Holy Defense Literature is the official term applied to a large body of prose and poetry published during and after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) as part of the Islamic Republic’s cultural policy to promote and maintain its Shiite and anti-imperialistic political and ideological agenda. Both the production and the critical reception of this body of work have since been gradually altered, resulting in a discrepancy between two mutually exclusive tendencies in the literary representation and interpretation of the Iran–Iraq war: the ideological and the realistic, the latter introducing a narrative alternative to the former. ʿAli Reza Gholami’s novel Divar (The Wall) (2015), however, can be read as an exception to this current creative and critical polarity. By openly renouncing any claim to any kind of truth, Gholami has rendered his highly technical literary creation into a narrative text that goes beyond the real to exert its undermining effect on the ideology of the Holy Defense. Drawing upon Andrew Gibson and Michel Serres, this article attempts to refashion the narrative geometry of Gholami’s novel to underline and elaborate on its destabilizing extra-textual meaning as well as its dialogical and dynamic literary effect.

What can the poetry chosen for epitaphs on graves tell us about the political and cultural development of post-revolutionary Iran and the politics of death and dying under the Islamic Republic? This article explores contemporary Persian epitaph poetry as a valuable medium for understanding the socio-political dynamics of Iranian society. By analyzing the epitaphs of the Iran–Iraq war martyrs, who are buried in Zahra’s Paradise public cemetery in Tehran (Behesht-e Zahra), a new nomenclature can be established for the religious, political and socio-cultural ideas underpinning death and the afterlife.

In the wake of a string of sensationalist documentaries about transsexuality in Iran, Iranian theatre and film artists began crafting groundbreaking trans performances to educate audiences and depict characters living non-heteronormative lives without the translating influence of queer theory or identity politics. Investigating transsexual bodies as assembled by jurists in Iranian Shiʿa jurisprudence and by artists on stage and screen reveals the ways in which the transsexual body is constructed in Islamic legal discourse and represented in narrative and bodily form in the public imaginary in Iran. Representations of transsexuality in theatre and film highlight the role of the arts as a vehicle for social change, communal recognition, and self-cognition. In particular, performances of female-to-male gender transitions in theatre and film have expanded the boundaries of how gender presentation is translated onto Iranian stages, into Tehran coffeehouses, and onto global screens. These trans performances usher Iranian spectators into new forms of viewership and artistic consumption in their attempt to creatively represent transsexual bodies and narratives to increase tolerance towards transsexuals; further, they have ignited a conversation among artists and activists about the assemblage of transsexual bodies in artistic productions and the most effective narrative and emotional forms of catharsis to inspire change.

The Georgian language island in Iran is not yet on the radar of international scholars. Studies by Georgian scholars have mostly focused on linguistic, ethnologic and historic issues concerning the Georgian community living in Isfahan province; no paremiological approach has been undertaken. This article is based on the analysis of Fereydani proverbs recorded from 1968 to 2014. Study reveals that the proverbs used by the Georgians of the Fereydan region in their mother tongue are: proverbs translated from Persian; proverbs of Georgian origin and proverbs existing in both Persian and Georgian paremiological funds. Archaic Georgian vocabulary preserved in proverbs is also considered. This paper highlights the need for a deeper paremiological approach to the proverbs of the Fereydani Georgians.

This paper proposes an exploration of the films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. It employs a methodology based on textual analysis, focusing specifically on the structural design of his films and the focalization processes of his scripts. It shows how Farhadi’s work can be understood as a coherent research project with a uniquely solid model based on chronological linearity as a way to explore the violent breakdown of different emotional communities: families, marriages, groups of friends, etc. At the same time, it considers how all the focalization processes in his films are oriented toward two main concepts: knowledge (of the characters, but also of the audience) and pain (of living in a [narrative] world afflicted by meaninglessness).

This contribution offers a presentation of Turkic languages in Iran with special focus on Khalaj, a non-Oghuzic language spoken in the Markazī province. Attention is paid to features induced by contact with Iranian languages in particular with regard to the anaphoric pronominal stem bilä-, necessity constructions and the multifunctionality of ki/ke, providing new data on Khalaj and offering significant insights for further research.

Most studies on language contact in Iran have focused on the effects of Persian on the country’s minority languages. There are also many cases where large regional languages such as Azeri, Kurdish, Balochi, Lori and Bakhtiari exert an influence on smaller regional languages, and a few studies have appeared on this topic. This paper examines the effects of language contact in the city of Juneqan in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran, where the position of two minority languages—Bakhtiari and Qashqai Turkic—appears to be evenly balanced. The analysis is based on a comparison of L1 and L2 speech from two bilingual individuals with a different L1, as found in responses to the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) questionnaire. Drawing on examples from lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax, the article argues that the equivalent influence of each language on the first- and second-language speech of members of the other language community is likely achieved not by simple equal status, but through the counterbalancing of regional Bakhtiari dominance with majority mother-tongue Turkic population in this city.

There has been very little research on family businesses (FBs) in Iran. Taking an institutional point of view, this article, based on a survey conducted in Iran, demonstrates that since the 1979 revolution FBs in Iran have been key intermediaries between political pressure from the top and societal trends from below. FBs in Iran since the revolution can be considered as a perfect mode of coordination reflecting “capitalism from below.” Based on unconditional support among the family members, they are perfectly adapted to the low-trust environment in Iran since the revolution. As a mode of coordination, the family business was also essential in protecting the modernization of Iranian society in promoting the role of women and the value of competency. It was also a mode of coordination which enabled FBs to protect their property rights which were threatened by a predatory state.

This article argues that even as Chinese imports occupy an increasingly large percentage of the space in Mashhad’s bazaars and marketplaces, such goods are interpreted not only as being of poor quality but, critically, as insufficiently “worthy” of the Iranian middle class who positioned themselves as “deserving better.” In attempting to assess why this is the case, the article suggests that such framing both reveals much of, and requires us to consider, the pivotal role of status in Iran. It holds that this concern for status is expressed at multiple levels: that of the family, as a class, and finally, of the nation. At each of these levels of expression, it is possible to trace different post-revolutionary social phenomena. These include the reification of the family as a moral unit, major shifts in the demographics of education and urbanization, the rise of a consumer culture and the perilous decline of the fortunes of the middle class, and, finally, imaginings of national exceptionalism. This article then uses such readings of Chinese goods as a window into middle class ideologies of worth and deservingness.

Iran Linguistic Atlas (ILA), funded by the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage and Tourism (RICHT), is a research project for mapping the linguistic diversity of Iran. The project is aimed at recording unified and comparable data from every spoken dialect of Iran’s rural areas and producing self-organized colored maps of this diversity using a specialized software program. Its initial phase began around the mid-1970s in the form of a joint project by the then Iranian Academy of Language and the National Geography Organization. In 2001, the documented data was handed over to the Cultural Heritage Organization, to be saved and expanded. The Iran Linguistic Atlas has now been redefined as an automatic linguistic atlas with the capability of producing self-organizing colored maps according to the operator’s choices. In this article, the ILA, its background and the state of its current phase is introduced. The nature of its data, its earlier and recent field methods, its audiotapes, digital databases and computer databases of phonetic transcriptions are described. In addition, ILA software program is presented and its capability for creating automatic colored maps is discussed thoroughly.

The article examines a hitherto unstudied document containing the earliest decree of Nādir Shāh (1736–47) and the petition of Muḥammad Ṣafī Ṣafavī, mutavallī of the pious endowments of Ardabil. The first part of the paper provides the transliteration and translation of this document, and the second part offers a short historical outline of the respective period and commentaries on the content and diplomatics. Through the lens of the document, the article aims to address the set of circumstances and prevalent issues in the administration of the vaqf during these historically turbulent years. Furthermore, from the viewpoint of diplomatics, unique insight can be gained into the distinctive features of Nādir’s early documents.