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.

Authority in Islam is often understood to operate as a site of negotiation. Based on textual analysis and ethnographic research, this article examines three case studies of disparate Shi'i Sufi Orders where a willing deferral of certain types of authority exists. In the first case study, the Soltanalishahi Order refer their members to an outside mujtahid for all matters relating to the shariat, therein limiting the powers of their shaykhs and qotb. The second case study looks at debates concerning the nature of the qotb's authority within a single order, particularly as it pertains to the power of touch and transmissibility of blessing (barakat) from qotb to object to person, with the order's leadership refuting the idea of charismatic embodied authority despite some of their lay members’ beliefs. Finally, the third case study addresses a group who refute the need for any centralized leadership at all and instead recognize and read the works of multiple qotbs from disparate Iranian orders. By focusing on the deferral of authority, as a type of editing, as a type of shaping, I hope to show that the refuting of certain duties is just as formative as the amassing of powers.

This article examines Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī's Sabʿa-yi Sayyār (889/1484), a Chaghatay rewriting of Niẓāmī's Haft Paykar and Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī's Hasht Bihisht. In the prologue of his masnavī, the Timurid poet expresses harsh criticism against his Persian models. He targets his predecessors’ frame stories, and more specifically their depiction of Bahrām Gūr's behavior while listening to the seven nested narratives. In fact, Navāʾī's reshaping of the poem epitomizes several Timurid trends with regard to the Persianate cultural complex: a tendency toward standardization, as well as a keen interest in Naqshbandī Sufism. Incidentally, the latter aspect shows Jāmī's influence on the Chaghatay polymath's literary output.

This article discusses use of the meter mutaqārib in Persian masnavī (narrative) poetry as related to its content from a comparative perspective. One of the aims is to demonstrate the various connections between a set of narrative poems composed in mutaqārib. The article questions previous assumptions about the form and style of early Persian verse romances and contributes to further discussion of approaches to Persian narrative poetry.

This paper aims to investigate the usage and frequency of what we refer to as K-suffixes in Classical New Persian of the ninth to thirteenth centuries, Contemporary Written Persian of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and Contemporary Spoken Persian. It shows that K-suffixes are most likely to be the reflexes of earlier evaluative morphemes, traditionally called “diminutives,” and are characterized by a high degree of multifunctionality. While evaluative functions continue to dominate in the Classical New Persian works, they have largely been lost in contemporary spoken Persian, and the suffix is now systematically used to express definiteness. The development of the K-suffix as a definiteness marker in contemporary colloquial Persian appears to be innovative, and is mainly dependent on genre, speaker, and speech situation.

Data for Classical New Persian is taken from critical editions of works from the ninth to thirteenth centuries. The data for Contemporary Written Persian comes from comprehensive books of fiction from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and for Contemporary Spoken Persian from an extensive corpus of spoken Persian narratives and a questionnaire answered by fifteen speakers. The results suggest that evaluative morphology can develop into definiteness marking, with the development passing through a stage of combination with a deictic marker.

This paper concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a new pathway that is different from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definite marking, though the endpoint may be similar. The study contributes the second detailed documentation of this process for any Iranian language, and one of the few well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking worldwide.

Afghanistan is one of the few places where the category of bachah—the beardless young male—has maintained its aesthetic and erotic aspects in the public imagination. This article provides an introduction to the history of the various arrangements of man-bachah relationships in Afghanistan from the rise of the Afghan kingdom in the late eighteenth century. By looking at both primary and secondary sources, alongside ethnographic materials gathered during fieldwork in Afghanistan between 2016 and 2021, this article shows how the content and implications of the category of bachah have been in constant flux and intimately connected to wider social, political, and economic developments both inside the country and beyond.

The Safīna-yi Sulaymānī (The Ship of Sulaymān), one of the foremost Persian travelogues from the Safavid period, includes a geographic description of East and Southeast Asia centered on the Indian Ocean. While the Safīna is well-known to scholars, secondary literature on this part of the book is scant and often characterizes it as incoherent and devoid of value. This paper challenges this interpretation through providing a new reading of this text. By casting it in a comparative framework with earlier books of wonders, this paper argues that the geographic section of the Safīna articulates an original view of the Indian Ocean resulting from the encounter between the traveler's observations and experiences and the Islamic tradition of wonders, the ʿajāʾib. As such, it encapsulates one of the central intellectual developments in early modern knowledge production, i.e., the tension between independent inquiry (taḥqīq) and imitation of earlier authorities (taqlīd).

How was Persian literature disciplinized in the twentieth century? This article addresses this question by focusing on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlining the sociohistorical processes that helped to transform scholarly and literary production into a social enterprise. A major outcome of these underexamined processes was the making of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949–79) in Kabul, the first modern encyclopedia produced in Persian. The article explains the multilayered significance of Āryānā's literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reified Persian literature as an object of academic study and national veneration in Afghanistan. A close reading of Āryānā's account of Persian literary history illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 1950s and its contributors’ adherence to a modern methodology. The present study places Āryānā squarely within a transregional ecosystem that brought about the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.

This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian literature, focusing on two different Persian translations of an influential Urdu-language work on Persian literary history, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nuʿmani. The article offers a close, comparative reading of the Afghan and Iranian translations of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in order to understand why two Persian translations of this voluminous text were published within such a short time period. These translations reveal how Indians, Afghans, and Iranians were invested in the same Persianate heritage, yet the emergence of a “Persianate modernity” undergirded by a cultural logic of nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism, along with Iran’s and Afghanistan’s differing relationships to India and Urdu, produced distinct approaches to translation.

The establishment of the colonial universities in India was a watershed moment for the history of Persian studies on the subcontinent. Despite the rise of English and vernacular literatures in the nineteenth century, Persian remained an essential language of instruction in colonial colleges, with generations of Indian students studying Persian to pass university examinations. By closely studying university calendars and courses, this article demonstrates that the colonial universities created and sustained an ecosystem for Persian studies throughout the colonial period, as Orientalists and increasingly Indian Persianists continued to invest in Persian instruction and curricular development. The breadth, diversity, refinement, and expansion of Persian college curricula—which included texts from the classical Persian canon and contemporary literature written by Iranians and Indians—testify to the continued fluidity and dynamism of Persian studies throughout the period. Such a phenomenon demonstrates that the debates and engagement around the Persian language in colonial India contradict its depiction as an obsolete or entirely classical language, and also that colonial college curricula influenced which texts were edited, compiled, printed, translated, and commented upon.

In the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, sound recording technologies—including radio and cassettes—proliferated in Afghanistan and reached transnational lengths. While the state came to dominate these technologies, it could not prevent users from circumventing its censors with alternative perspectives and discourses. This article highlights the examples of Farīda ʿUsmān Anwarī, a noted radio announcer, producer, and journalist, and Aḥmad Ẓāhir, Afghanistan's most popular musical icon to date, to showcase the ways in which the Persianate literary canon served as the medium for sounding dissent amid the changing social and political dynamics of the time. Pushing the boundaries of recorded speech created an alternative space where dissent became possible and the strategic use of mass media paved the way for transnational sonic solidarities among a diverse community of listeners across the Persian-speaking world and beyond.

What is the relevance of the Persianate as a category of analysis in a world wherein even world literature continues to be framed as the literary history of discrete nations? First coined by historian Marshall Hodgson in 1974, Persianate initially referred to cultures such as Georgian, Armenian, Chaghatay, Urdu, and Ottoman, which were heavily influenced lexically and culturally by Persian without themselves being related to Persian linguistically. Gradually, an additional meaning was grafted onto “Persianate,” which referenced cultures such as Judeo-Persian that were linguistically Persian but culturally diverse, bearing multiple alphabets, religions, and identities. These two meanings—the first grounded in cultural affinity and the second in linguistic origins—complement each other and ensure that the concept of the Persianate is reducible neither to language nor to identity.

This article introduces Julius Heise’s Marche Triomphale which reveals a history that was eliminated during the nineteenth century race theory publications. Beginning with an account of Iranians’ encounters with European military music, this article provides a brief history of Iranian military bands in European style, or the bands of muzikānchiān. It then addresses racial motivations behind a short account on Iranian music in 1885 by Victor Advielle, a French administrator. Arthur de Gobineau’s race theories were fashionable in nineteenth century Europe, and Victor Advielle used his fellow Artesian, Alfred Lemaire, to prove their racial superiority. Through Advielle’s account, Lemaire became the main figure of European music in Iran in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The article proceeds with biographical information on two European musicians, Marco Brambilla (d.1867 in Tehran) and Julius Heise (d.1870 in Tehran), and uncovers the earliest known piece published for the bands of muzikānchiān: Marche Triomphale, À Sa Majesté Impériale Nassir-Ed-Din Shah Kadjar de Perse.

In contemporary Central Asia, Soviet-era authors are national heroes. Writers’ natal homes have become lovingly curated home-museums; statues of poets bedeck city squares; and schoolchildren write dictations from twentieth-century novels. Less often discussed in public, such writers also once belonged to the Soviet Writers’ Union, many of these poets called themselves “proletarian,” and their novels purported to imagine “revolution.” Poems about tractors rarely appear in today's anthologies, and new editions of 1930s novels excise the once-obligatory references to Stalin. In reaction to their Soviet-era canonization, some writers have been knocked from their pedestals, as recently happened to Hamza in Uzbekistan. Due to the political sensitivity of many Soviet writers in Uzbekistan, most serious scholarly attention has turned, since 1990, toward transitional Jadid writers of the early revolutionary years who were ultimately devoured by the official regime, such as Cho'lpon and Fitrat.