One of the most important contemporary Persian prose chronicles of Nadir Shah's life is the Tārīkh-i ‘ālam-ārā-yi Nādirī (The World-Illuminating History of Nadir). Its author, Muhammad Kazim Marvi, served Nadir as a financial officer, and appears to have witnessed many of the events that he depicts. Completed after Nadir's death in 1160/1747 but before the last Afsharid ruler fell in 1210/1796, the AAN offers one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of Nadir's career. Several scholars, including N. D. Miklukho-Maklai and Muhammad Amin Riyahi, have begun to investigate the historical context of the work, discussing such issues as the date of its composition and its relationship to other accounts of the period. This article will attempt to build upon their work by focusing on what Muhammad Kazim's account of Nadir's career may reveal about his views on kingship and legitimacy.

There have been a number of important efforts to map out the languages of Iran, but until now no language atlas, or even a comprehensive and detailed country-level language map, has been produced. One of the recent initiatives which aims to fill this gap is the online Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (http://iranatlas.net). This article delineates objectives of the ALI research programme, atlas architecture, research methodology, and preliminary results that have been generated. Specific topics of interest are the structure and content of the linguistic data questionnaire; the handling of contrasting perspectives about the status of “languages” and “dialects” through a flexible multi-dimensional classification web; and the role of ongoing comparisons between language distribution assessments and hard linguistic data.

The Iranian Revolution, while similar to other modern revolutions in many aspects, has resulted in several innovative social policies which have not been pursued as seriously by other revolutionary governments. In this paper we will study one political innovation that has significant consequences for economic development. Taking advantage of its near monopoly on higher education and complete control over public sector employment, the Iranian government has set up a complex system of political screening and filtering for admission to colleges and universities, as well public sector employment.

This filtering process is complemented by a quota system which further enables the government to control the accessibility of higher education and public sector employment to various social groups. As would be expected, public reactions to these discriminatory policies are diverse. The beneficiary social groups offer justifications for this policy while those who are damaged by it express resentment in private circles.

It is surprising, somehow, to witness the degree to which the concept of national character doggedly maintains its intuitive appeal in the social sciences. Despite widespread criticism of the use of the concept as the basis for studying human societies, few researchers find themselves able to deny that different societies seem to have a distinctive “feel” to them, and it is a rare field worker indeed who doesn't speak, informally at least, of the members of a society in which he has worked in terms of collective “psychological” characteristics. Widely used anthropological concepts such as “ethos,” “value system,” and even “culture” itself reflect this feeling in differing degrees. The inherent intuitive appeal of the national character concept persists, then, despite our best efforts to repudiate it.

In trying to understand this phenomenon, it seems a vain effort to return once again to the question: “Do national characters exist?”. In place of this well-worked exercise, I feel it more profitable to turn away from the natives and focus on the epistemology of the observer.

During the last 65 years, European, American and Russian historians have often tried to study the reasons which led to the Allied invasion of Iran on 25 August 1941. For a long period, the main obstacle was the limited access to official documentary sources. Gradually, British and Russian archives started to declassify their documents concerning the events of August 1941. That, in turn, caused a new wave of publications on this topic. Unfortunately, even with newly available sources, modern researchers were frequently unable to grasp the whole picture, emphasizing only one reason for the invasion or even exaggerating its importance. This paper attempts to analyze the most common explanations of the reasons for the occupation of Iran offered by different historians and try to find out which of these causes impelled the Allies to invade Iran. The research paid special attention to existing Russian primary and secondary sources on the issue which are less well known to English readers. Important information found in them allows events related to the Allied occupation of Iran in 1941 to be described from a relatively new angle.

Although the first Persian language newspaper was published in Iran 170 years ago, Iranian journalism is a twentieth century creation, indeed a product of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The press played a significant part in the revolution, especially by promoting the demand for the rule of laws enacted by parliament, rather than decrees issued by the king or the religious leaders. Once a constitution had been declared, many journalists felt relieved of all restrictions and engaged in bitter, personal attacks on their opponents, including the monarch and his family. Many papers also opposed a press law that was passed soon after the revolution, arguing that it was meant to suppress their newly-gained freedom. Five more press laws have been passed in Iran since then, but the debate over press freedom and the rule of law in the country does not appear to be anywhere near resolution.

The Seljuk and Khwarazmid periods witnessed a growing relationship between Sufism and the state in the central Islamic lands. This link grew even stronger during the Ilkhanid Mongol period when there was an immense rise in the influence of Sufi masters in court circles, so much so that, in many ways, some Sufi figures became the primary religious authorities in Ilkhanid Iran. At the same time, there also appears to have been a blurring of the philosophical line separating Sufism from Shi'ism.

The family of wealthy Sufi masters from Bahrabad in Khurasan has attracted the attention of modern scholars on account of their involvement with the highest levels of the Ilkhanid state machinery and their association with the Kubrawi order and its influential figures, such as Najm al-Din Kubra, Sayf al-Din Bakharzi, and ‘Ala’ al-Dawla Simnani.

This is a study of the national sacralization of Hafiz as the “emblem of the manifestation of the Iranian spirit.” This sacralization began with E. G. Browne in 1902 but reached its definitive formulation in Abd al-Hosein Hazhir's monograph Hafiz-tashrih in 1928. For a nation to have a purchase on itself it must provide for a convocational experience. Shortly after the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, an ascending intellectual elite in Iran set out to do just that by fashioning a heterodox cult of the veneration of Persian poetry by recasting pre-modern texts, authors and their tombs into a national scripture authored by national prophets buried in sacred grounds which culminated in Hafiz as the “seal of its prophets.”

Despite the Eisenhower administration's strong support for the Pahlavi monarchy, tensions simmered under the surface of Mohammad Reza Shah's relationship with the United States throughout the 1950s. Following the Qarani coup attempt and the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, the shah sought to diminish the Soviet threat to his regime and reduce his dependence on the United States by exploring Moscow's offer of a non-aggression treaty. Drawing on American, British, and Iranian sources, this article provides the first detailed history of these secret Soviet–Iranian negotiations that ended in disastrous failure for the shah in February 1959.

The earliest historical references to the Persian Gulf appear to stem from the time of the Sumerian rulers of Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., when, for instance, the trade with Dilmun (on the western shores of the upper part of the Gulf) of Ur Nanše, King of Lagash (2494–2465 B.C.), is mentioned. The Gulf itself is specifically named in a historical text of Lugal Zagesi, King of Uruk (2340–2316 B.C.), where it is said that “then from the Lower Sea, by the Tigris and Euphrates, as far as the Upper Sea, [the god Enlil] provided him with clear routes”; and, in an inscription of Sargon of Akkad, it is said that Enlil gave him the Upper Sea and the Lower Sea.

Social life in Qajar Iran was segregated by both gender and class. Parallel to social life were social pastimes and amusements which were generally segregated in the same manner. Foreign travelers to Iran, in true Orientalist fashion, frequently mention that people had few amusements. This paper will discuss various amusements and diversions, ranging from outdoor activities such as hunting and shooting, to physical and intellectual games, to high drama such as passion plays (ta‘ziya) and folk performances as well as street performers, puppeteers and mimicry, dancers and musicians, and to activities promoting leisure and enjoyment. It attempts to cover as many activities as possible, but it will also show that there was such a wide choice of amusements that it is, in fact, difficult to discuss them all.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is seriously challenged by a secularizing intellectual force from within. It may seem ironic for such a movement to appear in a clerical-dominated regime, initially thought by many to embody the victory of religion and tradition over secularism and modernization. But the Iranian revolution came in the wake of at least a century of exposure to secular ideas and institutions, an experience whose impact continued to be discerned during and after the revolution by observers who could see beyond the rhetoric of Islamism.

Confronted with the task of writing a chapter on “History as Literature” for the volume on Persian historiography in the new History of Persian Literature, I found myself asking, “What does this title mean? And what might it imply?“ In medieval Islamicate societies, “history” (Arabic ta˒rīkh, Persian tārīkh) referred both to a specific discipline and to works dealing with the objects of that discipline. If, as written works, histories may be broadly classed as “literature” (for which neither Arabic or Persian had a corresponding term until the modern period), this might suggest that historians placed style over substance, or/and that history is “imaginative writing” and may, as such, contain an element of “fiction.” Indeed, as I shall note below, recent research on Arabic historiography (which poses somewhat different problems, in the main, than does Persian) has argued that many of the “historical” accounts which appear therein are, in fact, “fiction” passed off as history.

The significant changes in the social, economic, and political conditions of Iran in the late Qajar era both precipitated and necessitated changes in cultural production. One way to better understand these shifting paradigms is through an examination of print culture. ᶜAbbas Mirza, the governor of Azerbaijan and a Qajar prince, has been credited with promoting and supporting the printing industry in Iran. In 1812, he oversaw the establishment of a printing house in Tabriz, and it was largely due to his influence that Tabriz became an important center of publishing. Jan Rypka noted that the first “printing business” in Iran was set up in Tabriz in the year 1824-25 but he believed the press to have been operational for only a decade before lithography overtook the printing enterprise. ᶜAbbas Mirza sent a group of students to England to study, the most notable being Mirza Salih Shirazi who was a student at Oxford University.

The poet Muhtasham Kāshānī (d. 1588) is today known primarily for his strophic elegy on the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbalā, but such devotional poems make up only a tiny fraction of large oeuvre. Far more substantial are two works of a very different tenor, Nuql-i ‘Ushshāq (The Lover's Confection) and Risāla-yi Jalāliyya (The Glorious Epistle). Using an innovative combination of prose and poetry, these works tell the story of the poet-narrator's stormy affairs with, respectively, an upper-class courtesan and a footman attached to a nobleman's house. As part of the larger literary movement known as the maktab-i vuqū‘ or “realist school,” these purported autobiographical accounts of Muhtasham's amorous adventures reveal a sophisticated culture of eros and desire that differs strikingly from the usual representations of the state of literature and the arts under Shah Tahmāsp. After situating these works in their historical, literary, and cultural contexts, the article turns to a close analysis of an extended passage from each work to show how Muhtasham integrates lyric poetry, narrative, and setting to depict the pursuit of desire in the urbane world of early modern Persia.

This article examines the impact of modernization and Westernization on the clerical community in Iran between 1925 and 1941, and discusses briefly the reactions and attitudes of various factions and strata of the ulama toward the modernization efforts of the state. The study also demonstrates that the clergy's reaction to modernization was not one of outright opposition and resistance. While the clerical community as a whole rejected Westernization, its reaction to the government's modernization policies varied greatly.

The process of modernization in Iran was accompanied by a considerable degree of change in social stratification. New social classes and occupational groups emerged and the power of the old and traditional elites declined. In contrast to popular assumptions, the ulama as a traditional elite showed a remarkable degree of adaptability in response to modernization and social change.