Raji is a Central Plateau (Iranic) language spoken in Kashan district, in the north-west corner of Esfahan Province, Iran. Here, we investigate the nature of Persian influence on the lexicon of two closely-related Raji dialects: that of Abuzeydabad, a desert outpost at 947m above sea level, and Barzok, a well-watered farming community at 2080m in mountains nearby. As expected, our analysis shows many inherited similarities due to linguistic relationship among the three Iranic varieties; cases of difference and innovation that distinguish them; and profound impact of Persian on both Raji dialects. Nonetheless, the degree and patterning of convergence with Persian is uneven, with the dialect of Abuzeydabad showing greater wholesale borrowing from Persian, as well as evidence of structural hybridization. To account for the divergent effects of Persian influence, we review social and geographic dynamics in the language contact situation. Key factors such as population, distance from the nearby Persian-speaking city of Kashan, language identity, and the impact of media and education are equivalent. However, a stark contrast between the towns’ geographic settings defines their social networks and patterns of mobility, and in turn how speakers of each linguistic code respond to Persian influence.

As part of the collective endeavor to explore the modalities and challenges of the narrative in the Persianate world, this article reconsiders Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), a film characterized by a special cinematographic feature. While accounting for what appears to be a story of swindling and identity theft, Kiarostami keeps the viewer in a state of uncertainty about the nature of what he sees, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, truth and lie, through particular narrative and cinematographic choices. Previous scholarship has focused mainly on the aesthetic implications of the staging and its effects on the viewer. The present study proposes a different type of analysis by discussing specific narrative devices from the perspective of cultural anthropology, with particular attention to the recurrence of the zāher/bāten paradigm, suggested as a cipher by Kiarostami himself early on in the film. The examination of the discursive and aesthetic mobilization of these notions brings to light a subtle game of back-and-forth between the desire to disclose deeper meanings and the will to preserve ambiguity and intimacy, allowing for “soft epiphanies” to arise.

This is a review article of a three-volume book in Persian by Ali Akbar Tashakori on the social history of Yazdi Zoroastrians in medieval and modern times.1 The work goes beyond the history of the Yazdi community, encompassing the broader history of Iranian Zoroastrians. Despite certain novelties, the volumes largely rely on a conventional reconstruction of the history of Iranian Zoroastrians in the second millennium CE. The foundational elements of this reconstruction include the gradual Islamization of Iran and the subsequent “retreat” of Zoroastrians to the “marginal” regions of Yazd and Kerman, the challenging conditions faced by Zoroastrians in medieval and early modern times, the beginning of Iranian Zoroastrians’ social and intellectual “emancipation” in the nineteenth century with Parsi assistance, the community's increasing political and economic influence in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi eras, and the Pahlavis’ exceptional role in elevating the status of Zoroastrians within wider Iranian society. Tashakori's extensive reliance on these narratives offers an opportunity to not only review his own new interpretations, but also to reassess these long-standing assumptions. Additionally, the article highlights neglected primary sources pertaining to the Yazdi community.

One of the most prominent features of Iran's 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising has been the diverse profusion of songs created in its wake. Music has played an important role in Iran's social and political movements at least since the Constitutional Revolution when the poet and musical bard Abolqasem Aref Qazvini (d. 1934) effectively transformed the musical concert into a political congregation. Since then, musicians have given rhythm and rhyme to contentious movements all through modern Iranian history, most prominently during the 1979 revolution and again for the 2009 Green Uprising. Considering the important role of music in Iran's political movements, scholarship on music remains surprisingly marginal in Iranian studies.

The editorial decision to publish a roundtable on the 2022–23 protests in Iran has come with challenges and obvious limitations due to access and immediacy. The ambition of this intervention is to offer some initial reflections and some analytical instruments in the hope that they will be useful for future publications. We also want to write in this moment because we want to register its characteristics—emotions running high, the quick detours of power relations between the state and the protesters, the uncertainty, the changing political weight of the diaspora—along with the difficulty of doing analytical work in the midst of such processes.

At the zenith of the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) protests in October to December 2022, the call for (general) strikes became a rallying point for activists who were seeking to increase the protests’ social reach and political strength in the face of increasing state repression. Therefore labor provides an advantageous analytical lens for exploring some of the constraints and potentials of the social dynamics of the WLF protests.

In this intervention, we discuss the ongoing protest movement and the quasi-revolutionary situation in Iran with the goal of offering contextual as well as background analysis. Our objective is to examine the current wave of revolutionary politics in the frame of a longer history, that is, the one of the “unaccomplished” 1979 revolution. We do not argue that the current movement is in continuity with the so-called Islamic revolution; rather, we ask what afterlives of the 1979 revolution and successive waves of mobilizations reverberate within the current situation. We do so from a political transformative vantage point, which we understand as inherently feminist, in that we refuse to recognize any hierarchy between the struggles, the issues, and the demands as expressed by the protesters. Indeed, we understand liberation as a collective project resulting from the intersection of struggles, demands, and issues. Following this line of reasoning, we interrogate the current moment along three thematic axes: the social composition, the prospects for political convergence, and the genealogy, or the ideational connection, of the current struggle with those of the past.

This article is concerned with interregional trade dynamics between Elam and Mesopotamia in the early to mid-first millennium BC. During the seventh century BC, two great famines in the Neo-Elamite kingdom, of which climatological changes were a major cause, were documented in the textual records. An era of megadrought made grain procurement from the neighboring regions essential to feed the Neo-Elamite lowland population. This article further explores the impact of the two Neo-Elamite famines and “drought of the century” on the commercial and political mechanisms in the Upper Persian Gulf region.

This article considers three temporary and reversible penal shaming acts in nineteenth-century Iran: the shaving or cutting of hair, irrespective of gender; the shaving or cutting of men's facial hair; and the forcible removal of headgear or the coerced wearing of silly headgear. Drawing on anthropological, historical, and sociological studies of hair, this study argues that hair and hat punishments embodied elements of ritual, sexuality, social control, and marginalization. In order to understand the meaning of these penal acts, the article looks at general taboos around hair and head exposure alongside licit and voluntary forms of cutting or shaving hair. Illicit sex, heresy, and alcohol consumption were recurring moral crimes most often associated with such forms of humiliating punishment. Since restoration of honor was not the sole prerogative of the government, these punishments were often carried out by those acting on behalf of a religious authority or individually and collectively by ordinary subjects outraged by a moral violation.

This study argues, contrary to some opinions, that shadow performance existed in Iran from at least the tenth to the twentieth century. Through a textual analysis of newly discovered ancient texts, two plays specifically, this study shows how shadow performance originated in the Indian subcontinent, was transported from Iran to the historical region now known as Iraq, and then spread to Egypt, developing over time through its historical progression. This study also looks at the reasons for the decline of shadow performance in Iran, including the centuries-old Iranian Sufi criticism of the form and the establishment of the Safavid dynasty, which introduced Shiism as the official religion of Iran in the sixteenth century. Certain Iranian Sufisms considered shadow performance debaucherous until the fifteenth century. After the sixteenth century, influenced by the Turkish Karagöz, shadow performance was considered a theatrical form associated with Sunni infidels. Consequently, shadow performance was replaced with Muharram mourning rituals, ritualistic forms that reflect Shia identity.

This article examines the chapter on īhām (literary amphiboly) in Ḥadāʾiq al-Siḥr by Rashīd Vaṭvāṭ (d. 1182). Ḥadāʾiq, a treatise on stylistics with Persian and Arabic examples, is the oldest extant document to define īhām. Vaṭvāṭ's definition of īhām sheds light on the mechanism and function of this literary technique. This article argues that īhām, according to Vaṭvāṭ, operates through the creation of semantic fields and defamiliarization. Previous scholars who examined this chapter of Ḥadāʾiq, oblivious to this point, have made a number of misinterpretations. However, by analyzing the name he prefers for this figure of speech, the definition he gives, and the examples he cites to explain it, this article demonstrates that Vaṭvāṭ had this function of defamiliarization in mind.

“Writing capitalism into Iran” arguably requires addressing a prior theoretical question regarding the origins and development of capitalism. This is because many of the existing analyses of Iran's experience of capitalist modernity tend to uncritically deploy classical Marxist theories of capitalist development. This literature's analytical problems, especially its recurrent recourse to exceptionalism, cannot be solved at the empirical or analytical level but rather at its intellectual roots in classical Marxism (see Samiee in this roundtable forum). This observation has been central to my research program. What follows is an extremely condensed genealogy of this research program and some of its analytical implications for Iranian studies.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is confronting a crisis. Thousands of Iranians, within and without Iran, have taken to the streets to call for an end to a regime that sanctions violence against its citizens and a future of dwindling opportunity for its youth. These ongoing protests, catalyzed by the killing of Mahsa Amini, seem at once to have nothing and everything to do with the question motivating this roundtable: How can capitalism help us understand Iran, past or present? Some might argue that capitalism can scarcely act as a cipher for understanding recent unrest in Iran; it has hardly entered the slogans and symbolism of the protests, which decry police violence, state corruption, forced gender segregation, arbitrary punishment, and the greed of ruling military and religious elites more than they do a worldwide web of capitalist relations sustained by no single political party, religion, or country.

Iran is hardly perceived as a normal country, whether it be by Western commentators and politicians critical of the government, Iranian leaders who impart special distinction to it, or ordinary Iranians protesting against it. This sense of anomaly has become so ingrained that some factions of the Iranian opposition take to social media to express their yearning for a “normal life.” Economic peculiarities form one aspect of Iran's supposed abnormality, and the solution to them is posited as the establishment of a free market economy. Without denying the specificities of contemporary Iran, in this contribution I seek to scrutinize the very norms against which it is compared. I challenge the pathologizing approach that identifies Iran outside of or at the margins of history as a failing or stagnating polity and economy. This approach presupposes that a singular pattern of capitalist modernity is capable of yielding progress and prosperity, and diagnoses developmental shortcomings as the automatic outcome of deviating from a normal path of development.

Capitalism used to be a singular term, but, like many keywords in English, now is often presented and discussed as a plural: capitalisms. Whereas capitalism formerly stood for what today is called industrial capitalism, scholars currently talk about varieties of capitalism: commercial capitalism, industrial capitalism, financial capitalism, and neoliberal capitalism, to name but the most prominent historical variants. Given this proliferation, and the inherent difficulty of defining capitalism, singular, it is important to be clear about the meaning and function of our object of inquiry. After all, “different definitions lead to different conclusions and may make for very different histories.”

In the historiography of Iran, capitalism is commonly evoked as a “concept of difference.” By this, I mean that the term is regularly used to characterize socioeconomic phenomena as modern versus traditional, leading versus laggard, foreign versus indigenous, or hero versus villain in an assumed direction of history. As Jürgen Kocka remarked when coining the phrase, most definitions of capitalism since the nineteenth century have been used by intellectuals to distinguish experiences of their own time from either the past or the future. And it is in terms of this rhetorical function that its significance and limitations for Iranian historiography can be analyzed.

Using Soviet foreign ministry documents found in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, this article seeks to shed a new light on the identity of those behind the assassination of Haj ʻAli Razmara in 1951, and the reasons for it. In seeking a power to back his aspirations to become the ruler of Iran, Razmara hopped between the USSR and the United States, finally gambling on USSR. In spite of this, the United States was not in a hurry to get rid of him; instead, they preferred to use the Shah's fear of Razmara to secure the former's cooperation and to extract from him what they wanted, especially oil concessions in Iran. However, by then Iran was already marching rapidly toward oil nationalization, which Razmara opposed on the grounds that the USSR should be the power that produced the oil for the Iranians. This was unacceptable to the Americans, who, according to Soviet sources, decided to get rid of Razmara during the early stages of the Cold War.

Poetry readings are an intimate affair; they are not suitable for mobilizing the masses. But poems can capture moods and trigger emotions. They can create closeness and community, send messages and demand change. Indeed, in the case of Iran, a series of poetry reading sessions can be considered a milestone event on the country's path toward revolution.2 During ten nights of poetry reading, known as the dah shab, in October 1977 in Tehran, the country's most prominent poets and writers took advantage of a short window of opportunity that opened up for them when the Shah loosened somewhat the reins of dictatorship. Beginning on October 10, 1977, they presented their poems to thousands of listeners on ten consecutive evenings on the premises of the German-Iranian Cultural Association on Pahlavī Avenue. Poets of all political persuasions were present, united above all in their common interest of demanding an end to censorship and standing up for freedom of speech. The impressive list of participants includes such well-known names as Behazin, Simin Behbehani, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Houshang Golshiri, Saeed Soltanpour, and Siavosh Kasrai, along with many more.3

This photo essay provides a visual archive of Parsi philanthropic efforts toward the Iranian Zoroastrian communities of Yazd, Kerman, and Tehran during the 1930s. The essay reproduces a collection of photographs from a photo album produced by the Iranian Zoroastrian Anjoman (est. 1918) for the benefit of Parsi audiences in Bombay. These photographs were taken and compiled by administrators of the Parsi-funded charities in order to demonstrate to Bombay-based Parsi benefactors how their charity efforts were being used inside Iran. The essay also discusses the importance of including visual archival material as part of the social and cultural history of modern Iran, as well as the unique sets of challenges that such archival preservation represents.