Relations between Iran and the Ottoman Empire during the Safavid era were never free of tension, even when there was peace between the two states. In peacetime, both powers secretly and closely monitored the other's movements, either in anticipation of or in preparation for attacks. Due to the destruction of Safavid archives, there is little documentary information in Iranian archives about Iranian-Ottoman relations in the period, forcing us to rely mainly on chronicles and travelogues. However, the Ottoman Mühimme Defterleri (Registers of Important Affairs), which contain a copy of all royal decrees and orders, are a very valuable source for the study of these tense and unstable relations from the Ottoman perspective. According to these registers, upon the coming to power of Shah Ismāʿīl II, the Ottoman government publicly upheld and respected the terms of the Amasya Peace Treaty, while secretly looking for a pretext to resume war against Iran. The question is, however, why the Ottomans did not attack Iran immediately after Ismāʿīl II's accession to the throne. Was it due, as some sources claim, to the bravery Shah Ismāʿīl had previously shown in action against the Ottomans? By examining and analyzing the Mühimme Registers of this period, the authors of the present paper demonstrate that the Ottomans had plans to invade Iran and occupy parts of its territory at the beginning of Ismāʿīl II's accession, but their military campaign was thwarted by the lack of opportunities during the short period of the Safavid king's rule.

This article explores the wide range of responses to Persian polymath and poet ‘Omar Khayyām (d. ca. 526/1132) in Ottoman and Turkish literary sources. A great number of intellectuals, past and present, translated Khayyām's famed quatrains into Turkish, albeit with differing motivations regarding subject, style, message, and literary reception. Social critics like Abdullah Cevdet employed Khayyām's quatrains as a vehicle for proving that liberal and progressive mindsets were accommodated in classical Islam. On the other hand, literary scholars like Rıza Tevfik [Bölükbaşı], Ḥüseyin Dāniş, and Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı chose to focus on the intellectual origins of Khayyām's thought, as well as on his connections to Islamic philosophical traditions. In the first decades of the Turkish Republic, there was another wave of interest in Khayyām's quatrains related to prosody, message, and what his legacy and poetic disposition represented with regard to the Islamic past. Whereas poets like Yahya Kemal and Âsaf Hâlet Çelebi regarded him as a paragon of libertine lyrics and Sufi mysticism, Turkish leftist intellectuals such as Nâzım Hikmet, Sabahattin Eyuboğlu, and A. Kadir set him as a socialist or materialist humanist who was a staunch critic of religious bigotry and fanaticism.

Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, long-distance pilgrimage to Islamic holy sites expanded and quickened, resulting in the spread of cholera among travelers. The necessity of taking circuitous routes to holy cities both inside and outside Iran significantly exacerbated the spread of cholera. Although potential factors such as inadequate public health infrastructure and ineffective quarantine measures contributed to the dissemination of cholera, overall religious mobility in the form of pilgrimage primarily factored behind cholera's spread. Analyzing the influence of religious mobility and rituals sheds light on how pilgrims, as contagions, dealt with the pandemic and the treatment they received from authorities, members of host societies, and individuals within and outside Iran during the cholera pandemics of the1890s and early 1900s.

This paper investigates the impact of two French architects, Andre Godard and Maxime Siroux, in early twentieth-century Iran using postcolonial methodology to challenge the reductive prevailing narrative of these architects as representatives of Western imperial powers. Furthermore, this paper argues for the existence of a distinct local modernism in Iran, highlights the enduring presence of Iranian architectural traditions throughout different historical periods, and argues against the narrative of modern architectural works in Iran as simplistic hybrids of pre-Islamic Iranian architecture and Western modernism. In addition, this research underscores the role of Iranian intellectuals in shaping the cultural and social movements that led to the broader modernization of Iran and modernism in Iranian architecture.

The aim of the Isfahan Anthology Project is to create an inventory of, collect, and digitize all extant anthologies produced in seventeenth-century Isfahan. Thousands of majmuʿa were authored and assembled in Isfahan. Presently, we are working together with our graduate students at the University of Isfahan and the University of Michigan in a collaboration that intends to train a new generation of Safavid historians who will continue this digital project into the future. We have begun the vast project of collecting and generating tables of contents for anthologies housed in the capital's most prominent public libraries—Tehran University Library, Majlis Library, Malik Library, and the National (Milli) Library of Iran—to begin our analysis of their anthology collections. Adapting our work to include reconnaissance, we have taken careful account of the content and organization of these anthologies so that we can create a digital and searchable database of Isfahan's anthologies that allows fellow scholars and graduate students across the world to freely have access to these rich Persianate-world sources.

Following the tragic murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman, in 2022, subsequent protests in 2022–23 presented a significant intersectional challenge to the Islamic Republic of Iran's (IRI) political order, revealing deep-seated issues of ethnic, economic, gender, and political discrimination. Originating in the Kurdish region, these protests quickly spread across Iran and its diaspora, offering a glimpse of potential intersectional solidarity cutting across ethnic, gender, and religious lines. Notably, Kurds and Baluchis played a leading role in the protests, bearing the highest toll in terms of lives lost and injuries sustained. The Iranian regime responded ruthlessly, employing military violence to supress dissent and systematically dehumanizing these communities in an attempt to undermine their vocal opposition to the exclusionary and hierarchical rule rooted in Persian and Shiite dominance. Throughout history, the Kurds have consistently stood at the vanguard of resistance against the political authority in Tehran, as well as challenging the dominance of Persian and Shiite supremacy. This enduring opposition is instrumental to understanding the widespread, well-articulated, and mobilized resistance to the IRI's abuses of power. This resistance finds its epitome in the Women, Life, Freedom social movement.1

During Iran's 2022–2023 countrywide uprising, the intensity of popular protests in Kurdistan and Baluchistan drew attention to the question of national oppression. Some scholars then revisited a debate, originally articulated in Marxist circles, on whether Iran's culturally and politically oppressed communities, like Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis or Arabs, are ethnic or national minorities. This article approaches the debate within the frame of national oppression as a historical construction. It argues that in Iran, as in almost all modern nation-states, nationhood was established through the forcible creation of minoritized communities whose potential claims to nationhood, or an equal place in a politically democratic and culturally pluralist nation, have been denied.

Even before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran's border provinces, which contain Arabs, Azeri Turks, Baluch, Kurds, and Turkmen, were marginalized and securitized by the state. These processes and outcomes have created a vicious cycle and self-fulfilling prophecy within the context of the so-called security-development nexus. Iran's peripheral provinces border Iraq and Turkey in the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. They are located far from Tehran in the inaccessible and inhospitable terrain and climate of mountains and deserts. This geography and topography partially explain why these provinces have been traditionally neglected by the state. Beyond the geographic remoteness and topographic inaccessibility of these provinces, their ethno-religious demographics and marginalization-based grievances, including those that existed during the shah's industrial and urban-focused development drive before the revolution, have fostered local opposition to the state. Most recently, between 2022 and 2023, this opposition has culminated in the Jina Mahsa Amini or Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

Nationalism, nationhood, and ethnicity, as Eric Hobsbawm argued, are social processes constructed essentially from above, yet cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below.1 Inspired by European Orientalism, the intellectual advocates of Western-oriented nationalism attempted to establish a new Iranian identity based on Persian language and Iran's pre-Islamic past.2 This made Iranian nationalism an attractive ideology for some political elites, and was later endorsed by the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–79) when nationalist ideology replaced Iranianness with Persianity. In this conception, there was no room for the ethnic diversity of a nation-state that is the heir of an ancient empire. The elites’ aspirations to uniformity put pressure on members of ethnic groups to conform their way of life to a new model of Iranianness, Persianized and pro-Western. Every nonconforming element was regarded as a sign of backwardness and possible threat to the modern nation and its territorial integrity.

Throughout the twentieth century, Azeri Turkish was intermittently banned, occasionally tolerated, but always marginalized in relation to Persian, which was perceived as the unifying, defining, essential language of the nation. Despite the substantial population of Azeri Turkish speakers in Iran—the largest linguistic minority—any attempt to teach the language publicly or to publish in Azeri Turkish has often been regarded, even to this day, as a highly political act of dissidence. Historical analysis of Azeri Turkish texts and a review of policies in language teaching, publication, and censorship within Iranian Azerbaijan reveal a symbiotic but simultaneously paradoxical interaction between this mother tongue and the official master language.

Until a decade ago, it was unusual for officials in the Islamic Republic to use the word aqaliat (minority) to refer to ethno-linguistic minorities or Muslim sect minorities. Efforts to cast Sunni Muslims as a minority, or Azeri speakers, were treated with hostility, as the state, following a specific proclamation on ethnicity and sectarianism by Ayatollah Khomeini, viewed these concepts as divisive to the ummah and ultimately a threat to national security. Aqaliat was instead reserved for non-Muslims, specifically those recognized as minorities in the constitution: Assyrian, Chaldean and Armenian Christians, and Zoroastrian and Jewish Iranians. It is therefore worthwhile to examine how one such minority community, Iranian Armenians, has reacted to these changes.