One of the more pervasive implicit assumptions about Amīr Kabīr in both Persian and Western sources is that he was an innovator who wished to transform Iranian society. Not unrepresentative of such an assumption are comments like the following: “If Amīr Kabīr had not been killed at the hands of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh's executioners, how much he would have entangled the fate of Iran in a significant transformation.” In the same vein there is a tendency to view Amīr Kabīr as a visionary of political freedom. This tendency is perhaps most evident in two rather popularized Persian accounts of his life and career, that of Hāshimī Rafsanjānī and that of Ḥusayn Makkī. But with the advantage of hindsight, many less exaggerated accounts, also, attribute more to the intentions of Amīr Kabīr than can perhaps stand up under scrutiny. It is not uncommon, as Algar points out, for Amīr Kabīr to be reckoned among the precursors of the Constitutional Revolution.

Towards the end of the 19th century, different parts of the Islamic world, occupied with various attempts to cope with the European power play, became aware of a country that seemed to have “made it”: Japan, remote and in self-imposed, almost complete isolation from the Western world for more than 200 years up to 1853, fascinated Muslim viewers. In different aspects, Japan's situation lent itself to comparison. It had been a military confrontation with economic incentives that had forced Japan to come into contact with the West. In the first military confrontation with the American warships sent to force the opening of Japanese ports in 1853, Japan could not withstand the Western threat and thus confirmed the stereotype of the inferior traditional Oriental country retreating in the face of the superior, advanced West.

This article analyzes the work of the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) and its influence on the writing of Iranian national history in the 1920s and 1930s. Herzfeld's life and work illuminates the relationship between Germany and Iran and between orientalist scholarship and nationalist history in the first half of the twentieth century. Through the method of what he called “archaeological history,” Herzfeld wrote an interdisciplinary history of Iran and its Aryan foundations that contested the assumptions of decades of European orientalist scholarship.

Understanding the determinants of attitudes toward war is important for the prevention of military conflicts and the promotion of peaceful conflict resolution. To examine American and Iranian attitudes toward war, questionnaires were administered to American and Iranian college students in the United States and Iran respectively. The results of the study revealed that American students generally have more positive attitudes toward war than Iranian students. Since most Iranians in the sample experienced eight years of war with Iraq whereas Americans never had direct experience of war, it was predicted that direct experiences of military action could explain this cross-national difference. Among Iranians those who experienced the Iran–Iraq war had more negative attitudes toward war compared to Iranians who did not have such experiences. The results further demonstrated that being authoritarian, religious and male were independently related to having positive attitudes toward war in both samples.

Russian Orientalists participated—often in a close but precarious relationship with the state—in the transformation of Central Asia from a tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an “Empire of Nations.” One of them was the former tsarist colonial clerk Aleksandr Semenov (1873–1958), who together with such prominent representatives of the region's Persian-speaking elites as Sadriddin Ayni or Bobojon Ghafurov, and with the support of his academic mentors, such as Vasilii Bartol'd and Sergei Ol'denburg, effectively—albeit somewhat reluctantly—lobbied for the official recognition of the Persian/Tajik language and of Tajikistani statehood. The study of their cooperation shows how Central Asian cultural heritage was researched and preserved, but also how it was reinvented in national terms and codified; and how these processes were negotiated between local intellectuals, scholars and the state.

The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV), established in Moscow in 1921 and closed in 1938, presents a unique experiment in Soviet Orientalism. KUTV was the first communist educational institution set up specifically for students from the Orient to study their own countries in their native languages through a Marxist lens. Its purpose was not only to train teachers and revolutionaries for work in their native countries but to bring about a paradigm shift in the study of the East. Orientalism was to be freed from the imperialist prejudices of the past by redistributing the tools of Orientalist scholarship to Orientals themselves and by emphasizing contemporary social and economic history over an idealized and nationalistic antiquity. Iranians made up a strong presence at KUTV among both students and teachers, some of whom returned to Iran to spread learning and revolution, while others remained in the Soviet Union as scholars of Iran, influencing the development of Soviet Orientalism and often serving simultaneously in the Soviet political apparatus. With their students, they produced research and compiled massive collections of reference materials that formed the foundation for future Soviet scholarship and foreign policy. By the second half of the 1920s, KUTV developed into one of the most important centers of Soviet Orientalism, spawning a parallel Research Institute (NIA) that offered graduate programs and published its own periodical, Revolutionary East. With its aim of empowering the oppressed while simultaneously projecting Soviet influence, its attempt to rise above nationalist conceptions while at times succumbing to them, and the repression of its faculty in the Stalinist purges, KUTV exhibits many of the contradictions of the Soviet project itself. Among other sources, this paper uses Soviet case files on Iranian students and teachers at KUTV to shed light on their motivations and backgrounds.

The word “Sufi” is believed by some to be derived from the word “suf,” denoting a kind of woolen garment worn by ascetics. The wearing of this garment symbolizes the Sufi's renunciation of material, worldly concerns and his complete absorption in God. Throughout the history of the Sufi orders, this symbol of the humble woolen cloak has often stood in contrast with the actual economic status attained by many Sufi shaykhs. In her book Mystical Dimensions of Islam, A. Schimmel drew attention to this contrast:

Modern scholarship on Arabs in the pre-Islamic period has focused on Rome's Arab allies—the so-called “Jafnids” or “Ghassānids,” with much less attention paid to Persia's Arab allies, the so-called “Naṣrid” or “Lakhmid” dynasty of Arab leaders at al-Ḥīrah in Iraq. This article examines select pre-Islamic sources for the Persian Arabs, showing that even with the meager evidence available to us, and the lack of archaeological material, it is possible to draw a relatively complex portrait of the Persian Arabs. This article situates the Persian Arabs as important figures in some key themes and phenomena of late antiquity, such as the growth of Christian communities, the conflict between Rome and Persia, and the struggle for influence in the Arabian peninsula.

Despite extant, though often indirect references to women in manuscript and archival sources, modern historians of Safavid Iran have paid little attention to the active role of women in the formative period of its history.

Paradoxical though it may seem, I would like to begin my discussion of Qajar photography with a little-known painting (pl. 1). The work of an anonymous mid-nineteenth-century artist, this image marks an aesthetic watershed. Here, an unknown artist is photographing Nasir al-Din Shah who is posing for a portrait. The image, of course, is meant to capture the power of Nasir al-Din Shah, a figure so grand he is simultaneously painted and photographed by court artists. As a “dynastic image,“ the painting focuses on the grandeur of the shah's power, symbolically represented by his opulent dress, royal pose, and attendant technology—he is the subject of the newest form of representation, i.e. photography. What is remarkable about this little-known, perhaps even aesthetically insignificant, image is the powerful way it speaks to the shift from painting to photography in mid-nineteenth-century Iran.

The region between the lower course of the Tigris and its joint estuary with the Euphrates on the west, the head of the Persian Gulf on the south, and the Zagros Mountains on the east and north was known in classical Islamic sources as Khuzistan. The tenth-century geographer Ibn Ḥawqal described the province in a separate chapter of his Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ and included a map--“Ṣūrat Khūzistān.” In the thirteenth century, Yaqut reserved a detailed entry for “Khuzistan” in his compendium Muᶜjam al-buldān.

In Safavid times, however, the province began to be called Arabistan, and the older name became obsolete. The term Khuzistan reappeared in the 1920s, but Arabistan has continued to be used by some scholars and politicians. Both names were a matter of controversy in the early stage of the present war between Iraq and Iran. The purpose of this article is to examine the history of these two names and the reasons for their existence or disappearance.

The political history of the Ghaznavid and Seljuk dynasties, which ruled much of Iran throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, is now fairly well known and recently has been drawn together in the excellent narrative of Professor Bosworth in the Cambridge History of Iran. It is still quite imperfectly understood, however, and will probably remain so for a good while yet to come. The old and serviceable schematization of the period based on the notion of a Sunni revival, keyed to the development of madrasa education and to the personality of Nizam al-Mulk, is still current despite increasing awkwardness in fitting the facts to it. It would be premature to attempt at this time an alternative schematization, and, indeed, such a schematization, when it eventually appears, may well be not so much an alternative to the old one as an expansion in which the main features of the old one have a prominent place.

This paper fills in the gap in the literature by providing an acoustic analysis of rhotics in Persian and considers the social variables gender and register. Through the acoustic analysis of 807 tokens, it demonstrates that that there are a number of rhotic variants in Persian in different positions in the word and finds evidence of degemination in coda position, against previous accounts. Furthermore, it suggests that on the one hand, Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women's rhotic production patterns with those of Arabic societies as men favor rhotics with more complex articulations. On the other hand it questions whether the behavior of Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women conforms to established sociolinguistic norms regarding prestige and gender.

A well-educated, wealthy, 35-year-old woman from Tehran reported the following: “Someone I know has a man working for him whose brother is a gravedigger. He dug graves for those murdered in Jaleh Square 40 days ago. He said they needed a bulldozer to dig the ground for all the dead. An entire tent was filled with chadors. Fifty thousand people were killed.”

The Jaleh Square incident of Tehran was a momentous event in the Iranian revolution, marking popular revolt against the shah's regime by the people, and retaliatory atrocities by the shah's army against the people. Although demonstrations and killings in other cities after Jaleh Square were no less dramatic, Jaleh Square remains in the minds of nearly everyone in Iran as the principal episode of innocent citizens slaughtered. Yet, details and facts pertaining to the event are undocumented. What is known is that thousands of people participated in a massive antishah demonstration on Thursday, September 7, 1978, to demand the resignation of the shah, defying a government ban on rallies.

The Russians with the British, some now cheer,
have made a solemn oath this very year,
that within the politics of Iran,
they will not interfere from this time on.
It's a shame that the appeased of this land,
are content with the matter now at hand,
for when cat and mouse together lie,
the grocer may's well kiss his store goodbye.
Iraj Mirza, 1907(On the Anglo-Russian Treaty)

This paper is a study of early U.S. policy towards Iran and its significance in the field of twentieth-century Iranian-American relations. The paper also has the broader objective of investigating the roots of Iran's hostility towards America during the 1979 Iranian revolution. The early history of Persian-American relations has rarely been examined but, as I will argue, it was during this time (i.e., 1856-1921) that Iranians conceived an image of America as a sympathetic power—an image which the United States government falsely promoted and which resulted in Persia's overly heightened expectations of America. When these expectations were not met in later periods (i.e., 1953-1979), Iranians reacted with a magnified sense of hatred for the United States. The hostility expressed during the revolution came as a great shock to the United States.

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.

In 2005, Iran outlined its goals in economic, science and technology for the next twenty years, Sanad-e- Cheshm Andaz-e Bist Saleh (The Twenty-Year Vision Document), a working plan to raise the country's ranking to that of the first in the region. This article aims to map Iran's scientific and technological performance over five years since the ratification of the plan. Three main areas of science and technology—the percentage of GDP invested in knowledge, scientific performance and technological performance—were used to compare Iran's scientific output with a set of regional countries. The study revealed that Iran's investment in science to inspire technology (the linear model) has been able to nourish scientific performance in the form of rising publication, whereas the neighboring countries followed a more diversified pathway and inspired science from technological advances. Thus, the number of countries in the region capable of competing with and even outstripping Iran in terms of technological and hence scientific performance has increased.