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.

This study explores the process by which the treatment of infertility, which has been in the hands of the private sector, has been taken over by the state as a matter of public health. It argues that this shift stems from the pro-natalist policies of the state to help increase the population. Infertility treatment, using assisted reproductive technologies and its legitimization by the Islamic jurists, is used as a lens through which to examine the state's body politic. The frequent reversals of policies, since the late nineteenth century to the present, are shown to be directly linked with the nation-building goals of the state, expecting the citizens to readjust their reproductive behavior to meet the state’s policies.

Holy Defense Literature is the official term applied to a large body of prose and poetry published during and after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) as part of the Islamic Republic’s cultural policy to promote and maintain its Shiite and anti-imperialistic political and ideological agenda. Both the production and the critical reception of this body of work have since been gradually altered, resulting in a discrepancy between two mutually exclusive tendencies in the literary representation and interpretation of the Iran–Iraq war: the ideological and the realistic, the latter introducing a narrative alternative to the former. ʿAli Reza Gholami’s novel Divar (The Wall) (2015), however, can be read as an exception to this current creative and critical polarity. By openly renouncing any claim to any kind of truth, Gholami has rendered his highly technical literary creation into a narrative text that goes beyond the real to exert its undermining effect on the ideology of the Holy Defense. Drawing upon Andrew Gibson and Michel Serres, this article attempts to refashion the narrative geometry of Gholami’s novel to underline and elaborate on its destabilizing extra-textual meaning as well as its dialogical and dynamic literary effect.

The article examines the travelogues kept by the Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah during his European tours in 1873, 1878 and 1889. To the monarch, Europe appeared to be an exotic and at times troubling place and he recorded his experiences with delight, criticism and humor. Focusing on his notes on Germany, the article explores Nasir al-Din Shah's encounters with people on the streets and at court, and in particular his perception of the female sex. Scholarship has either neglected the diaries or rejected them as a historical source, referring to the strong influence of literary convention and the Shah's alleged lack of understanding of the political, social and cultural conditions in Europe. Drawing on the uncensored versions of the diaries, the article argues that a closer look at the texts reveals fruitful, often amusing, insight into the monarch's experiences with social roles and cultural patterns alien to him. It suggests that a more careful reading of the diaries will also be beneficial in regard to the Shah's perception of European history and monuments, technology and scientific innovations, and landscape.

This article explores the remaniement of three episodes current in the Perso-Arabic Alexander tradition—i.e., Eskandar's confrontation with the Indian king Fur; Eskandar's visit to Queen Qeydāfeh; and Eskandar's encounter with the Gymnosophists—in the anonymous Persian Eskandarnāmeh, a medieval epic narrative in prose (dāstān; ca. 12th–14th c.). Through extensive comparative evidence from other genres, primarily narrative poetry (Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh, Nezāmi's Sharafnāmeh and Eqbālnāmeh), mirabilia (ʿajāyeb), and exegetical works (qesas al-anbeyāʾ and tafsir), this study engages with how the modalities of the dāstān genre, with its strong leaning towards traditional oral storytelling, affect the narrative choices Eskandarnāmeh's author makes in treating these themes. In so doing, this article attempts to develop a more informed assessment of the strategies and devices which, activated both on the production and reception planes, generate competing interpretations of well-known plots recast in different narrative modes.

Just as natural history is the mother of the biological sciences, social history is the mother of the social sciences. Classical political economy was developed in a dynamic era, a period of European history where a series of long-term social developments were approaching their peak in the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution of England. It is not at all surprising that Adam Smith and David Hume spent time with the French Physiocrats, notably Quesnay and Turgot, and with the French philosophes, especially though not exclusively Voltaire and Rousseau.

It was precisely the dynamic quality of the era that led economic and social and political theorists alike to look into the nature and causes of change, and therefore regard history as a principal source of the foundations of their knowledge. A similar process was taking place, but more slowly, among biologists who were trying to discover the nature of life and the origin of species, and the causes of long-term biological changes through time. Darwinism was in fact the end, not the beginning, of this process.

Among other Middle Eastern countries, Iran and Turkey stand out as the two neighboring countries with many linguistic and cultural similarities. The question that comes to the fore is: to what extent do these two countries know each other? This article attempts to provide a picture of the state of Iranian Studies in Turkey with specific attention to three monographs originally written as PhD dissertations in various Turkish universities over the last three decades. Produced from within three different social science and humanities divisions, i.e. Political Science, Persian Literature and History, these are three of the very few scholarly monographs produced on Iran in Turkey. Based on a close reading of these studies, it seems possible to observe that they are mostly ill-balanced by methodological, ethnocentric as well as Turkish nationalist biases.

As far as written records and oral traditions indicate, entertainment in the Qajar era touched on all aspects of life, both public and private. Contrary to Western opinion about this period, Qajar society exhibited a great variety of entertainments, many of which (even when public) were not visible to the outsider, given the constraints of a strongly traditional society and of the class-bound nature of many of the entertainments requiring access to the court, the aristocracy or the inner sanctums of the houses of the grandees. Nevertheless, the picture that now emerges is one of plenty rather than penury, and a closer look at the variety of entertainments is thus eminently relevant and in order.

Neither this article nor the work of Nadir Mirza is primarily concerned with the Amazon or with the quest for the Nile sources. But a certain amusing curiosity aside, the fact that Nadir Mirza touches on subjects like this in a historical work on Tabriz is a clear hint that we are leaving the traditional boundaries of Iranian local historiography—and not only in the metaphorical sense.

To place Nadir Mirza's history of Tabriz in a more general context is a rather difficult task. Such a context is provided of course by the longstanding tradition of Persian local and regional historiography—as treated in the present collection of articles—and particularly in connection with the late development of this genre in the nineteenth century. Local works of historiography from the Qajar period quite often defy attempts at classification according to medieval categories such as chronicles, biographical dictionaries, or adab-literature.

The Tahmineh and Rostam episode, as presented in modern text-critical editions of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, is compared vis-à-vis both the pre-modern scribal interventions in the manuscript tradition of the poem, as well as two oral presentations of the same episode by traditional storytellers (naqqālān), as preserved in their prompt-books (tumārs) and in recorded performances from the twentieth century. The mise-en-scène, the social circmstances, as well as the expansive nature of such oral performances, are described, and a translation of an oral version of the Rostam and Tahmineh episode is given. The narrative strategies employed to negotiate the intersection of new episodes or contemporary moralistic considerations with the written text of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh are then explored, analyzing the nature, motivations and functions of the scribal and oral interpolations to the Tahmineh episode, and demonstrating how modernizing reinterpretations impart a certain dynamism to the living Shāhnāmeh tradition. The naqqālān are shown to alter the Tahmineh episode to comply with the moral and religious values of their audiences, the requirements of extended narration cycles, and the horizon of expectation of the genre of epic. The article closes with a brief consideration of how moral and religious values apply differentially across various genres (heroic epic, romance, etc.), and how these differing horizons of expectation impact the reinterpretation of the narrative material.

In Iran surrealism is spoken of by artists and critics as a living element in art, long after its popularity in Europe and North America has waned. This article explores key features of the work of one of the most prolific contemporary Iranian artists, Ali-Akbar Sadeghi. While Sadeghi says that he thinks of himself as a “surrealist,” his work is distinguished from many self-professed surrealists in Iran: whereas the latter are concerned with representing metaphysical, even mystical, meanings, Sadeghi sees his art as a kind of intellectual exercise, presenting a dramatic theater in which the viewer engages in epistemological interrogation. Though Sadeghi’s paintings are full of apparent references to surrealist themes and tropes from the past, here it is argued that his work is not so much a storehouse of surrealist content as a series of puzzles for the viewer to solve.

The origins of Iranian studies in Italy go back to the second half of the sixteenth century, when there developed a scholarly approach based on a recognition of Persian linguistic and literary evidence. The modern course of scholarly understanding was preceded, and prepared, by a process of political observation and geographical discovery of Iran, which began exactly a century before, with the accession of Uzun Hasan Aqqoyunlu (1457-1478).

Iran had then emerged as an autonomous power which on its western frontier contested the power of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet Fatih, the conqueror of Constantinople (renamed Istanbul) in 1453, was the great rival both of Iran and of Venice for the control of traffic and commerce between Asia and the Mediterranean. Hence the Papal State, interested in the salvation of souls, and the Republic of Venice, the hegemonical maritime power of the Mediterranean's eastern basin, established close diplomatic relations and pacts of alliance first with Uzun Hasan and then with the Safavids.