One of the most enduring legacies of Reza Shah's rule is the problematization of dress in Iranian politics. In the course of the twenty years that he was in power, the state promulgated a number of policies that had a deep, and at times traumatizing, effect on the everyday lives of Iranians. Following the example of Turkey, but unlike other Muslim governments in the Arab world, in South Asia, or in Southeast Asia, the first Pahlavi state set out to standardize and Europeanize the appearance of its people. This policy led to state-society and intra-societal conflicts that flared up again after the Islamic revolution of 1979. This article analyzes the state's dress policies, argues that they were mainly meant to promote nation-building, and ends with a translation of a short story that, better than any official documents or historical accounts, illustrates the impact of these policies on the everyday lives of ordinary people.

According to the few available cursory biographical accounts of Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926), a prominent Cambridge Orientalist who was to become the leading British authority on Iran in the years immediately preceding WWI, his initial interest in Iran was a byproduct of the affection he developed for Ottoman Turkey in his youth. In his own words, “It was the Turkish war with Russia in 1877–8 that first attracted my attention to the East.” Having developed an “admiration” for Turkey at the age of sixteen, in the process of learning Turkish Browne was to discover “that for further progress … some knowledge of Arabic and Persian was requisite.” Thus began what was to become his lifelong fascination with the Persian language and Iran.

Farrokhi Yazdi‘s career as a poet first and foremost, a journalist now and again, and finally a Majles deputy has generally been identified with the more radical trends of outlook during the post-Constitutional era and into the reign of Reza Shah. By virtue of subjects such as freedom, patriotism, syndicalism, and the class struggle—recurrent themes both in his poetry and in the articles which appeared in his well-known newspaper Tūfān—he has been classified amongst the pioneers of revolutionary literature in modern Iran. Therefore, in any discussion of literature and society in Iran between the two world wars, he deserves special attention. His political life fits almost exactly into the period mentioned: having begun his political and journalistic activities in the years prior to the First World War, he died in prison shortly before the beginning of the Second.

Iran's geography ensures that transport is a major problem for economic activity. Much of the country is sparsely settled; the major cities are hundreds of miles apart, with some roads running through inhospitable deserts. The population centers are separated from the oceans by high mountains. There are no rivers suitable for transportation over any distance. In short, transport is overwhelmingly by land through difficult terrain.

These natural barriers provide an explanation as to why Iran's economy consisted for many centuries of a series of local or regional markets, more than a national market. Producers and merchants did not consider their natural market to be Iran but rather their local region and, beyond that, the areas to which they could easily transport their goods, which could well mean nearby foreign regions rather than other parts of Iran.

Several works in Persian and English have detailed Iranian women's participation in social, political, and literary activities of the Constitutional Revolution. The present essay attempts to look critically at the discourses that informed, and were in turn rearticulated and transformed by, these activities. It will be argued that in the early years of the 20th century the very concept represented by the word zan was a contested one; that its homonymic ambiguity (meaning both woman and wife) signified the ambiguity of womanhood itself. Further, it will be argued that this ambiguity resided in the integration into the Constitutionalist language of two conflicting discursive elements regarding women—a contestatory rearticulation that charted the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of defining a new womanhood.

Introduction

The reforms initiated by Reza Shah's urban modernization drive led to changes not only in cultural patterns of urban life in Iran and the economic structure of the country, but even in spatial organization. The full effect of these initiatives only started to be felt under Mohammad Reza Shah, who continued to pursue the policy of his predecessor. For our specific purpose—urban change under Reza Shah—we will focus on an analysis of the development of the Iranian city, specifically the following three aspects: spatial reorganization; economic changes; and consequences of urban change.

Our basic assumption is that the city, unlike any other phenomenon, became the symbol of political and socioeconomic transformation in Iran and that, to this day, it has preserved this character of Pahlavi modernization and change like no other institution or phenomenon.

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.

The idea of Zoroastrian mysticism might at first glance seem a contradiction in terms. The Good Religion, after all, is čīmīg, “rational,” above all else: Zoroaster elegantly solved the most intractable mystery of all faiths, theodicy, by the revelation of cosmic dualism. The mere assertion that there are esoteric doctrines within Zoroastrianism has been criticized. This criticism springs in part from a flawed perception of mysticism itself, which, as it will be argued, is not an independent entity, everywhere the same. Rather, each religion has a mysticism of its own, often irreconcilable in some of its features with the mainstream, and, in the case of Zoroastrianism, with some of the religion's plain logic. Also, the existence of mysticism within a religious tradition does not imply its centrality to that tradition. Mysticism exists in Christianity, but could scarcely be called essential to it, considering the claim, elaborated as the Christian church rose to universal prominence, to the radically overt and sufficient truth of the Gospel.

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.

The Reza Shah period (1921–1941) continues to be one of the most understudied as well as controversial episodes in Iran's modern history. Assessments of the period tend to be politically charged and reflect the widely diverging opinions about the extent and quality of its transformative nature. They rarely involve an appreciation of the effectiveness of the measures taken in this period in relation to stated policy objectives and allowing for the circumstances and conditions of the time—something which is quite common when it comes to evaluating, say, the reforms of Peter the Great in eighteenth-century Russia or those of Muhammad ‘Ali in nineteenth-century Egypt. Instead, they frequently narrow down to a moral verdict that weighs the entire age on a retrospective scale of Iran's historical development since the mid to late nineteenth century.

Earliest contacts between the United States and Iran came about through Protestant missions. This activity resulted from the second great awakening, which, beginning in the early nineteenth century, impelled many Christians to preach the Gospel to all humankind; thus the American Protestant mission to Iran was part of a world-wide phenomenon. This mission was important to the development of Iranian and American perceptions of each other. Missionaries represented the U.S. to Iran, and they transmitted perceptions of Iran back to America. Because of the beneficent nature of their activities, especially education, many Iranians developed a favorable yet perhaps unrealistic view of the United States. This article will explore some of these early contacts and the imperfect mutual understandings they inspired. It will focus on mission personnel, schools, curricula, and students in the interwar years, as Iran tightened its control over education by initiatives taken in 1928, 1932, and 1939.

When Presbyterian missionaries entered Iran, they did so with the intention of introducing modern, Western civilization to the country. Regarding themselves as “servants of God sent to render service to man,” they favored a future for Iran in education, society, and politics much like what they foresaw for America: a nation that would be Christian, scientific, vigorous, cooperative, and democratic. In the inter-war years, it seems, they sought to achieve this vision by supporting Reza Shah's military dictatorship.

This seeming pro-Pahlavism can be explained, in part, by Jesus‘ exhortation to “render … unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's” (Matt. 22:21). Serving but one God—that of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Jesus—the missionaries had to contend with two “caesars.” While they were patriotic Americans, loyal to the United States, they lived and worked in Iran, and therefore served at the pleasure of the Iranian government.