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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This article investigates the history of economic relations between Iran and the Parsi community of India during the Reza Shah period. Encouraged by the policies of the new Pahlavi state, Parsi entrepreneurs began a serious effort to investigate the possibilities of economic investment in Iran. The article details three Parsi economic missions that were conducted in Iran during this period, and analyzes their assessments of Iran's potential for development in fields such as energy, textile manufacturing, commercial agriculture, and modern transportation systems. As the article argues, while these Parsi-led initiatives were part of a larger history of renewed engagement between Parsis and Iranians, for a variety of political and economic reasons, by the outbreak of World War II few of the Parsi plans for investment in Iran had come to fruition. While remaining largely forestalled in the interwar period, the article also suggests that Parsi economic assessments foreshadowed many of the planning strategies carried out in Iran's post–World War II history of economic development.

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 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 case of “homelessness in Iran” presents empirical evidence to demonstrate “how a small media organization affects and changes social discourse.” The study investigates how the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) embodied the view of a news agency as having a role not only in the coverage of events, but also as an active agent of social change through discursive interventions. The process by which ISNA reconstructed homelessness and its empirical consequences is compatible with the five accepted stages labeled by Blumer. Homelessness represents the different ways in which ISNA has intervened in the social discourse in Iran: foregrounding a social issue, thematizing a discourse and problematizing social issues in order to open up a new kind of discourse.