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.

This paper examines Mirza Rahim Khan's Persian translation (1885) of Clement Markham's A General Sketch of the History of Persia (1874) as a historical event. To this end, this article looks at two copies of the translation manuscripts: one written by the translator, which also includes revisions of his first draft, and the other an illuminated copy presented to Naser al-Din Shah, the fourth Qajar shah. A close comparative examination of the texts shows the translation reverberates three distinct voices: the writer, the translator, and his patron, the shah. The translator's shifts of meaning show that the changes, far from being slight and local, affect the whole text, resulting in a different narrative, mostly conforming to the ruling system. However, there are cases where Mirza Rahim expresses his dissident voice in the translation. Furthermore, this examination also reveals the socio-political condition under which the translation took place, shedding light on aspects of Qajar rule only revealed by analyzing translations of the time.

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.

In answering the motivating question of this roundtable—How, if at all, has capitalism as an analytical category figured in your work?—I separate my approach from two opposed but equally extreme camps of left-leaning scholars working on postrevolutionary Iran. The first camp underestimates the actuality of capitalism in Iran. It takes as its frame of reference neoliberal capitalism in the context of the Global North and contrasts it to an Iranian political economy lacking both the hallmarks of political liberalism and a robust economy to extrapolate that postrevolutionary Iran is not truly capitalist, without explaining why classic capitalistic class relations are continuously reproduced there. By contrast, the second camp overestimates the reality of capitalism in Iran, claiming that all aspects of collective social and political life are, in fact, now essentially capitalistic. This perspective rejects the relative autonomy of the state, culture, and other aspects of social life and the necessity for historical explanation of social and political complexities. Instead, it considers postrevolutionary Iran a purely capitalistic formation and explains its economy and politics through the logic of capital alone, without acknowledging the real weaknesses of capitalist production found there.

The world's first encounter with the tragic murder of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by Iran's “morality police” was through her image. As millions around the world browsed through news and social media, they were shocked by the image of the unconscious Amini hooked up to ventilators—her punishment for showing some hair through a loosely worn scarf (Fig. 1). The photograph was so influential that a week after its release, its brave photographer, journalist Niloofar Hamedi, was imprisoned. Despite government pressure, artists began reproducing this horrific image. In stylized reiterations, the portrait of Amini was at times coupled with mourning songs or counterrevolutionary music, as in the colorful animation by Belgium-based Iranian artist Niknaz Khalouzadeh that went viral overnight.

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

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.