In this intervention, we discuss the ongoing protest movement and the quasi-revolutionary situation in Iran with the goal of offering contextual as well as background analysis. Our objective is to examine the current wave of revolutionary politics in the frame of a longer history, that is, the one of the “unaccomplished” 1979 revolution. We do not argue that the current movement is in continuity with the so-called Islamic revolution; rather, we ask what afterlives of the 1979 revolution and successive waves of mobilizations reverberate within the current situation. We do so from a political transformative vantage point, which we understand as inherently feminist, in that we refuse to recognize any hierarchy between the struggles, the issues, and the demands as expressed by the protesters. Indeed, we understand liberation as a collective project resulting from the intersection of struggles, demands, and issues. Following this line of reasoning, we interrogate the current moment along three thematic axes: the social composition, the prospects for political convergence, and the genealogy, or the ideational connection, of the current struggle with those of the past.

From 1927 to 1932, wide-reaching negotiations took place between Reza Shah’s court minister, ‘Abdolhossein Khan Teymurtash, and the British Legation in Tehran, the aim of which was to resolve all outstanding issues and to normalize relations between the two countries on the basis of a general treaty. This article examines these Anglo-Iranian negotiations with a particular focus on the thorniest issues—Iran’s territorial claims in the Persian Gulf, particularly its claims to sovereignty over Bahrain, Abu Musa and the two Tunb islands. Though an agreement was never reached, an examination of the content and conduct of these negotiations offers some valuable insights into the unique features of Iranian nationalism and Iranian ambitions in the Persian Gulf during the Reza Shah period.

One of the most prominent features of Iran's 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising has been the diverse profusion of songs created in its wake. Music has played an important role in Iran's social and political movements at least since the Constitutional Revolution when the poet and musical bard Abolqasem Aref Qazvini (d. 1934) effectively transformed the musical concert into a political congregation. Since then, musicians have given rhythm and rhyme to contentious movements all through modern Iranian history, most prominently during the 1979 revolution and again for the 2009 Green Uprising. Considering the important role of music in Iran's political movements, scholarship on music remains surprisingly marginal in Iranian studies.

It is difficult to give more than a rough sketch of Iranian agriculture in the nineteenth century or to indicate any but the most general developments that took place in it. On the one hand, the government made very few studies of rural conditions and kept practically no statistics on land acreage or output; on the other, most foreign observers had little interest in the condition of the peasantry or agriculture as a whole. Nonetheless, because of the importance of silk in Iranian foreign trade foreign observers, especially British consuls in Rasht, took a special interest in various aspects of its culture and trade.

This paper sets itself the objective of studying production and trade in raw silk in Iran during the nineteenth century.

In Iran, national parks were originally created to protect wildlife and natural expanses. Over time, the exigencies of handling conflict with the locals and a worldwide shift in management approaches from strict protection to newer participatory approaches led Iranian conservationists to adopt the discourse of participatory conservation. However, serious institutional and attitudinal obstacles have prevented policy makers and officials from developing good relations with local communities, making it difficult to serve the interests of conservation or accommodate tourists. Based on interviews with past and present officials of the Department of the Environment of Iran and other field observers, this paper discusses approaches to conservation that reconcile the requirements of conservation with the needs of the people who benefit from reserves.

In the majority of Islamic countries, the art of painting has been restricted to non-figural and geometric designs in the public sphere, and strictly limited to small-scale narrative illustrations of manuscripts in the private sphere. By contrast, Qajar Iran witnessed the development of large-scale figural painting. Such a decisive break with Islamic tradition—where religious and social beliefs were primarily expressed through textual and calligraphic means—indicates that Iran possessed a distinctive, strongly visual culture. Nevertheless, Qajar painting has been perceived in the past as an offshoot of European easel painting.

In fact, Qajar painting, most particularly during the reign of the second ruler Fath ᶜAli Shah (1797-1834), represents the culmination of a long-standing indigenous tradition of imagery in both monumental painting and sculptural formats, primarily utilized for the decoration of palaces, exemplified by the bas reliefs and sculptures of the Achaemenid palace of Persepolis. Wall painting predated and subsequently coexisted with the better known traditions of decorative and manuscript painting.

A collocation can be defined as a sequence of words which co-occur more than would be expected by chance. Collocations impose constraints on how words can be used together. An idiom is an expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definitions and the arrangement of its parts, but refers instead to a figurative meaning that is known only through common use. In this paper I will attempt to expand on these notions. For further clarification, I will compare and contrast some examples from English and Persian.

The overthrow of the government of Mosaddeq has received considerable attention, scholarly and otherwise. The scholarly explanations differ in emphasis, but not in the general contours, particularly regarding the significant role of the Anglo-American secret services. There have also long been attempts to portray the overthrow of Mosaddeq as an isolated event taking place on 19 August 1953 and representing a conflation of royalist and traditionalist sentiments among soldiers and civilians. More recently it has been contended that it was not the Anglo-American secret services but the clerical nexus—prompted by Ayatollah Borujerdi, the highest religious authority in the country—which played the crucial role. This paper argues against reducing the overthrow of Mosaddeq's government to the events of 19 August, and views it as a protracted process. It further argues that assertions regarding the crucial and active role of Borujerdi are, on the basis of available evidence, untenable.

In the late nineteenth century, Qajar Iran, like its neighbor the Ottoman Empire, faced the dual challenges of colonialism and modernity. This paper considers the role of art education and art production in its response to these forces, focusing on the leading court painter of the late Qajar period, Mirza Muhammad Ghaffari, Kamal al-Mulk (1848–1941), whose career bridged the late Qajar period and the early twentieth century. Early in his career, Ghaffari was recognized as the leading exponent of academic painting, yet by the constitutional period his art had evolved into a style representing contemporary Persian life, a style which was informed by nationalistic discourses current in intellectual and political circles. This paper's consideration of the evolution of his style from a European modernism to an authentic Iranian modernism includes Ghaffari's training as a painter, the role of photography in the development of his style, his travel to Europe, and parallels with the art and career of the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi.

This article explores the process leading to the Afghan government's decision to implement a prohibition and eradication of opium in the northeastern province of Badakhshan. It explores why Daud chose Badakhshan, the impact of the opium ban on the people of Badakhshan and the future of opium production and trade, as well as the evolution of drug control in Afghanistan under the Musahiban dynasty. Ultimately, the ban was launched because it allowed Daud to garner international praise and financial support, while enforcing eradication in an area inhabited by ethnic minorities ensured that the Afghan government's coercive strategy would not generate resistance from rural Pashtun tribes historically opposed to these types of state intervention.

The late Ilkhanid period saw a florescence of intellectual and cultural production in northwestern and west-central Iran. This article argues that a regional network with its center at Isfahan contributed to this creativity through the production of translation-adaptations between Arabic and Persian. In a period of episodic sectarian tensions, especially in the wake of Öljeytü’s efforts to declare Twelver Shiʿism the official religion of parts of ʿIraq-e ʿAjam, this local network produced a set of five bilingual treatments of parts of the literary legacy of ʿAli b. Abi Tālib (d. 40/661). The article argues that the authors and copyists of these texts sought, through their focus on the figure of ʿAli and their exploration of the ambiguities facilitated by bilingual composition, to expand a non-sectarian middle-ground.

Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.

How was Persian literature disciplinized in the twentieth century? This article addresses this question by focusing on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlining the sociohistorical processes that helped to transform scholarly and literary production into a social enterprise. A major outcome of these underexamined processes was the making of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949–79) in Kabul, the first modern encyclopedia produced in Persian. The article explains the multilayered significance of Āryānā's literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reified Persian literature as an object of academic study and national veneration in Afghanistan. A close reading of Āryānā's account of Persian literary history illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 1950s and its contributors’ adherence to a modern methodology. The present study places Āryānā squarely within a transregional ecosystem that brought about the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.

This essay provides a general introductory survey of Iranian and Iran-related studies in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century (including languages, literature, and the arts), with a very brief preliminary foray into earlier Iran-related scholarship and wide-ranging imaginations of Iran in Britain and Ireland, as well as some concluding remarks on contemporary knowledge production about Britain in Iran. Among other themes covered in the essay are the varied contributions of non-Britons and non-Irish to Iran-related scholarship and imaginations in the United Kingdom, underscoring the overall transnational production, dissemination, reception, and utilization of knowledge (history, geography, archaeology, cultures, ethnography and anthropology, art and architecture, Iran-related Persian-language literatures and poetry, etc.). In particular, the essay highlights the contributions made by individuals from, and institutions in, the Indian subcontinent to “British” scholarship and knowledge about Iran.

The Persian wine production myth centers on the relationship between a male vintner and his female vine and her daughters, the grapes. This myth, the earliest extant examples of which are found in qasīdas by the Samanid poets Rūdakī and Bashshār Marghazī and which was much developed by Manūchihrī and his contemporary Farrukhī, contains images of femininity, the mother–child bond, separation, violence, execution, and ultimate redemption. The grape harvest comes in the late summer and culminates in the Mihragān festival, a celebration focused on the grape and grape wine, at which poems containing versions of the wine production myth were recited. The present study maps the evolution of this myth over the span of a century through a close reading of eleven poems with specific reference to variations in narrative structure.

The Epistle of the Right Path (Risāla-yi Ṣirāṭ al-Mustaqīm) is an anonymous treatise, possibly dating to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. It may be the earliest Persian Ismaili prose work of the post-Mongol period to come to light, and is here introduced, discussed, edited and translated. A clearly articulated, philosophically inclined treatment of numerous themes in Ismaili thought, the text draws frequently from Nasir al-Din Tusi's spiritual autobiography, The Voyage (Sayr wa-Sulūk). Its subject matter includes the correspondence between the exoteric and esoteric worlds, the concept of the divine command through which creation attains perfection, the role of the Imam and the esoteric hierarchy, and the fact that esoteric exegesis (ta 'wīl) of divine revelation must be compatible with the principles of the intellect.

In this paper, we discuss the impact of Jürgen Habermas' ideas on Iranian intellectuals who live in Iran. The upshot of the paper is that in present day Iran, where the society is going through a significant transitional period, various intellectual groups have reacted differently towards the ideas of the German philosopher-sociologist. While the orthodox left-wing (ex-Marxist) intellectuals and the conservative right-wing writers have, by and large, tended to ignore his views, a younger generation of the left-wing intellectuals and a number of the Muslim intellectuals with left-wing/socialist tendencies, have tried, each in their own ways, to ‘adopt’ Habermas' ideas in pursuit of their own projects/research programs.

The war in Afghanistan (1978 to the present) is one of the longest and bloodiest wars in modern history. From the early 1980s war intensified between the Leftist regime and the opposition Mujahideen and touched the life of every citizen. Bombardments, rockets and landmines killed and injured hundreds of thousands of civilians and caused massive displacement. Women were the direct and indirect targets of the war; some women lost members of their immediate family, others were displaced and emigrated, some were raped, and others were enslaved and sold. Thus trauma and mourning mark the lives of the majority of Afghanistani women. Given the political nature of the conflict—with superpowers and regional powers behind the warring sides—and the nature of socio-cultural bonds that required women to keep silent, how did women deal with these traumas? One of the areas in which this can best be seen is in women's literature—most notably narrative works. These works, in which the authors were themselves either victims or witnesses, voice women's resistance to the war and portray war and its consequences for ordinary women's everyday lives. In the narrative works of Spozhmai Zaryab (the pioneer of the anti-war fiction in Afghanistan), women and trauma are multi-dimensional. In some of her short stories women mourn publicly; in others, women cope with war and resist it by whatever means available to them. In others, women visualize war, invasion and destruction of all socio-cultural bonds. Women are transformed by a profound change, including in their perception of gender relations.

My aim in this lecture shall be to situate the world of color within the traditional context of the Islamic culture of Persia; to explore the conceptual motivations that provoked its intense crystallization and saturation during the Safavid era; and to ultimately follow this world of color as it is annihilated into nothingness within the presence of Absolute Light. We will therefore witness the conceptual birth, life and death of color as a cyclical yet timeless, metaphysical expression of the Absolute within the world of phenomenal forms.