Social life in Qajar Iran was segregated by both gender and class. Parallel to social life were social pastimes and amusements which were generally segregated in the same manner. Foreign travelers to Iran, in true Orientalist fashion, frequently mention that people had few amusements. This paper will discuss various amusements and diversions, ranging from outdoor activities such as hunting and shooting, to physical and intellectual games, to high drama such as passion plays (ta‘ziya) and folk performances as well as street performers, puppeteers and mimicry, dancers and musicians, and to activities promoting leisure and enjoyment. It attempts to cover as many activities as possible, but it will also show that there was such a wide choice of amusements that it is, in fact, difficult to discuss them all.

The essay of Sergo Gamdlishvili (1882–1910), a Georgian participant of the Gilan resistance, was published in Tbilisi in February–March of 1910. The source focuses on the Gilan resistance and provides insights and interesting details regarding the political attitudes, strategies, and collaboration of the Transcaucasian and Iranian revolutionaries from the end of 1908 through the summer of 1909. The source is also interesting material to study how the Iranian Constitutional Revolution was seen by its Caucasian participants, what they deemed to be major peculiarities of the Movement in different regions in Iran, and how they saw their role in these events.

Based on the author's original research, the paper will offer a glimpse into the frontal theory of Mostafa Sho‘aiyan. The paper draws on his life and experience of the National Front in the 1950s as a model for political thought. Next, the paper will show how he tried, through his unique and uncanonical revolutionary theory, to make a revolutionary praxis compatible with frontal thinking. Analytically, Sho‘aiyan's work proves that an ideologically driven concept of national liberation becomes an impediment for frontal politics in a truly democratic way. Sho‘aiyan's works represent a theoretical and existential response to the national liberation dilemma which the Iranian Marxists faced in the 1960s and 70s.

Based on the discourse analysis of the statements of the university student organizations in the period between 1996–2006, this paper will address the pros and cons of five approaches to politics in the post-reform movement era based on five discourses among university students in the past decade of Iranian politics and their consequences for reshaping the Iranian polity. This article first discusses five socio-political processes, i.e., Islamicization, social differentiation, limited political competition, transformation of Shi'ite authority, and personalization of power, which led to four social and political schisms in Iranian society; inequality; political, social, and cultural discrimination; and secular/Islamist tension. Referring to these schisms, political discourses shape the ideologies and actions of Iranian student movements. These discourses are social justice, tradition, totalitarianism, pluralism, and Islamic democracy. Even if these discourses were no more than intellectual pronouncements by the university students, they have been powerful enough to extend to the Iranian political society.

At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, it may be said that Afghans began to form exilic communities in Iran rather than simply intermittent groups of seasonal migrant workers. The binding institutions of these communities, in particular the community of Shi‘a Afghans in Mashhad, were political parties and groups of mojahedin, religious centers and leaders, and cultural figures—notably poets. Poetry (both oral and written) in court Persian and local vernacular, has a long tradition in Afghanistan—much of which is shared with Iran—and continues to be the most respected and most widely practiced of the arts. It has also always had a direct, but not always approving, relationship with power and politics. Among refugees, it has been a vehicle for political commentary and incitement to jihad; for dialogue between Afghans and Iranians; and (in lyrical forms such as the classical ghazal or contemporary blank verse) for expressing subjective experience, thought, and emotion, particularly love or the pain of exile, with some license to criticize or subvert social convention. In this ethnographic analysis, I examine the role of poets and poetry in the cultural life of Afghans in Iran since 1979, focusing on the latest generation of young poets and tracing the influence of modernist Iranian literary developments on their work in the context of the gradual depoliticization of Afghan communities in exile, in particular after September 2001. I also argue that literary activities have been important in sustaining a separate ‘Afghan’ identity that has helped many young people transform their sense of marginalization to one of pride both in their non-Iranian origins and in their common heritage with Iranians.

This article looks at the origins of the army of Nader Shah (reigned 1736–1747) and the nature of the Persian armies in the Safavid period before considering in more detail the composition and structure of the army at its peak in the early 1740s. It suggests, building on work by Rudi Matthee, that it was only under Nader's tutelage that Persia fully embraced gunpowder weapons and that this initiated a Military Revolution (not just a revolution in technology, but in drill, discipline, and army size as well as ethos) that, but for Nader's untimely death, could have brought about the wider social and economic changes that Geoffrey Parker and others have associated with the Military Revolution in Europe.

This paper maps how American popular culture came to terms with the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran through a study of Hussein Khosrow Vaziri. Vaziri, better known by his moniker, “The Iron Sheik,” was active in professional wrestling in the 1980s and remains to this day one of the most well-known Iranians in American cultural memory. Through an analysis of his character and how he has been represented in the popular media, I argue that he was chiefly utilized as a figure through whom Americans could cope with the devastating blow that the Revolution caused to American power. I argue that this reaction continues to this day, albeit focusing not on Iran but on the current political tensions involving the attacks of September 11, 2001.

With the emerging political stability in Afghanistan, Afghan refugees residing in Iran are scheduled to repatriate to Afghanistan. Many Afghan men have married Iranian women and their repatriation has caused a major dilemma for their Iranian wives. The dilemma stems from the Iranian citizenship laws which disadvantage Iranian women in transfer of their citizenship to their non-Iranian husbands and their children. Thousands of children born of these Iranian mothers and non-Iranian fathers are not recognized as Iranian citizens. They are considered Afghan nationals and are, thus, not entitled to benefit from state-funded education and health services. These children's uncertain futures have magnified the unequal status of Iranian women as mothers and served as an impetus to demand change in the Iranian citizenship laws. This paper seeks to explain gendered citizenship in Iran and explores the socio-legal challenges faced by these women.

The Assyrian “Camelot” in Iran, centered in northwest Iran around the towns of Urmia and Salamas, began with a surprise championship of their community by American missionaries and ended with ethnic cleansing between 1914 and 1918. During the eighty odd years of intellectual and material progress made in this community, Assyrians not only learned a multiplicity of European languages within a generation, but adopted western genre of entertainment on a broad scale. Among these were theater performances. Assyrian plays drew on many sources including French and Azerbaijani plots. But plays also became a means of retrieving their own historical past as it was being revived in Europe in the late nineteenth century under the influence of archeology and related classical sources on Mesopotamian and Iranian ancient history. In addition, Assyrians drew on another source of inspiration for theatrical performance, a source buried deep within their own medieval culture. To what extent does church theater performance soften attitudes toward theater in an environment where American-inspired religiosity frowned on frivolities like stage entertainment? To what extent does the Assyrian experience mirror the production of theater in Qajar culture in general? How, if at all, has the Assyrian cultural flowering, however brief, affected the encouragement of diverse entertainment in northwest Iran?

The literary genre known as dastan-e ‘ebrat (morality tale or play) had already gained currency before the turn of the century and the awakening that preceded the Constitutional Revolution. It was, however, in the context of that Revolution and the impulses the Revolution brought forth, that this form of writing achieved greater popularity. Through the new medium of newspapers available now to a mass audience, the mode of delivery of the traditional morality tale in daily or weekly installments also took on the new role of entertainment while retaining the old role of socio-political commentary. Combining the tradition of his grandfather, Mohammad Taher Mirza Eskandari, who as translator, brought the romantic novels of Alexandre Dumas to the attention of the court and the Persian public, and that of his father and uncle who were pioneers and founders of the early humanist societies (anjoman) in the late Qajar era, Yahya Mirza Eskandari also used literature as a means of conveying his progressive social and political views. The two works, ‘Eshgh-e doroughi and ‘Arousi-e mehrangiz, in particular, capture the genre and the message of the dastan-e ‘ebrat well while taking it further to a level of political and social critique, particularly directed at the autocratic foundations of the government of the time. While focusing on the political critiques of tradition and traditionalism that these works represent, this article will also try to highlight their entertainment aspect, achieved through the process of serialization and publishing by installment, the publication format the papers Majjaleh-ye nesvan and Iran-e now chose for them.

This paper compares the divergent positioning of Afghan women in diaspora in Iran, Pakistan, the U.K., and the U.S. and in their return to Afghanistan since the fall of Taliban. Afghans comprise a diverse group in terms of ethnicity, age, class, and religion, and their experiences in diaspora vary accordingly. Afghan women in Iran and Pakistan may have relatively less access to resources, including citizenship rights, in comparison with Afghan women in the U.K. and the U.S. who may be transnational and of a higher social class. However, Afghan women in Iran and Pakistan are able to break down masculine domains more effectively than Afghan women in the U.K. and the U.S. This is because Afghan women in the West are constantly engaged in mediating between ‘Western’ values and their Afghan/Muslim cultural identities. Finally, women in Afghanistan face imported Western notions of market liberalization, governance, and gender mainstreaming, which have failed to bring about desired state building, peace, and security. For the majority of Afghan women, advancing women's rights is not just about challenging male domination; it is also about challenging imperialist domination, militaristically and economically as well as culturally. Although the main focus is on the transitions in women's lives, due to displacement and—in some cases—reintegration, I will also address how these changes have affected Afghan men. One critical theme runs through the paper: the issue of gender, agency, and identity and the ways in which women, through their positioning in diaspora and under invading forces, are also social actors.

Iran has one of the world's largest refugee populations, comprised primarily of Afghans and Iraqi Kurds.1 As of 2001, there were approximately 2.5 million Afghan refugees living in Iran. About 1.8 million of those were documented and the rest undocumented. With aggressive repatriation efforts under the supervision of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the Afghan population in Iran in 2004 dropped to around one million documented and another 500,000 undocumented migrant workers.2 Based on ethnographic research among Afghans and low-income Iranians in urban and rural Isfahan, this paper examines how Afghans who access Iran's health services interpret health and family planning education in the face of Iran's repatriation efforts and increased social tension. Further, I investigate divergent views toward Afghan repatriation and notions of home, self, and identity. Ultimately, this paper addresses the various borders—physical, national, ethnic, religious, gendered, urban/rural—and how these borders can be redefined through the refugee experience, leaving hope for the future.

Iraj was a leading poet of the late Qajar era, a major poet in the whole history of Persian poetry, and by far the greatest of the poets who descended from Fath'ali Shah. Two things in particular distinguish Iraj's poetry: eloquence and humor. It is difficult to describe him as a satirist in the strict sense of this term since satire in his works is normally incidental and a natural result of his unique humor when writing about most subjects. His best works are Aref-Nameh, Enqelab-e Adabi and Zohreh o Manuchehr, although there is hardly any piece by him which is less than delightful, especially those which he wrote during the Constitutional era.