This article examines the American Presbyterian education project in Iran from the early nineteenth century to 1940. While most literature on the subject concerns Iranian state-missionary relations and Presbyterian boys' schools in Iran, this article seeks to address the interactions between American Presbyterians, the Iranian state, and students and families of Iranian girls' schools. A study of the Presbyterians' flagship girls' school in Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh and its sixty-six-year history reveals missionary intentions, tactics, and accomplishments, as well as the adaptations and accommodations pressed upon them by the Iranians they served. Despite the school's promotion of modern American norms and Christian teachings, the young graduates of Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh developed a strong sense of loyalty to both Iran and Islam, thus turning an evangelist mission into an important feature of the construction of Iranian nationalism and modernity.

Any discussion of the degree and extent of governmental authority in early Qajar Iran involves an examination of the basic administrative structure as well as the more important restraints imposed by the nature of traditional society on the exercise of such authority. This study will focus, therefore, on the development and functioning of administration at the central and provincial levels, including the methods and machinery employed by the early Qajar state in the collection and distribution of taxable revenues. In addition, the problem faced by the first two Qajar monarchs in obtaining popular concensus with regard to the legitimacy of their rule and acceptance of their edicts will be examined.

In the history of the medieval Middle East, Khurasan deserves special attention for a number of reasons. After the collapse of the ‘Abbasid Empire by the middle of the tenth century, local regimes and new elites replaced central governmental control throughout the provinces of the old empire. Khurasan was the first settled society that the Turkish Ghaznavid dynasty (established c. 994-98) and the Saljuqs (by 1040) encountered, and it served as a testing ground for the new elite's relations with Muslim communal organizations. Over the centuries, the ulama had developed their own structures of authority and organization (the madhhabs) independent of the state. These religious associations had come to represent Islam in its social and doctrinal aspects. In Khurasan, the religious prestige, judicial authority, and organization of the ulama made them a focus of identity and loyalty and gave them a broad base of popular support.

Among The Forerunners of Modernism in Nineteenth-Century Iran Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzada was probably the most outspoken in his defense of secularism and his attack on religion as the chief obstacle to social progress. His writings on these subjects, his advocacy of an improvised script—a lifetime preoccupation—and his plays with distinct social messages, have already been subjects of study. In their treatment of Akhundzada most writers have satisfied themselves with cursory content analyses of his social ideas and literary achievements. Yet the question remains: to what extent was his socio-religious criticism—what he called qirītīka (Persianized rendering of the Russian kritika)— the outcome of his exposure, directly or indirectly, to modern European thought? To what extent, on the other hand, was his blend of theological skepticism and social disquietude rooted in exposure to the lingering Perso-Islamic “esotericism” (bāṭinīya) of his time.

Turkic languages and dialects played a much more important role in Safavid Iran than is generally thought, while Azerbaijani Turkish in particular was widely spoken and written in Safavid Iran. It was not only the language of the court and the army, but it was also used in poetry, even by renowned poets who usually wrote in Persian. The Safavid shahs, many of whom wrote poetry in Turkish themselves, promoted its literary use. Also, Turkish was used in the court's official correspondence, for both internal and external affairs.

This paper explores the possibility of a considerable undercounting of women's labor force participation in the official surveys in Iran. According to the official data, the proportion of females in the total active labor force was about 15.5 percent in 2006. Furthermore, according to the official data the share of female in total active labor in agriculture was about 10 percent in 1996. An examination of a large body of field research on the subject, however, suggests a much higher participation rate, about 40 percent of total agricultural labor. This paper will examine these studies and explore the reasons behind the underestimations. Pointing at the growing visibility of urban women in public space, the increasing share of skilled and educated women, rising cost of living, and the need for both male and female incomes to support an urban family, some observers have suggested that the official data underestimate urban female labor participation, as well. Informal urban labor, however, has not been adequately studied. Anecdotal information, however, suggests the existence of a significant female informal economy in both traditional and modern industries. In 2001, I undertook a micro study of 350 working age women in the affluent northern part of Tehran and found that a large number of educated upper and middle class women were active in the informal market. This finding was in sharp contrast to the studies in other developing countries in which informal participants are generally poor and unskilled and are unable to join the modern formal economy. This paper will also explore the reasons for undercounting of urban female labor.

This paper is largely based on my field works in Iran from 1994 to 2004 and combines qualitative and quantitative methods. I conducted my first qualitative survey (open-ended interviews with a sample of a hundred mothers) in Tehran, Isfahan and their poor suburbs from 1994 to 2000. The quantitative survey, which is a result of the collaboration between Monde Iranien (CNRS), the French Research Institute in Iran and the Statistical Center of Iran was conducted in 2002 with a sample of 6,960 urban and rural households in all twenty-eight provinces. The sample was composed of 30,714 individuals, including 7,633 women 15 years and older married at least once, and 6,154 single youth, 15–29 years old, who lived with their parents: 3,437 boys and 2,717 girls.

At present the Kurds occupy parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the USSR. As the map shows, the area in which the Kurds predominate is a long are extending roughly northwest to southeast in a band of varying width from central Turkey to western Iran in the Kermanshah and Shāhābād regions. In these last areas, the historic road from Baghdad to Hamadān and beyond divides the Kurds from their Iranian cousins, the Lurs.

Within this extensive, mountainous area the Kurds speak an Iranian language divided into two groups of dialects--northern Kurdish, or Kurmandji, and southern Kurdish, called Kurdi. The dividing line between these two groups of dialects run roughly from the southwest corner of Lake Rezaiyeh to the town of Rowanduz in northern Iraq. Linguists consider Kurdish to be a northwestern Iranian language and therefore quite distinct from Persian, a southwestern language.

Since the late 1980s, Iran has pursued a policy of attracting foreign investment and fostering regional trade by granting favored status to the so-called “Free Trade-Industrial Zones” (FTZs) and “Special Economic Zones” (SEZs). To date six FTZs and sixteen SEZs have been set up throughout Iran. The FTZs are strategically positioned for their potential international links and have their eyes on markets beyond Iran, and the SEZs for their value in serving main industries and for improving the country's distribution system and supply network. This paper examines the experience of these zones in Iran in the context of Iran's contradictory and ambivalent approach to international economic integration in general. It is shown that liberal policies pursued in the free zones have been in marked contrast to the approach in the mainland, which has been generally inward-looking in much of the post-revolutionary period. We examine first the rise of free zones as a global phenomenon followed by an overview of Iran's zones and their characteristics. It is argued that serving mainly as “back doors” to the international economy, Iran's free zones have stalled mainly because their promotion has been decoupled from, if not at odds with, official attitudes to the international economy at large. As a result, the zones' ability to attract investment has been limited by both adverse external perceptions of Iran as an investment destination and internal complexities discouraging such investment.

In view of the recent expansion of Indo-Persian studies, the neglect of the Sino-Persian nexus is a missed opportunity to place Iranian history on a larger Asian stage. While Iranian contact with China has continued episodically from antiquity to modernity, scholars have so far focused almost exclusively on the pre-modern phases of exchange. As a contribution to developing the field of Sino-Persian studies, this article situates two twentieth century Iranian travelers to China against the changing background of Chinese–Iranian exchange from the medieval to modern period. In so doing, it demonstrates the infrastructural and conceptual apparatus that enabled the modern Iranian encounter with China while asking how, if at all, twentieth century intellectuals were able to draw on a longer history of interaction to find meanings for Sino-Persian exchange.

Studies on the pre-dynastic claim of the Safavids to sayyid status suffer from a dearth of primary source materials. Scholars have advanced various conjectures, but it is not yet clear when the Safavids began to promote this claim or indeed when the so-called “official” Musavid genealogy was developed. This study presents a genealogical chart drawn in the third quarter of the fifteenth century (most probably in the 1460s) in Iraq (most likely in Najaf), which records the “official” genealogy in an unequivocal manner. This chart is a valuable document in that it testifies to the circulation of the “official” genealogy some three to four decades before the establishment of the Safavid dynasty. A survey of the studies to date on the question of the pre-dynastic claim is also offered in order to clarify the significance of the chart.

Iran's geography ensures that transport is a major problem for economic activity. Much of the country is sparsely settled; the major cities are hundreds of miles apart, with some roads running through inhospitable deserts. The population centers are separated from the oceans by high mountains. There are no rivers suitable for transportation over any distance. In short, transport is overwhelmingly by land through difficult terrain.

These natural barriers provide an explanation as to why Iran's economy consisted for many centuries of a series of local or regional markets, more than a national market. Producers and merchants did not consider their natural market to be Iran but rather their local region and, beyond that, the areas to which they could easily transport their goods, which could well mean nearby foreign regions rather than other parts of Iran.

This study explores the perspectives of female Iranian students living in both Iran and the UK concerning violence against women. A qualitative approach, in the form of in-depth interviews, was carried out with 21 participants. Drawing on Stark’s concept of “liberty crime” the research found that the participants, regardless of their country of residence, perceived violence against women (VAW) as denying the opportunity for equal personhood by stripping away the victim’s sense of self. However, the scope of what was considered to be liberty crime was affected by the individual participants’ religious beliefs and their degree of acceptance of the Iranian state’s gender ideology. The research highlighted the extent to which different forms of VAW are interlinked and combine in order to control and subjugate women irrespective of their country of residence.

The Afghan poppy cultivation is presented here as a case in point to exemplify the linkages between external influences and local effects. World market and power relations have influenced cultivation patterns, processing, and trafficking. At the same time, poppy cultivation pinpoints an internal development which is strongly linked to deteriorating state control, warlordism, and regional power politics. Opium production has served as a major source of revenue for the upholding of disparate political structures which reflect the present political map of Afghanistan. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan gained a substantial push during the last quarter century, from an annual production of 200 tons in 1979 to 4,200 tons in 2004, making use of former development efforts in creating irrigated oases in Helmand and Nangarhar. Prices rose after the Taliban's 2001 ban on production, raising farmers' incomes substantially and turning opium into an unrivalled cash crop. Fairly new production zones have been added in recent times; for example, Badakhshan—the stronghold of the Northern Alliance—has gained the third position with major increases in the last few years. Afghanistan's poppy cultivation and opium production has to be interpreted in terms of globalization and fragmentation. Drug trafficking affects the neighboring states, namely, Iran, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, as they function as consumer markets as well as trade routes for contraband drugs heading towards the West. Consequently, the Afghan poppy cultivation is interpreted in a holistic manner.

Iranian villages generally contain two distinct social classes: (1) peasants who cultivate land they own and/or rent, and (2) landless non-farmers who engage in various commercial, service, and labor activities appropriate to an agricultural economy. Peasants generally employ one term to designate all landless villagers; the most widely used is “khwushnishin.” Although for peasants this term is useful, it poses some difficulty for the social scientist since khwushnishins do not comprise a homogeneous class, but rather are a collectivity of diverse occupational groups sharing in common only a landless status. Included among the khwushnishins are some of the wealthiest, as well as some of the poorest, of all villagers. In terms of economic and social stratification, one can identify at least three separate groups of khwushnishins. In this paper I propose to describe these three groups and analyze their unique roles in the villages.

The following article discusses the development of ancient Iranian studies, namely the important philological, archaeological, religious, and historical discoveries in the twentieth century and how they have changed our views of ancient Iran and its impact on modern Iranian identity. The essay also previews the use and abuse of ancient Iranian studies by the state and their focus on the newly discovered Achaemenid Empire at the cost of Arsacid and Sasanian dynasties.

Under the leadership of Sheikh Ubeidullah of Nehri, in the last months of 1880 tens of thousands of Iranian and Ottoman Kurds marched on northwestern Iran and temporarily took control of several cities. This movement, coupled with the response of the Iranian army, resulted in great violence and displacement. Despite its failure, in the limited literature on Kurds this revolt is seen as the birth of Kurdish nationalism. Using extensive and underutilized historical documents—including official correspondence from Iranian and Ottoman authorities as well as British consuls, and day-to-day reports and memoirs from American missionaries active in the region—this project suggests that Sultan Abdulhamid's (Sunni) pan-Islamist agenda, Shi'i–Sunni tensions, the rise of Armenian nationalism, and missionary activities in the region also played significant roles in the formation of this movement.

When Presbyterian missionaries entered Iran, they did so with the intention of introducing modern, Western civilization to the country. Regarding themselves as “servants of God sent to render service to man,” they favored a future for Iran in education, society, and politics much like what they foresaw for America: a nation that would be Christian, scientific, vigorous, cooperative, and democratic. In the inter-war years, it seems, they sought to achieve this vision by supporting Reza Shah's military dictatorship.

This seeming pro-Pahlavism can be explained, in part, by Jesus‘ exhortation to “render … unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's” (Matt. 22:21). Serving but one God—that of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Jesus—the missionaries had to contend with two “caesars.” While they were patriotic Americans, loyal to the United States, they lived and worked in Iran, and therefore served at the pleasure of the Iranian government.

This article examines state repression in the Iranian bazaar during the anti-profiteering campaign from 1975–1977. While many have argued that the anti-profiteering campaign helped spark the revolutionary mobilization of the bazaar itself, this article posits that scholars should also consider the notion that the campaign helped to foster popular support for the revolutionary movement as a whole. Given the bazaar's ties to middle and lower classes of Iranian society, as well as their status as the country's “economic barometer,” this article presents the theory that the anti-profiteering campaign played a role in generating popular discontent against the former regime in the period just prior to the 1979 Revolution.