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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This essay introduces a previously unpublished memorial album of the American College of Tehran compiled by a former student during the early Pahlavi period. The album contains a wide range of contributions by College faculty, associates, occasional visitors as well as fellow students and encompasses material on national history, ethics, sports, military service, mathematics and poetry, as well as numerous pencil drawings and art work. In addition there is a wide range of photographs of the College, its faculty and staff, its diverse student body, classrooms, athletics, special occasions and outdoor activities (a list of the album's contents and samples of contributions and photographs are appended to the essay). As discussed in the essay, and in manifold ways, the documentary evidence illustrates how both physically and cognitively the College provided a necessary space for participation in educational reform during the early decades of the twentieth century. Seen from this perspective, it was part of a wider context of modernization with which a broad range of individuals from different social and community backgrounds and generations identified themselves. On the whole, the album offers valuable glimpses into the social and educational aspects of the early Pahlavi Iran.

The article focuses on a very particular episode of the eastern Alexander legend, i.e. the building of an extraordinary “metal army” employed by Alexander in his war against the Indian King Porus, which is present in at least three Persian accounts written between the tenth and fourteenth centuries CE: the “Book of Kings” (Shāh-nāmeh) by Ferdowsi, the “Book of Dārāb” (Dārāb-nāmeh), attributed to Tarsusi, and an “Alexander-book” (Eskandar-nāmeh) in prose copied by ʿAbd al-Kāfi ibn Abu al-Barakāt. Compared to the most remote source, the text of Pseudo-Callisthenes, and to the closest ones (the Armenian version of the fifth century, the Syriac text of the sixth‒seventh centuries, and the Hebrew version of the tenth‒eleventh centuries), it is argued that the Persian authors have not passively received the inherited materials; on the contrary, they have been able to liven up the scene of Alexander’s battle against the Indian King Porus by bringing onto the battlefield a fiery and phantasmagorical army of metal, giving us one of the more amazing episodes in the eastern legend of the great Macedonian.

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.

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.

In the first decade of the fourteenth century, Rashiīd al-Dīn Fazl Allāh penned a remarkable endowment deed in which he meticulously detailed his plans for the creation of a utopian community. He named it the Rab‘-i Rashīdī. In this document, he provides socio-economic data concerning the day-to-day operations of this settlement unparalleled in comparable texts. This article focuses on the hospital ward of the Rab‘-i Rashīdī, and provides a broader historical context for this medieval hospital and its personnel by examining the financial and monetary information in the endowment deed in order to piece together the inner workings of this community. In so doing, we are granted a rare opportunity to explore the daily lives of ordinary people whose endeavors, however significant, often went unnoticed.