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 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.

In January 1988, the Speaker of Parliament, Hojjat al-Islam ‘ Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, delivered a lengthy Friday sermon (khuţbah) in which he discussed a “very important message” previously issued by the “leader,” Ayatollah Khomeini. The message, as expounded by Rafsanjani, was a reiteration of Khomeini's well-known views on the nature and function of Islamic Government and, specifically, on the duties and privileges of the ulama as the political leaders of the Muslim community. The gist of the sermon was that “it is the jurists (fuqahā’) who determine the Muslims’ way of life under every condition and at any given time.” In a world where “people extract economic minerals from the depths of the earth,” where “war is waged for the conquest of space and Mars,” and where “atom [bombs] are built … as weapons of intimidation,” the Qur'an could not provide answers to all problems and issues.

Private universities are a rapidly expanding form of education in Iran, and increasingly include Islam and the social sciences alongside the hard sciences too. What implications does the privatization of religious and social scientific knowledge have for the Islamic Republic? Scholarship has so far responded by looking at the ways in which the Iranian authoritarian state has monopolized religion, repressed the social sciences and hollowed out student activism. Complicating these arguments, this article provides a historical and institutional comparison of higher education in Iran in order to look at the evolving degree of autonomy of academic institutions and the ability of actors that operate within them to contribute to critical debate, social activism and novel discourse. The article proposes that while state universities and Islamic Azad suffer from politicization and control, a small set of privately owned “Islamic” universities is using its elite connections, financial independence and socio-pedagogical ties to the seminary and modern academia to secure enhanced levels of free debate and independent thinking.

This article analyzes the surprisingly consistent way in which Sadeq Hedayat's novella, The Blind Owl, represents the concept of eternal recurrence. Hedayat employs repetition in a unique manner. Neither narrator ever remarks upon or seems to notice that events, motifs, and similar or identical epithets and phrasings which arise in their own thoughts and utterances are repeating, but they rather encounter every repeated event or thought as if it had only just occurred for the first time. While I do not claim that Hedayat was in any meaningful way a ‘Nietzschean’ thinker, philosophical ideas from Nietzsche's works and those of the French thinkers who came after, most notably Klossowski and Deleuze, interact strikingly with The Blind Owl and seem to bring hitherto unnoticed dimensions of this important work to our attention. Notably, Hedayat depicts a struggle with nihilism that is informed by the philosophical questions surrounding what came to be known as existentialism, but in a manner that is not merely derivative of European models.

A la fin du quinzieme sifècle et à l'aube du seizième l'Iran était déchiré par des guerres intestines résultant de l'émiettement du pouvoir des Timurides. Le pays, sur le chemin de sa perte, subissait au nord comme à l'est, les terribles pressions de belliqueuses tribus.

En ce chaos, il appartint au futur fondateur de la dynastie des Safavides, Shāh Ismāᶜīl I (règne de 1499 à 1524 A.D.), de s'imposer, grâce à l'appui d'une faction turque, établie par sa famille dans la province caspienne du Gilan.

D'un sang illustre, puisque descendant du septième imam, Mūsā al-Kāzim, ce personnage, guerrier énergique et intelligent, héritait également des vertus combattives de ses ascendants de la tribu Ak Koyunlu et de la finesse de sa grand'mère, princesse grecque. En l'absence d'un rival de même valeur, ce prince chiite, alors que les populations partageaient en grande partie la même foi, fut sans difficulté reconnu comme roi.

In the Safavid period the concepts of miniature painting, already fully established in the Timurid period, still prevailed with certain modifications and changes in emphasis. Timurid painting in its turn had expanded and refined an art which had developed in the course of the fourteenth century into the “kind of painting,” as Dūst Muḥammad wrote in the mid-sixteenth century, “which is current at the present time.” Although Persian miniature painting achieved its first stage of maturity under the Jalā'irid sultans in the second half of the fourteenth century, the development was uneven. During the Jalā'irid and subsequent Timurid periods illustrations were produced which were markedly different from each other not only in concept and purpose but also in their stage of artistic development and degree of sophistication.

The study of the various factors that influenced the development of the art of the book in Iran is a vast subject.

In this literary analysis of the Akvan Div story in the Shahnama, the author proposes to read the story through the lens of more ancient texts to arrive at a better understanding of the trickster “archetype” in Iranian culture. After a brief introduction to and critique of Jungian archetypal theory and some remarks on the proposed method of “etymological reading,” a structural summary of the story is offered. The analysis that follows shows that in this reading, the story appears in its unity and parts that are usually seen as epic digressions become meaningful.

Even when Mohammad Reza Shah became an autocrat by the early 1960s, systemic constraints on his power persisted. One was government officials. They certainly accepted the shah’s governmental centrality. But in parallel they inventively created more elbowroom for themselves than they are normally credited for, shaping everyday administration and co-shaping policies. The article substantiates this argument in two steps. First, it looks at Iran’s Sāzmān-e bimeh-hā-ye ejtemāʿi-ye kārgarān (Workers Social Insurance Organization [SBIK]), drawing principally on French-language International Labor Organization (ILO) archival files. Although the shah had a well-publicized stake in social insurance expansion, the SBIK influenced policy strategy, sometimes against his explicit wishes; also, it handled routine operations and relations with the ILO independently from him. Second, the article zooms out to analyze Persian-language Harvard University Iranian Oral History Project interviews with high-ranking officials, alongside other published and unpublished sources, to show how government officials maintained some autonomy vis-à-vis the shah. Their strategies included self-effacement, the agreement on a unified cabinet policy position before a royal audience, resignation threats, open pushback, and gifts, including favors, to third parties.

The present article aims to shed light on the professional activities of the historian and mathematician Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī and his afar-nāmah. In so doing, two questions are addressed: (1) Did Yazdī’s expertise in mathematics influence his historical narrative? (2) Did Yazdī simply expand on Niām al-Dīn Shāmī's afar-nāmah, composed some twenty years earlier? Comparing the frequency of quantitative and qualitative data in Yazdī's and Shāmī's afar-nāmahs, the article finds that although Yazdī made an effort to incorporate quantitative data in his history, his narrative is not particularly informed by his expertise in arithmetic. This seems, at first glance, a byproduct of a predominant tradition in the Islamic-Iranian historiography, which makes extensive use of literary techniques. The comparison between the two afar-nāmahs, however, suggests that both Yazdī and Shāmī subscribed to a notion of “accuracy” which bore little resemblance to its modern counterpart manifested in quantitative precision. Finally, the article concludes that the allegation of plagiarism against Yazdī is unfounded.

This article aims to present a political analysis of the relationship between the Shiʿa community in Afghanistan and the new political system that emerged after the US military intervention of 2001. In light of the sectarian conflicts in the greater Middle East and the connection between South West Asia and the Syrian war since 2011, this article illustrates the limits of the social empowerment of the Shiʿa communities in Afghanistan. The article outlines the internal religious scene and the connections between āyatollāhs (marājeʿ), mainly from Iran or Iraq, and Afghan Shiʿite believers. It also examines how the Afghan Shiʿite community differs from those of Iran and Iraq.

The demonic plays an integral role in the Shahnameh, manifesting itself in countless forms. Early kings and heroes fight demons at every turn, and in one of the most memorable tales in the poem—the story of Zahhāk—Iran itself falls under the rule of demonic forces. But demons are not always physical creatures; we also encounter them as immaterial forces of temptation, distraction, and fate. One of the most fascinating aspects of this multifarious presentation of the demonic is the way it intersects the poem's portrayal of what it means to be human. This article focuses on that intersection, highlighting encounters between human beings and the demonic and arguing that they not only complicate notions of humanity, but also construct and reinforce categories of masculinity and femininity. A close examination of two phenomena at the heart of human–demon contact—serpents and sorcery—reveals how evil is embodied and enacted in highly gendered ways. Male and female characters in the Shahnameh diverge in their abilities to combat the demonic and are lured into wickedness by different means. What emerges from the interplay between human beings and demons and between the categories of masculinity, femininity, and the demonic is a multifaceted and sophisticated portrayal of evil that informs even the simplest and most straightforward tales in Ferdowsi's work.

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century in Tabriz, the political and cultural capital of medieval Persia, a remarkable congregation of Sufi poets assembled whose society, fellowship, and fraternity in Sufism, made them all members of one literary movement in Persian poetry, known as the ‘School of Tabriz’. In presenting the literary accomplishments and the mystical outlook of this School to a wider audience, the present article attempts to introduce the least known member of this school, namely, the Sufi gnostic poet, ‘Abd al-Rahim Khalvatī (Mashreqī), whose poetic oeuvre and biography has, to date, been completely neglected by Persian literary historians, both east and west.

Alexander Ludvigovich Kuhn (1840–88) was a Russian Orientalist of German-Armenian descent. The most important period of his activity was his service in Central Asia where on behalf of the Turkestan Governorate-General he collected manuscripts, archives and other materials, joining the military campaigns to Kītāb of ShahriSabz, Iskanderkul, Kokand and Khiva. A large number of the manuscripts were sent back to St. Petersburg to the Imperial Public Library, but some never left Kun's possession until they were donated to the Asiatic Museum after his death. Kun was also in charge of the compilation of the famous “Turkistan Albums”—a major collection of photos testifying to the different nationalities and customs that made up the populations of Central Asia. Until now, Kun's biography has been little known to us. The article takes a look into the personal archive of Kun, and describes the man and his motivations and desires.