Research in Iranian social and economic history is still relatively unknown. This situation is puzzling in view of the social and economic research in Arab and Turkish history, particularly from 1955 onwards. in the past ten years, social and economic research in these two areas of Middle East history have produced some excellent results. But similar research in Iranian history has not developed. This state of affairs is disappointing when we recall the words of Vladimir Minorsky in his "Foreword" to the Tadhkirat al-mulūk in 1943:

From December 1930, when the first Iranian feature film was made to the 1980s, the connections between Persian literature and the Iranian cinema have been intimate, varied, and significant. In fact, an examination of the Iranian cinema in terms of the roles literature plays in it demonstrates that the cinema constitutes an important aspect of the sociology of the Iranian writer, especially from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.

This essay surveys the role of literature and Iranian writers in the Iranian cinema and then focuses on a prominent example of the relationship between literature and movies, the popular 1971 film called Dash Akol, for the purpose of indicating differences in the aims and effects of the two art forms.

Published in 1933, Walther Hinz's detailed study on the short and turbulent reign of Safavid Shah Ismacil II (984-85/1576-77), which he likens to that of Ivan the Terrible, has yet to be surpassed. Although Hinz consulted many Safavid chronicles then in manuscript, including a number which have yet to be published, his discussion of a major facet of the period's history, Shah Ismacil II’s religious policies, is based primarily on the account of Iskandar Beg Munshi in Tārīkh-i cālam-ārā-yi cAbbasī, which he essentially paraphrases. Hinz concludes that Shah Ismacil II’s pro-Sunni policies, including primarily his prohibitions against cursing the Companions of the Prophet and his attempt to remove the Shicite credal statement cAlīyun walī Allāh “cAli is the ally of God” from the coinage, resulted not from political expediency but rather from personal conviction. In the end, these policies failed. Realizing that he could not win over the Qizilbash and that he himself was in grave danger, Shah Ismacil rescinded his decrees, had his pro-Sunni ṣadr and advisor, Mirza Makhdum Sharifi, placed under house arrest, and reconfirmed his commitment to Shicism before the end of his short reign.

From 1928 to 1932 the Pahlavi regime of Iran negotiated with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) to revise the D’Arcy Concession. These negotiations, conducted by ‘Abd al-Hosayn Teymurtāsh and the chairman of APOC Sir John Cadman, ended in failure when Rezā Shah unilaterally cancelled the D’Arcy Concession in November 1932. This article argues that “equitability” was the goal of the negotiations. An agreement was ultimately impossible to reach, due to differing ideas on either side regarding what was equitable, changes in the international oil economy and instability within Iran itself, leading to an unequal agreement in April 1933 that confirmed APOC’s long-term security but served only the short-term needs of Iran.

The splendour of Safavid Isfahan is no doubt proverbial. The landmarks that come to mind--the great Maydān-i Shāh with its stage perpetually set, the elegant Chahār Bāgh avenue, the graceful bridges slung across the Zayandah Rud--would make it appear as though the topography of Isfahan today, except for the old Jāmiᶜ, is a Safavid one. It is hard to believe, however, that the ages have not left a deeper mark, that the patterns of life generated in the pre-Safavid past did not affect profoundly the course of subsequent development.

Consider for example the curious orientation of Shāh ᶜAbbās’ imperial centerpiece, the Maydān-i Shāh. The two imperial mosques built to the south and east of the Maydān, the Masjid-i Shāh and the Luṭfallah Mosque, awkwardly twist on their axes in order to face the proper direction for prayer, the qiblah.

The toponym Kerend has a long history. This study explores the appearance of Kerend in pre-modern sources, beginning with the toponym Karintaš in the late second millennium BC. Kassite, Elamite and Assyrian rivalry for control over the central western Zagros mountains is discussed and the survival of the name in later antiquity is investigated. A derivative of the name appears in Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography and in the Parthian Stations of Isidore of Charax, as well as in the late Antique Cosmographia of the Anonymous Geographer of Ravenna. A homonymous name from the area east of the Caspian Sea is also discussed, as are several unrelated names occurring in other sources (Achaemenid Elamite, Armenian).

This paper discusses the attempted resumption of paramount Qashqa'i leadership upon the fall of the Pahlavi regime in 1979. Paramount Qashqa'i leaders had been exiled from Iran following their support of Prime Minister Mosaddeq in the early 1950s and had, since then, either remained in exile or returned to Iran to live under political restrictions. In early 1979, those in exile returned to Iran and joined the others in resuming positions of regional and national political power.

These questions are central to the discussion and analysis: What was the nature of Qashqa'i leadership both before and during Pahlavi rule, and how and why had it changed under the Islamic Republic of Iran? How had changes in Iran affecting the Qashqa'i people between 1953 and 1979 affected the attempted resumption of paramount leadership? How had the nature of the Iranian state changed during these periods? How are Qashqa'i leaders best characterized? Are they “tribal” or national-minority leaders, or are they better seen as regional and national powers? How is Qashqa'i leadership different from other kinds of political leadership in Iran, in particular that of other tribes and national minorities, and why?

The colonization of the Muslim lands and the increasing political and commercial influence of the Christian West during the last 200 years shocked Muslim leaders. In response to the agonizing problems that increasing incursion by the West brought to the Muslim lands, there arose three groups of intellectuals. The traditionalists believed that the situation was transitory and that traditional Islam would eventually triumph. The ultramodernists sought salvation through uncritical and wholesale imitation of the West.

Among the prominent advocates of this last approach one can count Afghani, Abduh, Gokalp, Iqbal, and probably Kasravi, the Iranian social reformist. Kasravi seems to stand out among them in two important respects. First, unlike his predecessors, he formulated his ideas in a systematic way, tracing “problems” to their roots and advocating explicit “remedies.” Second, Kasravi never shifted strategy to suit the occasion as did his predecessors who, by so doing, confused their followers.

This article examines the importance of the political thought and praxis of politico, ‘reformist’ strategist and intellectual, Saʿid Hajjarian, and his rethinking of the post-revolutionary Iranian state’s sources and bases of legitimacy in the 1990s and 2000s. It also provides an exposition and assessment of a number of his recommendations for the realisation of ‘political development’ (towseʿeh-ye siyāsi) in the post-revolutionary order and their contribution to the discourse of eslāhāt during the presidency of Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). Moreover, it attempts to situate Hajjarian within a broader spectrum of reformist political opinion and its proponents within the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political class.

This paper classifies Persian negative elements and analyzes the negative structures based on Minimalism and Distributed Morphology. Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in Persian which have [−neg] check its feature against [+neg] of negative marker for convergence. Negative Concord Items (NCIs), which are inherently negative, have [+neg]. Thus, in the NC Sentences, we have two [+neg]—one in negative marker, and the other in NCI. It can be misread that a NC structure, like Double Negation, delivers an affirmative reading. To prevent the misreading, we assumed Neg-absorption and Neg-criterion. However, that is impossible in Double Negation with two negative markers placed in different NegP, so the [+neg] in the sentence remain till Logical Form (LF) and they cancel each other and, as a result, the sentence becomes affirmative. Based on Minimalism and Distributed Morphology, the unified account on the structure of negation is examined.

The document translated below is a will written by cAbbās Mīrzā, the Heir Apparent, in July, 1830, three years before his death in Khurasan. This will is important because of its style and content. Written in a hasty manner, and originally in Persian, in some places it gives the impression of having been translated from Āzarī Turkish. The author has paid little attention to grammatical rules and literary embellishments. The force of the document derives from the author's deep feelings of hope (for future military success), sorrow (for past defeats), and uncertainty and worry (for the destiny of his children). References are made to the political events and personalities of the times, not directly, but in connection with the author's personal concerns. On the whole, cAbbās Mīrzā's major preoccupations in this document are to justify past errors, to be buried as a man of God, and to be remembered as a national hero.

In the first surviving portrait of Fath ᶜAli Shah (r. 1797-1834) as the Qajar sovereign, painted in 1213/1797-98, just after his accession, the young shah appears with a turban-like cap decorated with a plumed jiqqa (aigrette, fig. 1). The so-called Kayanid crown, a creation of his uncle and predecessor, Aqa Muhammad Shah Qajar (1785-97), is missing. In contrast to most other royal portraits of the later years, here in this majestic work by the master painter, Mirza Baba Shirazi, the shah poses on what appears to be a platform throne covered with a carpet, though at the time there was no Qajar royal throne in existence. The absence of the crown and the throne, the most conspicuous symbols of kingly authority, made the young Fath ᶜAli Shah a crown-and-throne-less king (bī tāj va takht), a synonym for utter powerlessness in the Persian political culture.

Shi‘ism, perhaps more than any other current of Islam, places emphasis on numerous forms of commemorative culture. Throughout the history of Shi‘ism, commemorative rituals have provided a comprehensive framework for interpreting a wide array of historical encounters between the Shi‘a and the dominant Sunni culture, thereby allowing Shi‘ism to construct itself as a community of learning and remembering. This self-construction required both a high degree of institutionalization as well as specialists to preserve the religious identity of the Shi‘a and to transmit religious knowledge to the next generation. Madrasas (Islamic institutions of higher learning) as well as the shrines of the Shi‘i Imams and their progeny served as the best institutions to achieve these goals. This paper argues that Safavid madrasas were not only centers for disseminating religious knowledge and preserving Shi’a intellectual heritage. They also rearticulated and contemporized the community’s past through the active memorializing of pivotal events in the religious calendar of the Shi‘a. More specifically, the paper delineates the nature and scope of religious rituals and rites carried out in the Madrasa-ye Sultānī and a number of other madrasa-mosque complexes of Safavid Isfahan in order to explore the process by which the Shi‘i past was contextualized or contemporized as salient to suit the needs of Safavid power and society.

The Iranian Green Movement emerged after the presidential election in June 2009. The paper tracks down its foundational origins through the concept of ‘fragmented collective action’, that points to the dispersion of a social movement's political energies and the fragmentation of its constitutive groups. It also addresses the significance of informal mobilizing networks and the widespread use of modern virtual space to bring together an intersubjectively constructed collective identity which was shaped by the movement’s interactions with political forces and with its interlocutors. Finally, the paper argues that the collective identity shaped the movement's strategies over the course of its evolution.

This article explores Salāmān va Absāl, one of seven poems which comprise Jāmī's collection of long masnavīs, known collectively as the Haft aurang. The work, which gained some renown outside Iran due to the English version of Edward FitzGerald, has nevertheless received little attention in modern scholarship. The few investigations of Salāmān va Absāl, moreover, have dwelled on its narrative, which tells the story of the carnal attraction of a prince for his wet-nurse, and never situated the work in its historical context or examined its political content. In addition, the allegorical symbolism of the tale, especially its depiction of key stages of the Sufi path, such as the act of repentance, has not been discussed in terms of representing a work of mystical advice. With these concerns in mind, the present article discusses the possibility that the political elements in Salāmān va Absāl complement the advice it gives on becoming a Sufi. Seen from this perspective, it would appear that Salāmān va Absāl correlates the notion of the just ruler to the Sufi concept of the “Perfect Man” to the extent that Jāmī presents the Sufi-king as the ideal medieval Islamic ruler. By implication, the work advises its royal patron, Sultān Ya‘qūb, to repent and embark upon the Sufi path, doing so, Jāmī intimates, would lead Ya‘qūb to realize his rank as God's “true” vicegerent.

During the years of the constitutional revolution and the Great War, Iran experienced a widespread and general reassertion of tribal power and by 1921 much of the country was under tribal control. Riza Khan's seizure of power, however, inaugurated a transformation in the relationship between the center and periphery in Iran. For the new regime and for the nationalist elite which supported it, the suppression of the tribes was an indispensable element of their larger project: the construction of a modern, centralized state, with a culturally homogeneous population. Their agenda was clear: the destruction of the autonomy and feudal authority of the tribal leaderships was to be closely followed by the subjection of the tribal populations to the unmediated power of the modernized state and their integration into settled society. From the very moment of seizing power in Tehran, the new regime embarked on a sustained effort to establish its military and administrative hegemony over the tribes.

A bureaucrat and historian of Iranian origin, Idris-i Bidlisi (b. Ray/Iran 1457–d. Istanbul 1520), is undoubtedly one of the most original and important intellectual figures in the Ottoman‒Iranian borderland in the sixteenth century. He lived in a very turbulent period and established different relationships with Iranian and Ottoman dynasties at the end of the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He and his works have been the focus of long-standing historical debates in Turkey that have continued to the present day. Until now, most modern scholarly works on Bidlisi have failed to provide a proper, in-depth textual and historical analysis. As a result, such modern works have come to present a skewed, romanticized image of Bidlisi, largely detached from the nature and dynamics of the historical context in which Bidlisi lived and evolved as an intellectual and writer. This paper provides a realistic appraisal of Bidlisi and discusses the shortcomings of modern historiography on him. By looking at Bidlisi and his corpus, and more specifically at the ways in which the latter was shaped by Bidlisi’s patronage relationships, the paper aims to open up a window into Bidlisi’s evolving mindset and worldview. In other words, through an in-depth analysis of his corpus and new archival sources the paper strives to unveil the intellectual life and career of an Iranian bureaucrat and historian positioned between Ottoman‒Iranian borderland and provide a glimpse into the nature of patronage in the sixteenth century.