Even before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran's border provinces, which contain Arabs, Azeri Turks, Baluch, Kurds, and Turkmen, were marginalized and securitized by the state. These processes and outcomes have created a vicious cycle and self-fulfilling prophecy within the context of the so-called security-development nexus. Iran's peripheral provinces border Iraq and Turkey in the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. They are located far from Tehran in the inaccessible and inhospitable terrain and climate of mountains and deserts. This geography and topography partially explain why these provinces have been traditionally neglected by the state. Beyond the geographic remoteness and topographic inaccessibility of these provinces, their ethno-religious demographics and marginalization-based grievances, including those that existed during the shah's industrial and urban-focused development drive before the revolution, have fostered local opposition to the state. Most recently, between 2022 and 2023, this opposition has culminated in the Jina Mahsa Amini or Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

Ardeshir Mohassess has often been called Iran's leading caricaturist and graphic artist. Yet, as the powerful images on the following pages show, neither appellation fully describes the breadth, depth, and complexity of his art and vision.

The artist himself also defies simple description. Through his art one sees him as a man of sharp and angry perception who wields his sarcastic pen mercilessly--decapitating bodies, twisting them into unnatural shapes, turning the world upside down, all in an attempt to expose the bitter truth that lies, he seems to feel, under the banal surface of everyday reality. In person, Mohassess is a remarkably sensitive, humble, and mild mannered artist with a philosophic sense of humor which focuses, not on the foibles of particular individuals, but on what he finds to be pathetic or absurd in the human condition.

This paper surveys some wood carvings belonging to four mosques in the villages of Firizhand, Quhrud, Abyana, and Barzuk. Carved between the years 700/1300-1 and 705/1305–6, they consist of architectural elements such as doors, columns, and capitals. The recently found woodwork evidence from the demolished Jamiʿ mosque of Barzuk reveals that this building and its decorations were executed by a multiskilled artist, who was most likely a descendant of Abu Zayd. Moreover, the newly discovered columns from the Masjid-i ʿAli in Quhrud show that, in contrast to what was previously thought, the current building is not contemporary with its dated door and was erected in later centuries. Interestingly, these wooden mosques were built during the last years of Ghazan Khan's rule and witness his order to construct mosques in all the villages of the country. This woodwork offers significant insight into the artistic and cultural situation of the early fourteenth century.

This article argues that even as Chinese imports occupy an increasingly large percentage of the space in Mashhad’s bazaars and marketplaces, such goods are interpreted not only as being of poor quality but, critically, as insufficiently “worthy” of the Iranian middle class who positioned themselves as “deserving better.” In attempting to assess why this is the case, the article suggests that such framing both reveals much of, and requires us to consider, the pivotal role of status in Iran. It holds that this concern for status is expressed at multiple levels: that of the family, as a class, and finally, of the nation. At each of these levels of expression, it is possible to trace different post-revolutionary social phenomena. These include the reification of the family as a moral unit, major shifts in the demographics of education and urbanization, the rise of a consumer culture and the perilous decline of the fortunes of the middle class, and, finally, imaginings of national exceptionalism. This article then uses such readings of Chinese goods as a window into middle class ideologies of worth and deservingness.

This paper sheds light on Ismāʿīl al-Qasṛī, his scholarly and pietist networks, Sufi genealogy, and its later transmission. Other than his debated role in Najm al-Dīn Kubrā's initiation into Sufism, very little is known on this understudied yet significant Sufi from Khuzistan. The paper argues that Ismāʿīl al-Qasṛī and his western Iranian Sufi genealogy was the primary, rather than secondary, initiatory chain claimed by Kubrā, his associates, and the later heritage. Besides, al-Qasṛī's robe continued to be transmitted beyond Kubrā's Sufi chain, and received multiple names in the absence of a prominent, eponymous master to claim it. Also introducing the figures in al-Qasṛī's, and hence Kubrā's, spiritual genealogy, the paper discovers the overlooked yet decisive impact of Iranian masters, most notably the famous pietist of the Fars area, Abū Isḥāq al-Kāzarūnī, on Sufism in the later tradition.

This paper deals with the origins of Iranian studies in the principal centers of Oriental studies in Russia, located in Kazan, St. Petersburg and Moscow from the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. It concerns the international political situation and major social changes which created a demand in the Russian intellectual market for both academic and practical experts on the entire Muslim world. The paper also describes how, thanks to the efforts of German scholars who were invited to these centers, the different fields of modern Iranian studies, including the academic traditions, achievements and key publications were initially formed and then were developed by their Russian colleagues.

A brilliant coral ground silk coat with a brocaded silk and silver gilt floral diaper sprig (fig. 1) was acquired in 1982 by the Textile Department of the Royal Ontario Museum (hereafter, “ROM coat“). It has been tentatively dated by the Department to mid-seventeenth - early eighteenth century Iran. There are as well several published garments, generally described as robes and sometimes classified as cadabi (sic.), which are very similar in cut, fabrics and trim to the ROM coat (see Appendix, “Related Robes“; hereafter, “Robes“).

In general terms, the history of the Kurds in the medieval period—or at least those described as being Kurdish in our sources—has attracted relatively little attention within western academia. Moreover, those scholars who have thought to comment on the subject have in general relied on the work of the eminent Russian orientalist Vladimir Minorsky. Hence there has been very little re-examination of the Arabic sources which Minorsky consulted. This article constitutes a first attempt to re-examine some of the “historical orthodoxy” regarding the meaning and nature of the term Kurd in the Middle Ages. More precisely, it aims at questionning the work of those scholars who argue that, due to its ambiguous usage, the term Kurd in the medieval period did not denote an ethnic people. This paper argues that in fact the very ambiguity surrounding the term is indicative of its ethnonymic value and through an examination of the meaning of the term Kurd in this era we can gain a greater understanding of conceptions of ethnic difference in Arabo-Muslim sources.