The belief that entrepreneurship, i.e., the predisposition towards risk-taking and innovative behavior in commercial situations, is the key factor in economic development is still widely held by social scientists and developmental planning experts. Based upon the theoretical positions of economists, such as Schumpeter, entrepreneurial historians and many sociologists, the occurrence of economic development is explained by the presence of individuals whose actions promote capital accumulation, rational allocation of resources, and the like for their own benefit and, as a consequence, for the benefit of society. Often intertwined is the belief that the shaping force behind the structure of society and its processes of change are values exemplified by Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the classic statement of this position.

Though Cambay is Now a Provincial Backwater, for Over Five Centuries—between the late tenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries A.D.—it was the main port of western India, home to a cosmopolitan population of merchants and traders from all over India and the Islamic world, and a major center of architectural and artistic patronage. Cambay is probably best known among Islamic art historians for its monumental fourteenth-century Friday mosque, the adjacent Kazaruni tomb complex (d.734/1333), and the large body of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Islamic inscriptions and tombstones that survives there. However, the port conceals many Islamic remains that have not been published.

When a historian decides to use literary texts to help construct a past, these texts can present some interesting theoretical and methodological problems. One theoretical question that concerns both historians and literary scholars is that of genre. Generic considerations are of primary importance for the historian as he or she sifts through such diverse kinds of material as personal diaries, government documents, field reports of inspection teams, and books of doctrine or practice. The historian knows what to expect of each sort of document and by virtue of this familiarity is able to notice, for example, unexpected additions, omissions, or subtle deviations from the expected norms. This awareness of generic considerations often becomes second nature to us as we work with familiar types of material.

But, alas, the specialized fields and disciplinary training of historians and literary scholars can obscure for them the generic characteristics of texts that they do not ordinarily work with.

In July 1980, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi died in Egypt, approximately a year and a half after the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy and the subsequent establishment of the Islamic Republic. Once asked whether Madame de Pompadour's celebrated phrase, “Après nous le déluge” echoed his own sentiments, the shah had willingly agreed, and indeed, Iran has in the period since his ouster experienced the turbulent existence of a society in the throes of revolution. The prevailing climate of instability, interspersed by alleged conspiracies and widespread purges and executions, has given every indication of developing into a chronic condition, if it has not already done so. The economy has faltered under the burden of inflation, unemployment, and the inadequacy of managerial skills, and in the process, become wholly reliant on the revenues that accrue from the export of petroleum.

Ahmad Shamlu is the primary, most prolific and most popular engagé Persian poet of post-Mosaddeq Iran. While critics in general view Shamlu's poetry as a mirror reflecting the stages of modernist Persian poetics from Nima Yushij (1895-1960) onward, Reza Baraheni has also described it as "a biography of our society." As a sociological study of this very important Iranian writer, this essay provides a chronology and analysis of Shamlu's relationship with his reading public and "the people," an overview of the nature of modernist engagé Persian poetry in general, and an assessment of the influence the "committed" poet has been able to exercise on Iranian society during the past three decades, in" particular.

This study is based on fieldwork undertaken in Badakhshān province of Afghanistan in 1968 for the purpose of collecting musical data. A summary of the basic musical styles and instruments current in the area can be found in the,author's Instrumental Music in Northern Afghanistan.

The focus of the present article is the type of Persian verse set to music by the folk singers of Badakhshān. Principally, this includes a description of the texts of the most common folksong form of the region, the felak, drawn from singers of the Faizābād (central), Darwāz (northern), Shughnān (northeastern), Wākhān (eastern) and Keshrn (western) regions of Badakhshān province.

The Last Half of the Eighteenth Century and the First Half of the Nineteenth century saw Twelver Shiᶜi Islam, especially in Iran, undergoing a number of upheavals as a result of conflicts between different schools of thought. These upheavals were primarily ideological but they also led to conflict, fighting and even deaths. This period began in the political turmoil following the collapse of the Safavid Empire. The Akhbari school of Twelver Shiᶜism had been in the ascendant during the latter half of the Safavid era, but the period following the overthrow of the Safavids saw the defeat of the Akhbari school and the triumph of the Usuli school at the hands of Aqa Muhammad Baqir Bihbihani, known as Vahid Bihbihani (d. ca. 1207/1792) in the shrine cities of Iraq, the main centre of Twelver scholarship. The Usuli school enabled the ulama to give legal opinions (fatwās) and hence intervene in social areas from which the more restrained Akhbari school would refrain.

Uniquely among the world’s temperate forests, much of the vegetation of the Caspian forests is now endangered. But while deforestation has accelerated in Iran, these processes were actually underway in the nineteenth century. This article offers a brief introduction to the history of forest exploitation and concessions during the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, addressing actions taken by the Iranian state to protect and extend forest cover, but also the deficiencies of that legislation and the reasons for its failure. Though it is one of the most forested countries in the Middle East, Iran’s forests remain understudied. Existing scholarship mostly addresses the contemporary period; this paper extends the scope of our knowledge, offering a deeper history of forest exploitation in Iran.

This essay examines certain common themes as well as conflicting voices in two extensive sets of Persian diaries, written almost a century apart, by Mohammad-Hasan Khān Eʿtemād al-Saltaneh (1843‒96), a long-time courtier and confidant of Nāser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848‒86) and Asadollāh ʿAlam (1919‒78) a close associate and court minister of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941‒79). On the whole these diaries provide significant amounts of information about the inner workings of the court and the overall institutional setup of the Iranian state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although in writing their diaries these authors did not set out to produce a literary work, and nor did they intend to chronicle a general history, each in his own way captured his respective epoch and, within their limitations of time, scope, and insight, each reflected a broad range of private and social relationships. Also each in his own way echoed older ministerial voices, reminiscent of the voice that often resonates in the “mirror for princes” genre, of part player part intimate observer, and with a certain sense of admonition and resignation, lamenting the loss of an era which they felt was slipping away as they wrote.

The fate of secular sciences in Islamic civilization has been the object of intense historical investigation. Historians have long sought to explicate the seemingly mysterious reduction of knowledge production in late medieval Islam. The present article attempts to grapple with this phenomenon by focusing on the social elements of knowledge production at the local, rather than the global level. It argues that the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval Islam depended largely on a close cooperation among historical agents, who sought to advance various interests. The ultimate reduction of knowledge production—commonly referred to as the “decline” of sciences—was brought about by intense rivalry and the increased tension between different forms of knowledge and their representatives, which in turn hampered patterns of cooperation. The article stresses the contingent nature of the social relations that gave rise to the “decline” of sciences: the configuration of social agents, their interactions, and the final outcomes were not bound to unfold the way they did, nor did they have to follow the same path that led to emergence of modern Western science.

The Work of the Scholar, Moralist and Exegete, Husayn Kashifi, is Fairly well-known, and becomes even more so with the appearance of this special issue of Iranian Studies. On the other hand, the esoteric dimension of Kashifi's work has received far less attention. It represents, however, an integral part of the author's world vision. The goal of the present article is to cast light on the principal ideas and character of Kashifi's work on magic, entitled Asrār-i Qāsimī. This medium-sized book opens like any other, as if it were dealing with a subject as incontestable as pharmacology or astronomy. Its goal, however, is to outline the procedures that enable one to participate in the hidden laws that connect all living things. Kashifi's stated purpose is to make the contents of the voluminous general surveys of the Ancients on esotericism accessible to a wider Persian-speaking audience.

This article examines male/female dynamics in three versions of the classical story of the Sassanian prince Bahrām Gūr and his lyre-playing slave girl: that of the Shāhnāma of Firdawsī, the Haft Paykar of Nizāmī Ganjavī, and the Hasht Bihisht of Amīr Khusraw. It argues that each version provides progressively more positive depictions of intergender dynamics, ones that are contingent upon more egalitarian understandings of the male/female dichotomy. The later authors destabilize the categories of “male” and “female,” equalizing and even uniting the dichotomous pairs, so that men and women draw nearer to each other in qualities rather than remaining in their usual polarized positions. In the Hasht Bihisht, moreover, we witness a reversal of hierarchies in which traditionally feminine qualities receive preference over masculine virtues—an act that suggests fresh possibilities for harmonious interactions between the sexes.

The Topics Treated so Far in Encyclopaedia Iranica Under the General rubric of languages and the language sciences may be subdivided as follows, with an approximate tally of the articles devoted to each subtopic: 1. Iranian languages and dialects (34; 9 languages, 25 dialects and dialect groups). 2. Relevant non-Iranian languages and dialects and language areas (19; 10 languages, 9 areas). 3. Scholars, authors, works (36; 26 persons, 10 works). 4. Technical terms, genres and etymologies (12). The articles range in length from a few lines to twenty columns or more, some with subdivisions, some in themselves being subdivisions of larger articles. Obviously it is impracticable to mention more than one hundred articles individually. The following overview will attempt an appraisal of each category and its salient components, referring to particular articles as illustrative of the whole.

Private life during the Qajar period is not a subject on which much primary material is available. In an earlier work I made use of material from the Mahdavi Archives in Tehran to describe the life and career of Haj Muhammad Hasan Amin al-Zarb, the first major Iranian entrepreneur. Material from the same archive and other sources allows us a glimpse into the daily life of the household of Amin al-Zarb in Tehran. A native of Isfahan, Muhammad Hasan came to Tehran from Isfahan sometime about 1853. He arrived in the capital and, in his own words, “aside from a few items of clothing and an ᶜabā, my worldly goods consisted of a box of scales and weights (miqāl), the work of Isfahan that I had bought for eleven qirāns, and one hundred riyāls in cash.” By 1863 he had begun the most extensive commercial enterprise in Iran and become the richest and most influential merchant in the country.

This article examines some manuscripts of the so-called “Anonymous Histories of Shah Esmāʿil” with a view to answering the question: How did people in post-1514 Iran remember the Battle of Chālderān? After a brief examination of these manuscripts, the article focuses on three moments of the battle—the Safavid council of war, Esmāʿil’s clash with Malquch-oghli, and the Ottoman cannonade—to explore the ways in which popular memory embellished and altered the events we know from the official histories. Such changes reveal that the loss at Chālderān may have marked the end of Shah Esmāʿil’s aura of invincibility, but not of his larger-than-life image in the minds of his countrymen.