This paper seeks to understand the political economy implications of nicotine addiction in Iran, focusing on the US Office of Foreign Asset Control's granting of Iran operations licenses to American tobacco companies. Presuming that tobacco taxes, levied both as import duties and ad valorem, would financially benefit the Iranian government, the introduction of a highly desired US product to the market would be antithetical to the sanctions regime currently in place. By comparing Iran's tobacco industry, and the attendant public health crisis that has arisen from high rates of nicotine addiction, to conditions in Turkey, it can be demonstrated that Iran is uniquely unable to extract revenues from the sale of tobacco products. The primary point of comparison between Iran and Turkey is smoking-attributable annual productivity losses of each country, as estimated through the use of Smoking-Attributable Mortality, Morbidity and Economic Costs Software (SAMMEC) and the available related literature. According to the calculations derived from the SAMMEC model, Iran is burdened with an astonishing economic cost due to the high prevalence of smokers. It is concluded that an awareness of this condition enables OFAC to award licenses to Big Tobacco without fear of undermining current foreign policy initiatives.

Rapid developments of the twentieth century have forced attention upon the changing status and role of women in all societies. As they have acquired a longer life expectancy, are having healthier children, and with the advancing technology, mass production and distribution contributing to their lessening housekeeping chores, women have acquired more and more leisure time.

While the industrialized societies have been mostly concerned with the problem of leisure time for these women, and making optimum use of all human resources, both male and female, the developing countries have been facing the basic problem of illiteracy, and particularly illiteracy of their female population. There has always been a small segment of the female population in developing countries with as much, if not more, leisure time than those of the industrialized nations.

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh was not conceived as a national epic, but it does encapsulate another kind of group identity: it provides context and meaning for the glorious pedigree of the Iranian aristocracy. Ferdowsi himself was a member of the Khorasani dehqān gentry whose collective effort in the tenth century CE was turned towards preserving and reshaping their own history and literary heritage in the terms of the new era. This article analyzes the final section of the Shahnameh, dealing with the reign and death of the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III. As such, this section provides crucial clues for the function of the Shahnameh as a means to construct meaning for Ferdowsi's own group in his own time. The description of this crucial moment in history, pivoting between the era of Iranian kingship and the Islamic era, suggested possible modes for interpreting the present. The study reads this section of the Shahnameh with close attention to the use of the word nezhād (“lineage”), which circumscribes the identity of both the aristocrats of Ferdowsi's present, and the kings and heroes of the mythic past. In doing so, the transition between eras appears as a tragedy of nezhād, as the Sasanian dynasty is extinguished, raising permanent existential ambiguities for the entire class of Iranian gentry whose genealogies were associated with it.

The paper presents an account of the founding of the Arya-Mehr (now Sharif) University of Technology, and the role that Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi had in its creation in 1965. The paper describes the landscape of science and technology in Iran in 1965, the year in which Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi appointed Mojtahedi to establish this university. It describes the various challenges that Mojtahedi faced in establishing the university, such as avoiding crippling government regulations and bureaucracy, hiring qualified faculty, attracting top students, developing an appropriate milieu for the cultivation of scientific and technological culture and, most importantly, setting the course for the university to become not only Iran's leading institution, but also one of world's credible institutions in science and engineering. The paper also discusses Mojtahedi's unique approach to these challenges, and how, despite his best intentions, he created the animosity and intrigues that resulted in his ousting in 1967. The university did in fact become Iran's leading institution in sciences and engineering, a position which it holds even today.

Mirza Muhammad Farrokhi Yazdi suffered a long series of persecutions, imprisonments, and exile during his rather short life (1889-1939). At the age of 16, two years before the Constitutional Revolution, Farrokhi showed his national and Islamic zeal by writing poems against the authorities of the British missionary school at Yazd, where he was a student. Following the circulation of one of these poems, in which he had defended the cause of Islam against the “devilish designs” of the Christians, the headmaster expelled him from school and thereby ended his formal education. This was the first and by far the lightest punishment the poet was to suffer for his beliefs.

As he himself proudly testifies, Farrokhi was a dehqān-zādeh, a peasant's son. When he was forced out of school, the peasant's son became a laborer. His family background and his own experience as a laborer greatly influenced the direction of his thought in later years.

Based on the author's original research, the paper will offer a glimpse into the frontal theory of Mostafa Sho‘aiyan. The paper draws on his life and experience of the National Front in the 1950s as a model for political thought. Next, the paper will show how he tried, through his unique and uncanonical revolutionary theory, to make a revolutionary praxis compatible with frontal thinking. Analytically, Sho‘aiyan's work proves that an ideologically driven concept of national liberation becomes an impediment for frontal politics in a truly democratic way. Sho‘aiyan's works represent a theoretical and existential response to the national liberation dilemma which the Iranian Marxists faced in the 1960s and 70s.

Only three out of her 36 short stories are available in English (two translated by the writer herself), and yet Simin Daneshvar (b. 1921) is Iran's first woman novelist and one of the country's most significant fiction writers. Daneshvar has published Savooshoon (the most popular Iranian novel), three collections of short stories, ten translations, and a memoir about her late husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Having retired from her teaching position at Tehran University, she lives in Iran and is now working on her second novel, The Wandering Island.

Daneshvar's literary work is a celebration of the feminine—her taste for life and love, her art of endurance and strength. While most of her female characters manage to survive, none reveals such stamina or resilience as the narrator of Jalal's Sunset. Confronted with the unexpected death of a husband, a colleague, and a collaborator, Daneshvar in this text portrays a real survivor.

This essay provides a historical analysis of Iranian experiences with disability. I will begin by reviewing the literary application of the term in various contexts. Next, I will examine the social milieux in which local observers, medical professionals, and policy makers talked about and treated disability. As state-run institutions emerged to address disability needs, health professionals often drew a distinction between physical disability and intellectual or psychological disability, raising ethical and legal questions about the status of the disabled in modern Iranian society. Finally, an attempt will be made to situate disability politics in contemporary Iran, where the disabled population has increased significantly as a consequence of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88). Although this paper concentrates on Iranian experiences with disability, comparisons can be drawn with other Islamic societies.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 and the developments of the following decade greatly altered the social and political atmosphere in Iran. Poetic changes created in the wake of these developments were of considerable transitional importance and generated a suitable literary atmosphere for the more basic changes introduced by Nimā Yushij in the 1920s and the 1930s. A major issue in this regard is the impact of revolutionary developments on the general outlook and the literary creativity of the contemporary poets. The present paper includes a short introductory survey of the background and the characteristics of the “constitutional poetry” and a general discussion of the revolution's impact on the contemporary poets. A number of “constitutional poets” are then discussed individually.

This essay has two purposes. One is to compare the agrarian mode of production in Iran during the 7th through 12th centuries with the mode of production in European feudalism, searching for clues as to why Europe--but not Iran--developed a capitalist mode of production. The second, accompanying purpose is to evaluate the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, a theory developed mainly within the Marxist tradition, in the context of medieval Iran.

A few Persian writers of the 1960s and 1970s dealt with the question of why non-European societies failed to experience a transition to capitalism, but their writings were not convincing. If the transformation from a feudal mode to a capitalist mode is due to feudal evolution, then a rigorous comparative approach is necessary in order to see why such an evolution took place in one society and not in another.

Iran's rich repertoire of narrative literature of oral origin, ranging from single-scene situation comedy through fairytale to the lengthy heroic epic, can certainly be appreciated for its intrinsic literary merits and entertainment value. Both compilers and patrons, however, of what are in effect folktale collections, have from ancient times adopted a utilitarian attitude to their material, a classic instance being the political science course that King Dabshalim (or Devasarma) took from Professor Bidpai in the form of animal fables. In one form or another, the practical autocrat and his obliging philosopher have continued to vet Persian literature through the centuries, insisting that myth and folktale be used as parables to leaven works ostensibly of devotional or moral instruction (as of Rumi or Sa'di) or of historical narrative.

The debate over political commitment in Iran was never limited to adjudicating content: it was frequently a debate over form as well. In the realm of fiction, this debate fixated on realism, the nature of mimesis, and the autonomy of art and the literary text. Within a few short years after forming the iconoclastic journal Jong-e Esfahan in 1965 with a group of likeminded colleagues, the writer Hushang Golshiri had become the preeminent modernist fiction writer in Iran. His critical essays represented a passionate defense of aesthetic autonomy at a time when realism and, particularly, socialist and “engaged” literature were powerful shibboleths in the Tehran literary scene. This paper begins with a look at Golshiri’s critical interventions in this debate and then moves on to show how the short stories he produced in the Jong era were an even more integral part of his response to the mimesis question. By reading his stories with a methodology drawn from “possible worlds” theories of narratology, Todorov’s fantastic, and Golshiri’s own theories, we see how these works break down the “one-world” frame of reality that realism takes for granted, and require the reader to grapple with multiple, often contradictory, possible realities in its stead.

This paper will attempt to compare a famous scene in Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh with an equally well-known one in Homer's Iliad. There are broadly three ways in which such a comparison can be made. Similarities and differences can be ascribed to reasons of genre, or to the nature of the underlying mythical material and sources utilized by the poets in question, or to a consciousness of, and use by, the later poet of the earlier poet's work, at whatever stage of remoteness. Elsewhere I have touched on genre as a cause for apparent similarities between the two superficially quite different epic traditions of Greece and Iran, indicating that the king/champion conflict described by W. T. H. Jackson as typical of the European epic is also a characteristic of the Iranian Shāhnāmeh.

Cultural diffusion of a partially non-literate kind is intrinsically hard to demonstrate and document. The poles between which cultural currents flow across geographical space are not the simple loci of “high” and “low” cultures or of superordinate and subordinate civilizations. Aspects of elite culture trickle down, features of vernacular culture bubble up, to confound and subvert the orderly progression of literary and religious history beloved of conventional scholarship. And, of course, the key occasions of transfer are usually absent from the record.

One such current that is, however, sufficiently documented in general and specific terms to be accepted nem. con. as truly remarkable in volume, longevity and global efficacy is the overwhelmingly one-way traffic of seminal commodities, artifacts and ideas that flowed westward from the South Asian subcontinent between at least 300 B.C.E. and 1400 C.E. Along this stream, from the Punjab via the Iranian plateau and adjacent waterways to Mesopotamia, Syria, the Mediterranean and western Europe, were borne the Gypsies, the game of chess, the mathematical concept of zero and the notation with which to use it, the literary device of the Frame Story, and a flood of stories to stock it.

In the literature of the Iranian-American diaspora, the memoir genre has become a predominant lens through which Western audiences “read” contemporary Iran. While many bestselling life narratives have relied on hostage crisis-era tropes of gendered repression and subsequent liberation in exile, new amalgams of style and theme, distortions of perspective, and complicated renderings of the “subject” are now beginning to cross borders. One of these is Shahriar Mandanipour's 2009 novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which this paper examines as an auto-fictional commentary on the memoir genre that both arises from and responds directly to censorship using a self-referential and layered text. Through three central dialectics—ambiguous violence, encoded desire and resistance to diachronic historicization alongside the nation—this paper demonstrates how Mandanipour's auto-fictional and often magical realist attempts elude what Gillian Whitlock terms the transnational “economy of affect” that publicizes, protects and ultimately drives the reception of memoir across borders.