Armenian participation in the Constitutional Revolution of Iran remains a subject fraught with ambiguities and unanswered questions. There has not been, to this date, a comprehensive study of Armenian participation, nor on the Caucasian element in general. There have been several articles and also a few biographies of major Armenian figures such as Mirza Malkom Khan (1833–1908) who, though not an active participant, was one of the principal proponents of constitutional government, or Yeprem Khan Davitian (1868–1912), who was instrumental in the battles to restore the constitution. This emphasis, in fact, is a problem. By concentrating on two key individuals, we take away from the larger dynamics and exclude other factors, and their exploits or ideas become merely the exploits and ideas of two individuals who happen to be of Armenian background.

Iraj was a leading poet of the late Qajar era, a major poet in the whole history of Persian poetry, and by far the greatest of the poets who descended from Fath'ali Shah. Two things in particular distinguish Iraj's poetry: eloquence and humor. It is difficult to describe him as a satirist in the strict sense of this term since satire in his works is normally incidental and a natural result of his unique humor when writing about most subjects. His best works are Aref-Nameh, Enqelab-e Adabi and Zohreh o Manuchehr, although there is hardly any piece by him which is less than delightful, especially those which he wrote during the Constitutional era.

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.

After the Second World War and simultaneously with the independence movement in India many other movements for national independence and removal of colonial rule erupted in other Asian and African countries where news from India was of great importance and interest. This paper will focus on the coverage of India's independence movement by Iranian newspapers which were the main source of such news for the Iranians. The paper will examine a variety of Iranian newspapers across the political spectrum for the accuracy of their reports and the quality of their analysis of the developments in India. In spite of their technical shortcomings and their limited knowledge of India, the articles carried by the Iranian newspapers demonstrate the Iranian public's interest in India's movement for freedom from colonial rule, which they regarded as a source of hope and a model to be followed by other Asian countries suffering from foreign domination.

In an article entitled “The Study of History in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” Professor A. Amanat analyzes the state of historical research and wonders whether the new interest in history will endure or whether it is a passing fad, a lingering after-effect of the 1979 revolution. He points out that “the frontiers of serious scholarship do not seem to have reached the domain of analysis. Neither the methodology, nor the scholarly attitude seem to be ready for the task.” In the eighteenth year of the Islamic revolution, it is perhaps worth taking another look at the state of historical research in Iran with an eye to detecting any changes in the observed trends pointed out by Amanat.

In the late-Pahlavi era, the study of history as an academic discipline was the least popular among the topics at the national universities. It was consistently the last choice for the entering class.

From the beginning of her career, Simin Behbahani stresses her intention to reflect contemporary concerns in her poetry. She has continued to use the traditional form of ghazal and to affirm the ghazal's capacity to reflect the contemporary environment. Behbahani tells us how she changed the structure of the ghazal to suit her poetic needs. This paper focuses on the poetic conversation as a feature of Behbahani's poetic style which leads her poetry firmly into present time. Early female poets in Iran made use of poetic conversation to bring attention to a changing social system and, especially, issues of concern to women. Behbahani refines and perfects the technique of poetic conversation. Her poetic conversations range from a single-voiced complaint to complex commentary involving more than one perspective. In particular, a character identified only as “you” at times represents society or a companion, and may even bring the poet face-to-face with herself. This character widens the scope of the poetic drama. Behbahani's poetic conversations convey a femininity that is complex and a sensibility that is modern.

Despite the great number of studies conducted by Western scholars exploring kinship terminologies in different languages, there seems to have been little attempt at dealing with kin words in Iranian languages like Kurdish. More specifically, Kalhori, as a southern dialect of Kurdish, has rarely been subject to studies of this nature. Underlining the significance of such studies in the wider linguistic and anthropological contexts, this study attempts to explore kin words Kalhori speakers use to refer to or address their relatives. We also make an attempt to investigate the possibility of presenting a formal explanation of the terms by placing them in a componential analysis framework.

The Kurdish novel emerged in 1935 and, towards the end of the twentieth century, established itself as a literary genre with a significant quantity and quality. However, until the last decade of the previous century the Kurdish novel was entirely dominated by Kurdish men and there is no single novel written by a Kurdish woman. During recent years, however, Kurdish women novelists have contributed to the development of this genre. This article aims to assess Kurdish women's novel-writing and, through analyzing and discussing their style and themes, tries to find out their main characteristic generic features. An attempt is made to see if there are thematic and stylistic differences between Kurdish novels written by the women and their male counterparts.