On 31 January 1990 the Council of Guardians of the Islamic Republic of Iran ratified an amended version of a five-year economic, social and cultural development plan set forth by the Majlis for the 1989-93 period. In its economic dimension, the proposed plan represents a major departure from the development policies preached, and to some extent practiced, under the leadership of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. One of the most noteworthy aspects of this departure is a significant decline in the role of agriculture, hitherto the “major axis” of economic development. The plan instead designates a “high priority” status to the sector. This, according to some Majlis deputies and government officials, has placed the nation back on the pre-revolutionary development path so heavily criticized by the revolutionaries in the 1970s. The post-Khomeini government, however, considers its new policy orientation a practical step, motivated by technocratic realism, to remedy decades-old economic problems.

During the Qajar period the two shrine cities ('Atabādt-e ‘āliydāt, lit. Sublime Thresholds) of Najaf and Karbala, south of Baghdad, served as the leading centers of learning for the Shi'i world. As such they were also at the center of patronage networks that were essential for the consolidation of the religious leadership of all Shi'i communities. Yet, whereas various scholars have examined doctrinal and political developments in the religious establishment in Iran, none have dealt specifically with the ‘Atabat community of learning during the 19th century. The purpose of this study is to examine patterns of continuity and dynamics of change in the composition of the ulama community of the ‘Atabat, based on ethnic, professional, and geographical factors. Such research could shed light on the structure and characteristics of the entire ulama community in Iran and specifically in Ottoman Iraq.

Moniru Ravanipur began her literary career in 1989 with the publication of her first collection of short stories, Kanīzū. The same year she published her first novel, Ahl-e gharq. Since then she has completed two other novels, Del-e fūlād and Kowlī kenār-e ātesh, another collection of short stories, Sang-e shaytdn, occasional stories for children, and a compilation of southern Iranian legends and beliefs, Afsānehā va bāvarhā-ye jonūb. Her fictional works are almost all set in the Persian Gulf region and center around local myths and legends. The language of Ravanipur's literary production also bears the distinct mark of her regional dialect, which as a native of the village of Jofreh (also the setting of her first novel) she maintained after moving to Shiraz, where she eventually received a degree in psychology from Shiraz University.

For Ravanipur, writing is inextricably linked with her littoral linguistic and cultural heritage.

The dialogic interaction among India, Europe, and the Arab-Islamic culture in the 18th and 19th centuries led to a refashioning of Iran and a rescripting of “the people” and “the nation” in Iranian political and historical discourses. The newly imagined Iran, constructed of textual traces and archaeological ruins, fashioned a new syntax for the reconstruction of the past and the formation of a new national time, territory, writ, culture, literature, and politics. Language, the medium of communication and signification, and the locus of tradition and cultural memory, was restyled. Arabic words were purged, “authentic” Persian terms forged, and neologisms and lexicography were constituted as endeavors for “national reawakening.” Iran-centered histories displaced dynastic and Islam-centered chronicles. In order to recover from historical amnesia, people reinvented pre-Islamic Iran as a lost Utopia with Kayumars as a Persian prophet predating Adam, Mazdak as a theoretician and practitioner of freedom and equality, Kavah-yi Ahangar as the originator of “national will” (himmat-i milli), and Anushirvan as a paradigmatic just-constitutional monarch.