This study details the Masjid-i Jami‘ of Urmiya, the earliest surviving mosque in the West Azerbaijan province in Iran. The building suggests the expansion of constructing Saljuq-domed mosques outside central Iran in the mid-sixth/twelfth century, embellished with a stunning Ilkhanid mihrāb (prayer niche) in the seventh/thirteenth century. This study provides as much information as possible for recognizing the structure's main features. While the mosque is comprised of various parts, this paper mainly focuses on its dome chamber as the earliest surviving structure. Several new inscriptions and drawings in the mosque's decoration are published for the first time in this article.

Relations between Iran and the Ottoman Empire during the Safavid era were never free of tension, even when there was peace between the two states. In peacetime, both powers secretly and closely monitored the other's movements, either in anticipation of or in preparation for attacks. Due to the destruction of Safavid archives, there is little documentary information in Iranian archives about Iranian-Ottoman relations in the period, forcing us to rely mainly on chronicles and travelogues. However, the Ottoman Mühimme Defterleri (Registers of Important Affairs), which contain a copy of all royal decrees and orders, are a very valuable source for the study of these tense and unstable relations from the Ottoman perspective. According to these registers, upon the coming to power of Shah Ismāʿīl II, the Ottoman government publicly upheld and respected the terms of the Amasya Peace Treaty, while secretly looking for a pretext to resume war against Iran. The question is, however, why the Ottomans did not attack Iran immediately after Ismāʿīl II's accession to the throne. Was it due, as some sources claim, to the bravery Shah Ismāʿīl had previously shown in action against the Ottomans? By examining and analyzing the Mühimme Registers of this period, the authors of the present paper demonstrate that the Ottomans had plans to invade Iran and occupy parts of its territory at the beginning of Ismāʿīl II's accession, but their military campaign was thwarted by the lack of opportunities during the short period of the Safavid king's rule.

It may seem perplexing, in the beginning, to see Iranian poet Khayyām's rubaies and other Persian poems on the gravestones of Bidlis from the late nineteenth century. However, when scrutinizing Bidlis's political and cultural history, it is clear that Persian language and culture has deep, longstanding roots in this city and been integrated into high Iranian-Islamic culture in both respects. Based mainly on primary archival sources and inscriptions, I touch on the adventures and preponderance of Persian—the lingua franca of the rulers of Bidlis, a Kurdish principality located on the Ottoman-Iranian frontier—and its intellectuals after the city was integrated into the Ottoman world, and thus the decaying ascendancy of Persian.

Mohammad Amin Riyāhī's book, Nofūz-e zabān o adabīyāt-e Fārsī dar qalamrov-e Osmānī, is a well-known study in this respect, but mostly focuses on the adventures of Persian in and around court circles. Another comprehensive book on the subject, The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, illustrates the frontiers of Persian's usage in the vast geography stretching from China, Central Asia, and India to the Ottoman world. By focusing on a limited area like Bidlis, the region's most prestigious principality, this article attempts to elucidate the impact of Persian in the Ottoman-Iranian frontiers, unearthing its influence as a language of both diplomacy and literature as well as a lingua franca of Bidlis intellectuals in the lands ruled by Kurdish rulers.

This article explores the wide range of responses to Persian polymath and poet ‘Omar Khayyām (d. ca. 526/1132) in Ottoman and Turkish literary sources. A great number of intellectuals, past and present, translated Khayyām's famed quatrains into Turkish, albeit with differing motivations regarding subject, style, message, and literary reception. Social critics like Abdullah Cevdet employed Khayyām's quatrains as a vehicle for proving that liberal and progressive mindsets were accommodated in classical Islam. On the other hand, literary scholars like Rıza Tevfik [Bölükbaşı], Ḥüseyin Dāniş, and Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı chose to focus on the intellectual origins of Khayyām's thought, as well as on his connections to Islamic philosophical traditions. In the first decades of the Turkish Republic, there was another wave of interest in Khayyām's quatrains related to prosody, message, and what his legacy and poetic disposition represented with regard to the Islamic past. Whereas poets like Yahya Kemal and Âsaf Hâlet Çelebi regarded him as a paragon of libertine lyrics and Sufi mysticism, Turkish leftist intellectuals such as Nâzım Hikmet, Sabahattin Eyuboğlu, and A. Kadir set him as a socialist or materialist humanist who was a staunch critic of religious bigotry and fanaticism.

Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, long-distance pilgrimage to Islamic holy sites expanded and quickened, resulting in the spread of cholera among travelers. The necessity of taking circuitous routes to holy cities both inside and outside Iran significantly exacerbated the spread of cholera. Although potential factors such as inadequate public health infrastructure and ineffective quarantine measures contributed to the dissemination of cholera, overall religious mobility in the form of pilgrimage primarily factored behind cholera's spread. Analyzing the influence of religious mobility and rituals sheds light on how pilgrims, as contagions, dealt with the pandemic and the treatment they received from authorities, members of host societies, and individuals within and outside Iran during the cholera pandemics of the1890s and early 1900s.

This paper explains the nature of sacred text and the process of canonization in the Yārsān religion. To this end, we first show how three formative ideas—i.e., the history of divine manifestation, the angelology of scribing, and the scripture of Qabālah—played a major role in the emergence of canonization and sacred text in the Yārsān religion. We then turn to the parallel, heterogeneous processes of canonization in the Yārsān community, showing that factors such as the community's rhizomatic structure, idea of infinite divine manifestation, continuous process of producing holy texts, and the heterogeneous nature of its oral tradition hindered the emergence of an ultimate canon in the Yārsān community. Additionally, the sacred Yārsān texts, as the outputs of canonization procedures, are divided into three categories: narrative, testimony, and ritual. Finally, following scrutiny of the linguistic nature of Gorāni koine, the paper attempts to clarify the relationship between different types of religious texts and the formative idea of Qabālah as the archetypal sacred text in the Yārsān religion.

Raji is a Central Plateau (Iranic) language spoken in Kashan district, in the north-west corner of Esfahan Province, Iran. Here, we investigate the nature of Persian influence on the lexicon of two closely-related Raji dialects: that of Abuzeydabad, a desert outpost at 947m above sea level, and Barzok, a well-watered farming community at 2080m in mountains nearby. As expected, our analysis shows many inherited similarities due to linguistic relationship among the three Iranic varieties; cases of difference and innovation that distinguish them; and profound impact of Persian on both Raji dialects. Nonetheless, the degree and patterning of convergence with Persian is uneven, with the dialect of Abuzeydabad showing greater wholesale borrowing from Persian, as well as evidence of structural hybridization. To account for the divergent effects of Persian influence, we review social and geographic dynamics in the language contact situation. Key factors such as population, distance from the nearby Persian-speaking city of Kashan, language identity, and the impact of media and education are equivalent. However, a stark contrast between the towns’ geographic settings defines their social networks and patterns of mobility, and in turn how speakers of each linguistic code respond to Persian influence.

This paper investigates the impact of two French architects, Andre Godard and Maxime Siroux, in early twentieth-century Iran using postcolonial methodology to challenge the reductive prevailing narrative of these architects as representatives of Western imperial powers. Furthermore, this paper argues for the existence of a distinct local modernism in Iran, highlights the enduring presence of Iranian architectural traditions throughout different historical periods, and argues against the narrative of modern architectural works in Iran as simplistic hybrids of pre-Islamic Iranian architecture and Western modernism. In addition, this research underscores the role of Iranian intellectuals in shaping the cultural and social movements that led to the broader modernization of Iran and modernism in Iranian architecture.

The aim of the Isfahan Anthology Project is to create an inventory of, collect, and digitize all extant anthologies produced in seventeenth-century Isfahan. Thousands of majmuʿa were authored and assembled in Isfahan. Presently, we are working together with our graduate students at the University of Isfahan and the University of Michigan in a collaboration that intends to train a new generation of Safavid historians who will continue this digital project into the future. We have begun the vast project of collecting and generating tables of contents for anthologies housed in the capital's most prominent public libraries—Tehran University Library, Majlis Library, Malik Library, and the National (Milli) Library of Iran—to begin our analysis of their anthology collections. Adapting our work to include reconnaissance, we have taken careful account of the content and organization of these anthologies so that we can create a digital and searchable database of Isfahan's anthologies that allows fellow scholars and graduate students across the world to freely have access to these rich Persianate-world sources.

Under the early Qajars, Tabriz rose from being a provincial backwater in ruins to the foremost commercial entrepôt of Iran. Initially, its insignificant foreign trade was limited to Turkey (mostly raw Gilani silk), but, when the major commercial southern and western supply routes of Iran became unsafe and costly, trade moved to the northern route. Moreover, after Russia opened its territory to European goods in 1821, these also flowed via Tiflis to Tabriz. When ten years later Russia revoked this permission, the Tiflis trade moved to Tabriz via Trabzon, gradually replacing not only the Tiflis route but also the Istanbul-Erzerum route. This turned Trabzon into a quasi-“Iranian” port, as initially most of its imports were destined for or coming from Iran. Four-fifths of imports to Tabriz were European fabrics. Initially these had come from Russia, but, as of the 1820s, such were replaced by British, German, French, and Swiss fabrics. By mid-century, Manchester fabrics dominated the import trade of Tabriz. Thus, Great Britain took Russia's place as its primary trading partner, although by 1900 the tables had turned. During the majority of the nineteenth century, Caucasian Armenian merchants dominated Tabriz's foreign trade, with European merchants playing an important but limited role in the import of Manchester goods and the export of raw silk. After 1870, the importance of Tabriz as the commercial hub of N.W. Iran decreased, due to various reasons such as the outbreak of the Gilan silk disease, Russia stopping the transit of non-Russian goods, and the opening of the Suez Canal, but also because it became cheaper to import goods via Bushehr and Baghdad-Kermanshah. Nevertheless, even with a diminished role as a financial center and less foreign trade, Tabriz continued to be Iran's major commercial center until WW I.

In Iran, the writing of history has consistently been intertwined with political decisions, and official historiography written after the Islamic Revolution is no exception. The majority of books and articles on Pahlavi I have inherited this historiographic tradition, and are thus highly politicized, particularly around the topic of the role of the clergy during this era. Official narratives of this period are based on two representations: portraying intellectuals and Britain as the sole forces involved in bringing Reza Shah to power and consolidating his rule, while concealing the role of the clergy, or depicting this social group as the sole opposition to his government. This article aims to assess this binary narrative and answer the following question: What role did the clergy play in establishing and consolidating Reza Shah's reign? Research findings indicate that neither of these claims are accurate, as the clergy played a key role in the transfer of power from the Qajar to Pahlavi dynasties by supporting Reza Khan during his ministry, participating in the coup on February 22, 1921 (3 Esfand 1299), and supporting him in the Constituent Assembly. Further, the majority of clergy not only did not play the role of opposition, but indeed actively participated in the governmental institutions of the era. This research utilizes a historical-documentary approach to examine the subject.

Following the tragic murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman, in 2022, subsequent protests in 2022–23 presented a significant intersectional challenge to the Islamic Republic of Iran's (IRI) political order, revealing deep-seated issues of ethnic, economic, gender, and political discrimination. Originating in the Kurdish region, these protests quickly spread across Iran and its diaspora, offering a glimpse of potential intersectional solidarity cutting across ethnic, gender, and religious lines. Notably, Kurds and Baluchis played a leading role in the protests, bearing the highest toll in terms of lives lost and injuries sustained. The Iranian regime responded ruthlessly, employing military violence to supress dissent and systematically dehumanizing these communities in an attempt to undermine their vocal opposition to the exclusionary and hierarchical rule rooted in Persian and Shiite dominance. Throughout history, the Kurds have consistently stood at the vanguard of resistance against the political authority in Tehran, as well as challenging the dominance of Persian and Shiite supremacy. This enduring opposition is instrumental to understanding the widespread, well-articulated, and mobilized resistance to the IRI's abuses of power. This resistance finds its epitome in the Women, Life, Freedom social movement.1

Archival documents from Russia, which are becoming more accessible, help to provide a more accurate accounts of Iran's political past. Based on Soviet documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, as well additional primary and secondary sources in various languages, the focus of this article is on the challenges and obstacles which the Tudeh Party faced from the British and their proxies in Iran during the Allied occupation of Iran in Second World War (thus creating Tudeh's ‘British Problem’). The article delves not only on describing and analyzing those challenges and obstacles, but also on the way the Tudeh was able to overcome them, and its political breakthrough and success in the Fourteenth Majlis elections and later in introducing three of its members into Qavam's coalition government. Faced with such successes of the Tudeh, and worried about the future of their own interests in Iran, and especially the oil installations of the AIOC, the British sought American assistance. According to the Soviet view, it was only through an Anglo-American cooperation that Tudeh's political rise in Iran was checked.

During Iran's 2022–2023 countrywide uprising, the intensity of popular protests in Kurdistan and Baluchistan drew attention to the question of national oppression. Some scholars then revisited a debate, originally articulated in Marxist circles, on whether Iran's culturally and politically oppressed communities, like Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis or Arabs, are ethnic or national minorities. This article approaches the debate within the frame of national oppression as a historical construction. It argues that in Iran, as in almost all modern nation-states, nationhood was established through the forcible creation of minoritized communities whose potential claims to nationhood, or an equal place in a politically democratic and culturally pluralist nation, have been denied.

Even before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran's border provinces, which contain Arabs, Azeri Turks, Baluch, Kurds, and Turkmen, were marginalized and securitized by the state. These processes and outcomes have created a vicious cycle and self-fulfilling prophecy within the context of the so-called security-development nexus. Iran's peripheral provinces border Iraq and Turkey in the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. They are located far from Tehran in the inaccessible and inhospitable terrain and climate of mountains and deserts. This geography and topography partially explain why these provinces have been traditionally neglected by the state. Beyond the geographic remoteness and topographic inaccessibility of these provinces, their ethno-religious demographics and marginalization-based grievances, including those that existed during the shah's industrial and urban-focused development drive before the revolution, have fostered local opposition to the state. Most recently, between 2022 and 2023, this opposition has culminated in the Jina Mahsa Amini or Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

Nationalism, nationhood, and ethnicity, as Eric Hobsbawm argued, are social processes constructed essentially from above, yet cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below.1 Inspired by European Orientalism, the intellectual advocates of Western-oriented nationalism attempted to establish a new Iranian identity based on Persian language and Iran's pre-Islamic past.2 This made Iranian nationalism an attractive ideology for some political elites, and was later endorsed by the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–79) when nationalist ideology replaced Iranianness with Persianity. In this conception, there was no room for the ethnic diversity of a nation-state that is the heir of an ancient empire. The elites’ aspirations to uniformity put pressure on members of ethnic groups to conform their way of life to a new model of Iranianness, Persianized and pro-Western. Every nonconforming element was regarded as a sign of backwardness and possible threat to the modern nation and its territorial integrity.