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.

The first part of the paper examines the evolution and transformation of Safavid ideology in the context of confessional changes and the role of Turkoman tribes in the Safavid social movement in the Ottoman‒Iranian borderland. The second part examines the impact of Ottoman‒Safavid wars and religious rivalry on the society and economy of Azerbaijan from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

This study addresses the gap in the contemporary scholarship on Kurdish oral and performative culture by, for the first time, presenting a review of some of the performance traditions in Kurdistan. By describing these traditions, the article demonstrates that performance has for centuries comprised a vital and meaningful element of Kurdish cultural life. Further, it shows that a more inclusive approach to writing theatre histories enhances understanding of Middle Eastern and, in particular, Iranian performance culture—for the Kurds, as an Iranian people and the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, play an intrinsic part in the culture of the region. All combined, this comprehension fosters a deeper appreciation and fuller picture of Middle Eastern theatre, in general, and Iranian theatre, in particular.

This paper proposes an exploration of the films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. It employs a methodology based on textual analysis, focusing specifically on the structural design of his films and the focalization processes of his scripts. It shows how Farhadi’s work can be understood as a coherent research project with a uniquely solid model based on chronological linearity as a way to explore the violent breakdown of different emotional communities: families, marriages, groups of friends, etc. At the same time, it considers how all the focalization processes in his films are oriented toward two main concepts: knowledge (of the characters, but also of the audience) and pain (of living in a [narrative] world afflicted by meaninglessness).

In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of literature is often conflated with the delimitation and reification of national cultures as different manifestations of a single process. This article examines three anthologies of Persian literature from the interwar Persophone Soviet Union to reconsider the relationship between state cultural institutions’ procedures of literary modernization and nationalization. The anthologies mark out the stages by which classical Persian literature was portioned out to Soviet Eastern nationalities, and in particular the advent of Tajik literary history, but they also reveal the degree to which national literatures coevolved with new post-Persianate literary cosmopolitanisms and internationalisms.

The Persians held sway over the Greek imagination for more than 200 years. The image of Persia shifted in that time from xenophobic hostility, caused through fear of the encroaching presence of the Persian empire, through to curious acceptance of its dominance. Much study has been given to the formative decades of the construction of the Persian “Other” in Greek art, but the fourth-century image of Persia has remained relatively unexplored. This paper demonstrates how Greek artists of the period 380–330 BCE fixated on the life and accomplishments of the court of the Achaemenid Great Kings and argues that instead of offering an orientalist clichéd view of Persian life, it attempted to understand and disseminate bone fide Iranian images of court society.

The document presented in this article is a quasi-ethnographic account of the religious customs of the Magh (i.e. Arakanese), which was most probably collected on the basis of firsthand observations made in the region of Chittagong, in southeastern Bengal, sometime in the 1780s, or early 1790s. The commissioner of the document is John Murray-MacGregor (1745–1822), a Scottish officer of the British East India Company, who remained in Bengal for about three decades and brought back with him one of the largest private collections of Persian manuscripts, as well as some bilingual Sanskrit–Persian texts, and twenty-two bundles of Pali and Arakanese manuscripts collected in eastern Bengal.

The Modern Jewish Community in Afghanistan was Shaped by the Exigencies of long-distance trade. Jewish merchants along with their Hindu and Muslim counterparts provided goods to remote regions and tribes. Often these traders would be the only ones allowed into disputed areas, as they were considered neutral. Jewish merchants in particular also acted as intermediaries to help nomadic groups settle conflicts peaceably. In order to fill this economic role, unusual domestic arrangements developed. Men would depart alone for long periods of time from Herat, the center of the Jewish community in Afghanistan, as the journey was generally too risky for an entire family to undertake. After traveling the long caravan routes, they would live in Jewish caravanserais for much of the year, generally returning for the holidays of the month of Tishri and for Passover.

The name of the Armenian-Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin (ca.1838-1933) is not found today in the literature of the world history of photography. Although his photographs were published in several English books about Iran during his own time, the standard Western works on the history of photography, including those covering the Near East, all fail to mention Sevruguin. He does appear, however, in Yahya Zoka's Persian-language history of photography in Iran (1997).

In 1999 the Smithsonian Institution, which houses one of the two major collections of Sevruguin's work, published Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran 1870-1930. Almost simultaneously, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, Netherlands, which houses the other collection, published a book called Sevruguin's Iran, a combined effort by the Netherlands and the Islamic Republic of Iran and containing both English and Persian text. Once again, this Middle Eastern artist has emerged in Western scholarship.

It is indisputable that the religious history both of the Safavid period and of the two centuries that preceded it remains inadequately explored. There existed in Transoxania and Anatolia, as well as the Iranian plateau, a plethora of groups and individuals with diverse tendencies and aspirations that it is difficult, in our present state of knowledge, to synthesize into a comprehensible whole. There are however a number of minor observations on Professor Nasr's presentation that I wish to make. The first is an expression of respectful disagreement, and the others are intended to direct attention to matters not mentioned in his otherwise comprehensive paper.

Professor Nasr's contention that Sufism owes its essential origin to Shiᶜism, and that therefore its suppression in the Safavid period ought to be regarded as a return to the womb that bore it, is highly contestable.

The article examines the contents and the historical background of five early specimens of diplomatic correspondence on the Pashtun tribal territories. Written in Persian by the Khatak chief Afzal Khān (d. circa 1740/41) these letters supplement the author’s Pashto account of his political conflict with the Khatak spiritual leaders, the sheikhs, in 1724. While in the letters the tribal chief appealed for judicial settlement of the conflict via legal procedure in the Sharia Court of Peshawar, in verbal negotiations he sought extrajudicial administrative arbitration or tribal practices of reconciliation according to the Pashtun customary law. The article conttrunains new materials for the historiography of Pashtun tribes and for comparative study of conflict patterns in Muslim tribal societies.

Qianling Mausoleum (乾陵) which is located in the northwest of Xi'an, is the tomb of Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty (唐高宗, r. 649–83 AD) and his Empress Wu Zetian (武則天, r. 690–705 AD). In this mausoleum, there are two statues of Pērōz, son of Yazdegird III (632–51 AD), and another Persian nobleman who have been recognized by western scholars. However, scholars’ attention has been limited to a general and mistaken description of the statues. This paper reassesses both statues in order to give some new insight into the head of one of the statues found at the Qianling Mausoleum.

This paper incorporates a study of “re-ghettoization” among the Armenian Christians of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It focuses on how legal marginalization has led to the emergence of an entirely separate existence from the Muslim majority in Tehran among Armenians born after the revolution. By focusing on the spatial and social divisions of the hayashatner (Armenian neighborhoods) and the “social” ghetto of the Ararat Compound, this article addresses the question: what are the social implications for religious discrimination in the Muslim Middle East? This paper is based on three extensive blocks of fieldwork carried out in Iran from 2010 to 2015.

This study examines the character of Kush-e Pildandān, the anti-hero of the Kushnāmeh, by arguing that the protagonist of the poem represents the monarchs of the Kushan dynasty. In order to substantiate this claim, the Kushnāmeh is introduced and the process of its formation and its reflections of Kushan history are examined. Then the various components of this image of the enemy are discussed. What is revealed is a polemical strategy of creating an enemy, a unique insight into the political ideology of the Sasanian period. The study offers a glimpse into the ideological discourse of political power in the Late Antique period, and how they drew upon a shared conceptualization of the past.

Addressing the scarcity of scholarly literature on Iran’s involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa during the Pahlavi period, this paper demonstrates that throughout the 1970s, as the shah’s international standing rose and Iran’s economy grew, so too did Iran’s political and economic relationships with several African countries, especially Senegal. The article will explore a number of factors that stimulated this relationship, most significantly Senegal’s strategic and symbolic importance, and the personal friendships that developed between the countries’ leaders. The ultimate manifestation of this bilateral relationship was the Keur Farah Pahlavi project; a joint Iranian–Senegalese city to be constructed in Senegal. By exploring this project, the paper aims to demonstrate the strategies through which the Pahlavi state sought to expand its influence worldwide.

Zīlū seems to be a term of Persian origin. It refers to a type of reversible cotton floor “spread”, generally either blue and white or light brown and white in colour, which is decorated with stylized geometrical motifs and patterns. The blue cotton yarns in Zīlū are the same as those used in weaving palās, or denim cloth; the white yarns are undyed cotton (fig. 1).

Zīlū were the traditional floorcoverings in most mosques in the south, central and Khurasan regions of Iran, that is, in the country's drier areas; because the yarns used in their construction deteriorate in cold, damp environments, a/a are uncommon in otherparts of Iran. Zīlū were woven to fit the shabistān and the atvān of mosques. The names of patrons and craftsmen were customarily woven into those Zīlū presented as vaqfvo mosques and other religious institutions (figs. 2 - 3).