The completion of this article preceded the triumph of the Revolution in Iran. During the previous regime, critical studies on the subject of political economy of Iran, either went unpublished or were sufficiently diluted to cause no alarm and thus no harm. We write from personal experience and from knowledge of the experiences of other colleagues.

This study is not free from the effects of such constrictions since most available official data generated in Iran during the past regime were tampered with somewhat to satisfy political interests and concerns. The data at hand fail to reflect what we think of as the “economics of growth and destruction.” By using available data, reaching for alternative sources when possible, and pointing out the observed inconsistencies, we have uncovered a bleak picture, despite the distortions by authorities who, unwilling to reform the condition of life in Iran, kept reforming the data.

Historians have tended to ignore the structure of tribalism in writing the history of Iran. Numerous references to tribal leaders can be found in the literature (Turkoman, Bakhtiyari, and Qajar khans appear and reappear as important figures in Iranian political history), but the nomadic societies that produced these leaders and shaped and limited the contours of their actions have been left to the researches of anthropologists and other social scientists. While historians have undertaken detailed studies of urban and agrarian institutions, they have continued to ignore tribalism as a factor in Iranian history.

Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, pastoral nomads comprised approximately one-fourth of the population of Iran. Forming over two hundred separate tribal units divided into five major ethnic groupings (Turkoman, Iranian, Kurdish, Arab and Baluch), these pastoral groups have been and continue to be integral elements in the shaping of Iranian history.

In their “recreation of the Persian nationality” and their proclamation of Shiᶜite Islam as the official state religion of Persia, the Safavids performed a crucial historical role. They formalized, institutionalized, intensified and politicized the Sunni-Shiᶜite doctrinal and regional schism within the Islamic world. Coming in the wake of the four centuries of Turko-Mongol invasions which had already helped to “harden the division of the Muslim lands into separate Arabic, Persian and Turkish regions between which literary communication was confined to the restricted circles of the educated,“ the triumph of the Shiᶜite revolution in Persia formalized the division of Islamic Asia into three major Muslim political entities: Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. Safavid Persia drove wedges between the Sunni Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire and Central Asia. Safavid and shicite Persia, however, was not a monolith. It was an ethnic, linguistic, and religious mosaic.

This incident occurred in 1943, a year after the Shah had succeeded his father and was recounted by A. C. Millspough, then financial advisor to the Iranian government.

By the 1970s, however, the Iranian government was denying the relevance of the “guns versus butter” tradeoff for the country. The Shah posed the problem differently, “What is the use of having an advanced industry in a country which could be brought to its knees when faced with any small asinine event?” Asked on a subsequent occasion whether the desire for maximum national power implicit in such defense expenditure was compatible with the efforts to achieve maximum economic development, he replied, “It is not only compatible but essential.

This paper explores how children of Iranian immigrants engage with internet media in processes of identity formation. It conceptually centralizes places of home in order to bring together literatures on diaspora and digital media in order to understand the case of the second-generation immigrant home. It argues that this partially mediated home is both connected/mobile and emplaced/embodied. It is in this sense that the article discusses processes of locating home, in the sense of both a narrated discovery and a materially situated formation. The findings are generated from ethnographic fieldwork among second-generation Iranian Americans in Los Angeles carried out over a period of twelve months as part of an ongoing doctoral project with a focus on respondents' everyday practices of internet usage.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Parsis reestablished ties with Zoroastrians in Iran that had languished due to decades-long internal unrest in Iran. In 1854 reformists in India established the Society for the Amelioration of Conditions in Iran and sent a representative to Iran—Maneckji Hataria. Hataria was charged with eliminating the onerous non-Muslim tax owed by the Zoroastrians (the jaziyeh). Hataria also organized the Iranian Zoroastrian community, and funded a variety of community projects. He also brought Parsi reformist ideas to Iran, and attempted to reshape Iranian religious practice and belief along Parsi lines. This article explores the effects of Parsi reformist ideas on Iran, and Hataria's own writings concerning Zoroastrianism and its relationship to Iranian national identity.

One of the most exquisite illustrated books produced under the patronage of Shahrukh is a copy of Majmaʿ al-Tawarikh which was widely dispersed during the twentieth century. The dispersal of the manuscript has strongly influenced and limited its scholarly examination. The present research has traced the folios of this manuscript in numerous collections. By means of comparison with other dated codices, the illustrations of the dispersed manuscript can be classified into three distinctly different groups. This article gives an explanation of why these three styles appear side by side in the manuscript. Thereafter, it focuses on the problem of the authenticity of some of the illustrations of the manuscript.

The Gizistag Abāliš is a ninth- or tenth-century Pahlavi text, recording a debate which took place at the court of al-Maʾmūn between a Zoroastrian priest and a heretical dualist. This article, the first in-depth study of this important work, examines the text in its broader Islamicate environment. It argues that the narrative itself is probably fictional, but reflects a real historical phenomenon, namely the interreligious debates which took place among Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews during the ʿAbbasid period. It argues that the text is a unique Zoroastrian example of a literary genre that was common among Christians at the time, namely, “the monk in the emir’s majlis.” By comparing the Gizistag Abāliš to these Christian texts, it explores why Zoroastrians generally did not launch explicit polemics against Islam, comparable to those of other non-Muslim communities. It seems that Zoroastrian authors were more concerned with explaining their own doctrines than critiquing the beliefs of others. This is curious considering the large numbers of Zoroastrians who were converting to Islam at the time. Finally, the article proposes new ways of refining the way we read Pahlavi texts, by analyzing them alongside the literatures of other religious communities in the early Islamic empire.

The Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī of Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi in Many Respects Represents a late medieval summa, or codification, of the Persian genre of ethical and advice literature. Designated variously as andarz, pand, naṣīḥat, siyar and akhlāq, the genre of political advice literature is an ancient one in Persian culture, going back to Late Antiquity and exhibiting concordance with Greek and Indian sources. Most works of Sasanian political wisdom literature, such as the Advices of Anushirvan, Buzurjmihr, and Ardashir, as well as those attributed to the ancient Greek sages Aristotle, Plato, and others, are of indeterminate authorship. Many have been preserved only in late manuscript copies dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and some, like the famous Letter of Tansar, may even have been composed in later periods.

The famous Persian version of the Jāmiᶜ al-Tawārikh (Hazine 1654) has never been studied with the care it deserves. Since its transcription was completed a year before Rashid al-Din’s execution, it remained unfinished while approximately seven illustrations were inserted into it, and the locations of other illustrations were left blank. Careful examination of the manuscript reveals that almost all of the empty spaces left for narrative illustrations were painted during the last decades of the fourteenth century. Having decided to improve the quality of the manuscript, the kitābkhāna of Shāhrukh, in the fifteenth century, completed the missing passages of text and restored or overpainted some of its illustrations. The dedicatory inscription of Farhād Khān Qarāmānlu indicates that the manuscript was refurbished again in the Safavid period. The last artistic additions to the manuscript were overpainting an illustration and insertion of two illuminated friezes in the Ottoman Istanbul. This paper, which is a result of close examination of the original manuscript, explains the complicated life history of the book.

This article examines the life and work of Dinshah Irani, a prominent Parsi scholar, lawyer and philanthropist who was a key intellectual intermediary between the Parsi community of Bombay and the intellectual community of Iranian nationalists during the 1920s and 1930s. The article details the role played by Irani in patronizing the publication of Zoroastrian-themed printed works in Bombay that were intended for export to the reading market in Iran. By focusing on the life and work of Dinshah Irani, the article details the important role the Parsi community of Bombay played in the revival of Iranian antiquity during the early twentieth century. The article also highlights the transnational cultural and intellectual history of Iranian nationalism during the Reza Shah period.

Human rights issues loom large in the contemporary history of Iran. Under the reign of the late shah, Iranians were deprived of basic rights and freedoms and suffered from pervasive violations of human rights, many at the hands of the regime's notorious security forces. Ironically, in official representations to the international community, the shah's government posed as a champion of human rights. In the 1960s and 1970s Iranians took a leadership role at the United Nations in promoting international human rights law, and Tehran was selected as the venue for the important 1968 UN International Conference on Human Rights. Under the shah Iran ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the United States failed to ratify until 1992 (and then only conditionally). Individual Iranians also contributed to the development of human rights principles.

“It is true that the Japanese have copied Europe. There is no Such Obstacle there as in our case, for their religion is not so strong.” So said the famous Persian statesman Mirza Malkom Khan in an article that was published in an English journal in 1891. The first statement seems obvious enough, but what about the second? Is it true that the Japanese encountered no obstacles in their emulation of Europe? Even more fundamentally, why did Japan play so prominent a role in the eyes of Persian and Ottoman observers to begin with? Reform-minded statesmen and intellectuals in both countries looked to this Far Eastern state because it seemed so easily to take over European technologies and to avail itself of the progress led by the West.

This article studies an early Safavid chronicle, Futuhat-e Shahi by Amini Haravi. In 1521, the founder of the Safavid state, Shah Isma‘il, provided Haravi with a number of veterans from the early days of the Safavid uprising as informants. Their narrative presents an alternative view on the early career of the shah that differs from the dominant version current in modern scholarship. From the perspective of the Futuhat, the rise of the Safavids did not occur as a wild apocalyptic explosion, but was a carefully planned and cautious campaign run by experienced commanders who kept a tight rein on the teenage Shah Isma‘il.

Ayatollah Montazeri was a Khomeinist who came to regret being Khomeini's unabashed protegé. Though he has never abandoned the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, he has sought to reconceptualize it by furnishing it with democratic principles. In this, he has not been credible, although he has managed to portray himself as a reformer among some Iranian activists who themselves have credible reformist credentials, such as Akbar Ganji. But other reformists believe that the principles of the mandate of the jurist permit authoritarian abuses. And those among them who seek a mujtahid's support for overthrowing that doctrine would prefer to turn to the writings of Ayatollah Dr. Mehdi Ha'iri (d. 1999).

A hitherto neglected aspect of the Iranian women's lives and activities is their traveling and travelogues. A number of Iranian women pilgrims to Mecca and the Shi'ite holy shrines of Mesopotamia during the past four centuries have left behind memoirs of their travels. They recorded interesting details about their spiritual experience as pilgrims to the holy lands of Islam and of the difficulties of the journey, especially the notoriously dangerous land route from Iran to Mecca through the Arabian Desert. This paper examines four examples of that genre, the oldest dating from the early eighteenth and the other three from the late nineteenth centuries. As expected, the authors were all members of upper class families: one was a princess, another a former queen, and the other two were also affiliated with the ruling families in one way or another. However, they shared the same goals with all other female, and male, pilgrims: to perform their Muslim religious duty of hajj and to do it right. They all wrote about their spiritual satisfaction but also of the disadvantages and the extra burden that a woman experienced in her pilgrimage journey, simply for being a woman.

Much Scholarly Ink has been Spilled over the Question of What constitutes dance in different societies. Several attempts have been made to create a universal category for dance that would enable dance scholars to transcend this fundamental question and get down to the business of conducting research, secure in the knowledge that all of their colleagues understand the basic definitions of “dance.”

None of the current definitions takes into account dance and dance events in societies such as those of the Islamic areas of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa where the term for dance (usually the Arabic word raqṣ) can possibly bear powerfully negative or, at least, ambiguous connotations. While dance, and a word to denote that activity, exists and we can perhaps come to an agreement over what constitutes dance, an even more crucial issue is what dance is not in an Islamic environment.

If viewed in full historical perspective, Isfahan may reasonably claim to have been the most important city on the Iranian plateau. It is also the most studied. However, although its unique historical monuments may possibly have (compared with the historiography of other great cities) received scholarly attention commensurate with the city's historical role, relatively little attention has been paid to its social and ecological history. Why did Shāh ᶜAbbās choose Isfahan for his capital? What are the geographical factors that distinguish the city of Isfahan from the rest of the plateau? What were their implications for the social and political history of the city? More specifically, what was the role of the river, the Zayandah Rud, in the growth of the city? Is it profitable to seek a cause and effect relationship between the organization of irrigation for the agricultural base of the region's economy and the political and economic development of the city?