This study concerns the native language of Shirazi Jews, most of whom live in diasporic communities outside Iran. The language Judeo-Shirazi belongs to the Southwest Iranian group, as do most other native languages spoken in southern Iran. As such, Judeo-Shirazi shows general agreements with native rural varieties spoken in inland Fārs. There are, however, phonological features suggesting that Judeo-Shirazi is an insular survivor of the Medieval Shirazi language, from which a sizable literature has survived dating back to the fifteenth century.

Episodic approaches may point in the direction of general trends by examining the ideological presuppositions of dominant literary discourses. However, they necessarily reduce the aesthetic complexity of literary movements and fail to critically consider poets whose vision may not directly speak to common literary trends. Poets such as Bizhan Jalāli (d. 1999) have been rendered standalone figures whose visions of poetic modernism are understood only in the context of their “non-adherence” to the dominant literary discourse of their time or are overlooked altogether. This essay examines how the literary life and reception of Bizhan Jalāli intersect with the intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings of committed circles in the 1960s and 1970s. The twists and turns of Jalāli’s poetics do not speak directly but rather laterally to committed articulations of modernism. The article returns Jalāli to his literary milieu by analyzing the way his work has been received by poets, anthologists and critics. As the contours of literary commitment drastically change in the 1980s and 1990s, another image of Jalāli emerges: once marginalized for his “non-commitment,” he is championed as an “apolitical” poet.

Since the Iranian Revolution, Soviet writers have evidenced two general perceptions of that phenomenon. On the one hand, they perceive it as an anti-imperialist movement motivated by desires for socioeconomic development free of capitalist fetters. On the other hand, they cannot easily fit this revolution into the general theory of social change that is to be found in writings dating from Lenin and Stalin to more contemporary doctrines of the National Democratic State and the Revolutionary Democratic State.

This paper assesses the Soviet image of the Iranian Revolution by comparing and contrasting the arguments adopted by such theoreticians as Primakov, Stepaniants, Demchenko, Ulianovskii, Zagvozdkina, Vasil'ev, Timofeev, Nikol'skii, Trubetskoi, and others. They have tried to clarify the differences between what they term Islamic “orthodoxy” (fundamentalism), Islamic “reformism,” and Islamic “modernism.” In their view, the classification scheme is based on two factors: (1) the linkage of the movement to Islamic dogma; (2) the class basis of the movement.

Some Fifteen Years Ago, The First Fascicle of What Seemed to be an almost megalomaniacal undertaking was published; since 1982 the Encyclopaedia Iranica (EIr) has not stopped growing slowly but steadily, and one can not imagine Iranian studies anymore without it. In the course of a decade and a half, in which eight impressive volumes have left the editorial rooms of the Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University in New York, its wealth of learned information has made it an indispensable multidisciplinary tool for non-specialists and specialists alike interested in just about any aspect of Iranian civilization. Meanwhile it can easily bear comparison to that other major enterprise called Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE), which is all the more astonishing in view of the fact that even fewer scholars are working in the field of Iranian studies than in that of Classical studies. Were it not for the exemplary international cooperation between scholars of four continents, this monumental encyclopaedia would probably have remained just a concept.

In an Encyclopedia Devoted to Matters Pertaining to Persia and The greater Iranian cultural sphere, musical items cannot be too numerous or diverse. Musical topics fall under four categories: 1) the theory and history of traditional art music; 2) folk music of different regions; 3) musical instruments; and 4) individual musicians and their work, past and present, worthy of mention. Of these, art music provides the most extensive area for representation. The folk music of Persia, with patchy exceptions, has not been adequately studied; unfortunately satisfactory encyclopedia entries cannot be constructed in more than a few areas. The country is very rich in diverse musical instruments, but many are folk instruments about which, again, comparatively little scholarly work has been done. As to individual musicians, there are those medieval figures, mostly claimed by the Arabs and Turks as well, whom we know mainly through their extant writings on the theory of music. Only contemporary figures can be properly identified, both biographically and as to their artistic merits. They are mainly performers of the urban musical tradition.

Rawls formulates liberalism according to two conceptions of reasonable and rational, which, tied to two particular notions of society and person, define the basis of liberalism in Rawlsian thought. This article argues that Mehdi Haeri Yazdi's important work, Hekmat va Hokumaat, should be considered as a work of liberal theory, and shows how it endorses liberal conceptions of the reasonable and the rational. The main elements of Ha'eri's liberalism are his thesis that philosophy has priority over jurisprudence, his doctrine of contract based upon concepts of agency contract (aqd-e vekalat) and joint private ownership (malekiyat-e shakhsi-ye musha), and his defense of individualism against the alleged collectivism of Rousseau.

The Jāmāspi is one of the most popular Zoroastrian texts. It was probably conceived as a kind of encyclopedia for laymen. At the beginning of the last century, it was still well-known among the Zoroastrian community of India and has reached us through various manuscript traditions: Pahlavi, Pāzand and Pārsi. A philological analysis of all the manuscript traditions suggests that there was a Pahlavi archetype of the text. Moreover, it shows clearly that the Pārsi codex M52, which represents the best preserved tradition, was the result of a collation of all the existing Pahlavi and Pāzand materials. The study of the language and the narrative pattern allows us to consider the Pārsi transcription as a mechanical transcription from a Pāzand model.

Anyone familiar with Iranian history would not have been surprised by the uneasy coalition of religious leaders, secular intellectuals, and bazaar merchants that spearheaded the antishah movement in Iran. Once each generation in this century such a coalition has attempted to gain political control of the nation. Each time, including this one, their efforts have met the determined resistance of one or more external powers. There appears to be a cruel geopolitical determinism at work. Iran, standing at the meeting point of competing imperial interests, is not allowed for long the luxury of chaotic development. Internal chaos threatens the delicate balance of external competitors—each fearing the other will take undue advantage of the situation. And since the kind of regime the coalition claims to seek, liberal and democratic, is certain to be at least initially unstable, it has been consistently the negative target of the external competitors.

This Paper Shall Deal with the Formal Aspects of the Storytelling technique employed by Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73 C.E.) in his Manavī-yi Maᶜnavī (henceforth Manavī). I shall begin with the assumption that there is some kind of form to this work and shall try to investigate the nature of that form.

To the casual observer the Manavī, as a whole, seems to have no narrative sequence with its plethora of apparently unconnected and disjointed stories. Moreover, the narrative order of a particular story may be interrupted by other stories, sermons, expositions of Qurᶜanic verses, aḥādīth, stories of prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāᵓ), popular Islamic lore and glosses, etc. Throughout this entire exercise Rumi's goal is to drive home various precepts of Sufism via the use of these means.

This is a comparative study of anger and narrative control in two tragic stories cast in an epic-heroic register, the “Tale of Rostam and Sohrab” of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and “The Knight's Tale” of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The narrators of both stories are heavily invested in upholding a certain normative interpretation of the events they recount, a fatalistic worldview that justifies itself through the necessarily agnostic optimism that these senseless catastrophes gain meaning when situated within a greater order that is beyond the capacity of man to comprehend. The emotional responses of outrage and grief therefore have no legitimate place in this worldview, and must be submitted to a process of rationalization and violent suppression in order to be kept in check. However, this same process also reveals the underlying aporias of its own normative logic, producing a subtextual counter-narrative that resists and undermines the dominant voice of the text. The resulting fragmentation and narrative collapse provides a fruitful opportunity to investigate how both texts respond to a crucial ontological topic in medieval literature and philosophy: what does it mean to be an autonomous subject within a divinely ordered universe, and how can one distinguish justice from tyranny in a world entirely governed by fate?

“The politic” and “the religious” have had many relations with each other in Iranian history and in some cases “the religious” has been defined in a situation beyond the extent of the political power. A case in point is the right of taking sanctuary in Shi‘ite shrines. Throughout Iran’s history, subjects could take refuge in Shi‘ite shrines and some other places related to religious and non-religious authorities. Persecution was delayed or the individual was forgiven, though sometimes they were sentenced when exiting the shrine. By referring to religious texts that have reinforced that tradition, this article seeks to trace continuities between early Islam and modern Iran. It focuses on sanctuary taking and sit-ins at shrines and tombs, and on the interplay between those actions and political power, and discusses the changing mobility and dynamisms of those actions at different periods of Iranian history.

Religious authority in the Shi‘ite world is often claimed and justified by drawing on national ideologies. Examining the relations between the ruling religious elite in Iran and Lebanese Shi‘ite party of Amal and followers of the Lebanese Shi‘ite scholar Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, this article shows how the latter two actors seek to break official Iran's hegemonic claim to lead the Shi‘ite world through parody and critical narratives about the history and society of Iran. This politics of religious authenticity is not limited to debates among Shi‘ite scholars but also involves other actors such as political party members, students of religion, and pilgrims as they take part in shaping claims to seniority and authenticity in Shi‘ite tradition.

The history of children in general and that of Persian children in particular is that of the inarticulate. The social history of Iran is a neglected field although in recent decades a preponderance of material has appeared on the history of women. Aside from this no work has been undertaken on the private life of the period including childhood and family life. This article examines various aspects of the position and upbringing of children in Qajar Iran ranging from the rearing of children to their status in the family, discipline, amusements and education. This investigation attempts to cover the childhood of different sexes and social classes both in rural and urban areas. The discussion is limited to Shi'i children, the majority population of Iran.

Seven years ago, a political report published by Echo of Iran raised the issue of the difficulty with which the Iranian political elite distinguishes between criticism and subversion. There is still only a hazy boundary separating treason from the lesser evil. Just one example of this level of debate was the suggestion by the “opposition” Mardom Party Newspaper that to attribute administrative misdemeanors to either ministers or to the Imperial Inspectorate was to commit treason.

One of the distressing effects of the failure to make this distinction in contemporary Iran is that a generation may appear which is loyal to the monarchy but which holds attitudes counter-productive to the espoused long-run political goals of the Shah. The attitudes to which I refer include the rejection of policy-oriented political activity and a flexible bargaining stance in the resolution of social problems. This writer met a number of young people in Iran who saw general disorder as the only alternative to the tight rein with which the Shah attempts to guide political activity.