The Haydariyyah and Niᶜmatiyyah were Widespread, Mutually Hostile urban factions of Safavid and post-Safavid Iran, sparsely documented and virtually unstudied. From at least the middle of the tenth/sixteenth century up until recent decades, a number of cities and towns of Iran were perceived as being divided into two groupings of adjacent wards (maḥallah), one grouping known as the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the other as the Niᶜmatī-khānah, the respective (male) inhabitants of which would profess mutual contempt and antagonism, and would periodically clash in massive public fights. The origin of the terms and the cause of the antagonism were not generally known to the participants; the topography and composition of the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the Niᶜmatī-khānah (which in some places extended into the adjacent countryside) was apparently irrelevant; and membership in either of these factions corresponded to no other social, political, or sectarian affiliation.

During the nineteenth century, the bazaar remained the center of commercial activity in Iran. However, the traditional structure of Iranian economy and society began to be deeply affected by Iran's increasing involvement in the international market, so that by the end of the century there had been nearly a twelvefold increase in the volume of Iran's foreign trade. This was accompanied by a rise in the general level of prosperity in the country, and an almost doubling of its population. The groups most directly affected by these developments were the merchants and craftsmen and it was the emergence of a small capitalist class which wanted a share in the political process that greatly contributed to the rise and success of the constitutional movement. The impact of the demands of the international market on crafts and guilds damaged some of the textile industry but stimulated the rise of new crafts, such as those associated with the production and processing of opium and carpets.

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.

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.

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.

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 his speech at Columbia University, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad stated that there are no homosexuals in Iran. His attempt was to avoid the subject and any ensuing controversies that could hamper the nuclear talks at the United Nations General Assembly the following day. The present study will argue that the denial of homosexuality has been selectively applied to situations when the most prudent alternative was to overlook the issue or to keep quiet about it. A few years earlier, while the former president, Mohammad Khatami, was still in office, this attitude determined the course of action in dealing with Mohammad Khordadian, a famous Los Angeles based Iranian-American male cabaret dancer who was also rumored to be gay. In the spring of 2002, Khordadian visited Iran for the first time in more than twenty years. The authorities considered it an offense that he dared to challenge the morality codes of the Islamic Republic by crossing the border into Iran without any apprehension. The imprisonment and trial of Khordadian is a unique case in focus.

The processes of development in the “Third World” are of great concern to historical sociologists and economic historians. However, despite the great interest displayed by the founding fathers of sociology in the nineteenth century in similar questions, and despite their historical orientation and liking of historical periodization, present day sociologists tend to be uninterested in both this subject matter and this orientation. In this respect they have lagged behind economists interested in questions of development and economic historians.

Following in Marx & Weber's tradition of social-economic science the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of historical analysis for a deeper understanding of the problem of economic development. From the outset tha basic question will be the proper use of history to construct the historical processes of development both in the past and the future.

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.

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.

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.

This study aims to address concerns over Iranian territorial integrity with respect to ethnic identity by examining three interrelated points of:

• Center and periphery in Iran.

• Territorial attachment and the political borders.

• Ethnic identity and social mobility.

Earliest contacts between the United States and Iran came about through Protestant missions. This activity resulted from the second great awakening, which, beginning in the early nineteenth century, impelled many Christians to preach the Gospel to all humankind; thus the American Protestant mission to Iran was part of a world-wide phenomenon. This mission was important to the development of Iranian and American perceptions of each other. Missionaries represented the U.S. to Iran, and they transmitted perceptions of Iran back to America. Because of the beneficent nature of their activities, especially education, many Iranians developed a favorable yet perhaps unrealistic view of the United States. This article will explore some of these early contacts and the imperfect mutual understandings they inspired. It will focus on mission personnel, schools, curricula, and students in the interwar years, as Iran tightened its control over education by initiatives taken in 1928, 1932, and 1939.

After dropping rapidly and steadily over two decades, fertility in Iran stabilized between 2001 and 2011 at around 1.9 to 2 children per woman, before starting to rise slightly between 2012 and 2016, then falling fairly quickly. This coincided with the implementation of the Islamic Republic’s new population policy, with its aggressive and coercive measures, one of whose goals was to reverse the downwards trend in fertility. Given changes in proximate and remote determinants of fertility in Iran, and the decline in fertility since 2016, it is assumed that this new population policy triggered a reduction in intervals between births between 2012 and 2015, leading to a slight rise in the fertility of already married couples. The other latent objective of the Islamic Republic’s new population policy is to drive Iran’s population up to 150 million inhabitants in the near future. This is utopian given Iran’s demographic dynamics, but it conceals the political and ideological goal of asserting Iran’s demographic and geopolitical significance within the region, by drawing on a novel immigration policy to make up for its low fertility.

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.

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.

Shortly after the investiture of Shah Isma'il (r, 907-30/1501-24) in Iran as the first Safavid monarch, Twelver Shi'ism was declared the religion of the new empire. Shah Isma'il and succeeding monarchs seemed determined to convert Iran from Sunnism to a literate urban version of Twelver Shi'ism, distinct from the folk religion of the Turkoman nomads. The process of conversion to Shi'ism is best understood within the larger political framework of Ottoman-Safavid relations, as an attempt to demarcate Safavid territory against Ottoman encroachments and insulate its inhabitants from Sunnite leanings. To disseminate the Shi'ite creed and apply Islamic law (sharī'a) in accordance with the Shi'ite school (madhhab), the shahs invited the Shi'ite ulama from Arabic-speaking territories such as Iraq, Bahrain, and Jabal ‘Amil (in present-day Lebanon) to reinforce their counterparts in Persia. Among these, the contribution of the scholars of Jabal ‘Amil became especially notable as they successfully cultivated Safavid patronage and reaped unprecedented socio-economic power.