrequently prepared prior to major decisions and subsequent to important events. Moreover, the relevant documents that were produced have not been preserved systematically and, in cases where they do exist, are not generally available to researchers.

The Arabic copy of Rashid al-Din’s Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh dated 714/1314‒15 and divided between Edinburgh University Library (Or. ms. 20) and the Khalili Collection in London (ms. 727) is of seminal importance as one of the first and most extensively illustrated histories produced in Iran. This article examines four paintings from the manuscript to suggest why the patron wanted to add illustrations and how artists in his atelier adopted and adapted elements from Chinese painting in order to disseminate the text and enhance its meaning.

At the zenith of the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) protests in October to December 2022, the call for (general) strikes became a rallying point for activists who were seeking to increase the protests’ social reach and political strength in the face of increasing state repression. Therefore labor provides an advantageous analytical lens for exploring some of the constraints and potentials of the social dynamics of the WLF protests.