The Gāthic stanza Y 30.3 has always been at the center of various interpretations and controversies in Western scholarship on Zoroastrianism. Those who believe they have discovered in the Gāthās a monotheistic religion armored with an ethical dualism have made this stanza one of the pillars of their thesis. The so-called Twins stanza shows, according to this view, that the good and evil primordial spirits exist as a result of their choice between Good and Evil, which preserves not only the absolute goodness of the supreme god but also his uniqueness. More recently Kellens and others following him have given a completely different reading of the stanza. According to their account, this stanza is a speculation on the hidden processes of ritual. What the poet expresses in Y 30.3 is not a dualism, ethical or otherwise, but a psychology of the process by which man makes his choice of ritual conduct. Aside from the question of coherence, one must ask whether these accounts are borne out by the text they claim as their basis. This article addresses these two questions.

This study employs keyword searches of literary databases such as Literature Online (LION) in an attempt to map the image of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry as it was molded by a proliferation of thoughts and ideas in a variety of contexts. Completeness is not possible, of course, but the article aims to identify and explore some of the major categories within which the image of Persia was formed and disseminated in the nineteenth-century. The scope of the study is not confined to a corpus of poetic works that were written specifically on or about “Persia,” but takes account of a broader range of poems, and attends to the structure, texture and variations of the presence of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry.

Gholamhoseyn Sa'edi, also known by his pen name Gowhar Morad, is one of the two or three most prominent writers of prose fiction in Iran today. His first published work appeared in 1956, and since then he has published some twenty volumes of short stories and plays, and several monographic studies of rural Iranian communities. Initially trained as a physician, Dr. Sa'edi has for some years now devoted himself almost wholly to writing. Most recently he edited four volumes of a new literary journal, Alifba, for the publishing house of Amir Kabir.

The present story is the first in a collection of three, entitled Gūr va Gahvārah (“Cradle and Grave“), that was first distributed some seven years ago and later confiscated.

When we got off the bus, the old man said, “Here we are.” There was a big rectangular square, and at each corner a long street like a hallway that stretched off into the darkness. The old man leading the way, we walked down the street across from us until we reached an open space and a long concrete bridge.

The Arabic copy of Rashid al-Din’s Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh dated 714/1314‒15 and divided between Edinburgh University Library (Or. ms. 20) and the Khalili Collection in London (ms. 727) is of seminal importance as one of the first and most extensively illustrated histories produced in Iran. This article examines four paintings from the manuscript to suggest why the patron wanted to add illustrations and how artists in his atelier adopted and adapted elements from Chinese painting in order to disseminate the text and enhance its meaning.

When Dihkhuda published his poem Inshallah gurbah ast (“God willing, it's a cat”) in 1933, he created quite a stir in Iranian literary circles. The great scholar Muhammad Qazvini, for example, was inspired to call the poem “without a doubt one of the masterpieces of modern literature.” Even a poem of lesser quality, however, would have been the cause of some wonderment, for Dihkhuda's pen had been silent for nearly fifteen years. After transforming Persian prose during the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 with his column Charand parand (Chit-Chat), Dihkhuda gave up writing satirical social commentary in the tumult and disillusionment of the First World War. While sitting out the war in the mountains southwest of Isfahan, Dihkhuda occupied himself with the only book he had available—a Larousse French Dictionary.

This paper is an in-depth study of The Confessions of Dolgoruki, the purported memoirs of a nineteenth-century Russian ambassador to Iran, long adduced as a document proving the claim that the Bahā'īs of Iran are spies of foreign powers. It unearths several early versions of the text, contextualizes the creation of The Confessions, exams the zeitgeist that produced it, and tracks the changes the text went through as the dominant socio-political discourse changed over time. In discussing the range of reactions The Confessions provoked, this paper traces the intriguing path through which this text created the masternarrative of Bahā'ī espionage. Finally, a hypothesis regarding the identity of the original creator of the text is advanced.

This paper suggests the interpretation of the images woven on Safavid precious textiles in their historical context. The thesis is that the mythical and literary subject of the discovery of fire by Shah Hushang was used by the Safavids in their negotiations concerning the supply of the firearms to Iran. The images of Hushang slaying the dragon on the silks of the third quarter of the sixteenth century reflect different stages of this diplomatic mission and the objects sewn out of these textiles served as meaningful presents to the interested parties.

Back in the fall of 1980, Edward Keenan, then Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, asked whether I would organize an oral history project on Iran. A Soviet specialist, Keenan saw certain similarities between the Russian and the Iranian revolutions and considered the immigration to the West of hundreds of former Iranian officials to be an exceptional opportunity to collect and preserve valuable historical data.

In our subsequent discussions it became clear that an in-depth study of the internal workings of Iran's former regime was difficult, as few reliable primary sources are available for this purpose. Because of the autocratic nature of Iran's political system, government papers, documents, and reports were (and still are) infrequently prepared prior to major decisions and subsequent to important events. Moreover, the relevant documents that were produced have not been preserved systematically and, in cases where they do exist, are not generally available to researchers.

This article examines the life and works of Hossein Kazemzadeh Iranshahr, focusing on the evolution of his thought from an ardent nationalist to a cosmopolitan mystic. It offers a detailed account of the spiritual transformation that Iranshahr went through around 1920 in Europe—a topic that has never been addressed in existing scholarship. It contextualizes his esoteric views, especially the influence of Theosophy on his thought in the context of the so-called “Occult Revival” in Weimar Germany. Finally, it discusses how Iranshahr's emerging spiritual worldview impacted his intellectual outlook, especially his views on religion, nationalism, civilization, and race.

It is not yet possible to say with any certainty what the total number of Babis may have been. According to the Bab himself, in a work written in the latter part of 1848, 100,000 adherents had been converted during the first four years of his career (MacEoin, 1982:117-18), a figure also referred to by the Russian Ambassador Dolgorukov in February 1849, by the Iranian chief minister, Amir Kabir (Dolgorukov, 1966:19), and by the British minister Sheil in May 1850 (Momen, 1981:7n). That this figure was very much a guess, at least where the two diplomats were concerned, is underlined by Sheil's reference to an alternative (but presumed to be less likely) figure of 50,000. Whatever the case, no detailed support for any figure can be supplied because of the semisecret nature of the Babi organization.

This study concerns the native language of Shirazi Jews, most of whom live in diasporic communities outside Iran. The language Judeo-Shirazi belongs to the Southwest Iranian group, as do most other native languages spoken in southern Iran. As such, Judeo-Shirazi shows general agreements with native rural varieties spoken in inland Fārs. There are, however, phonological features suggesting that Judeo-Shirazi is an insular survivor of the Medieval Shirazi language, from which a sizable literature has survived dating back to the fifteenth century.

At the zenith of the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) protests in October to December 2022, the call for (general) strikes became a rallying point for activists who were seeking to increase the protests’ social reach and political strength in the face of increasing state repression. Therefore labor provides an advantageous analytical lens for exploring some of the constraints and potentials of the social dynamics of the WLF protests.

The fate of secular sciences in Islamic civilization has been the object of intense historical investigation. Historians have long sought to explicate the seemingly mysterious reduction of knowledge production in late medieval Islam. The present article attempts to grapple with this phenomenon by focusing on the social elements of knowledge production at the local, rather than the global level. It argues that the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval Islam depended largely on a close cooperation among historical agents, who sought to advance various interests. The ultimate reduction of knowledge production—commonly referred to as the “decline” of sciences—was brought about by intense rivalry and the increased tension between different forms of knowledge and their representatives, which in turn hampered patterns of cooperation. The article stresses the contingent nature of the social relations that gave rise to the “decline” of sciences: the configuration of social agents, their interactions, and the final outcomes were not bound to unfold the way they did, nor did they have to follow the same path that led to emergence of modern Western science.

In the last few decades ritual interpretation of the Gāthās has replaced the biblical one as the dominant paradigm. The emphasis on the central role of ritual in the Avesta is well justified. This realization has given rise to the question of the role and meaning of ritual in the Gāthās. Marijan Molé had tried to argue that the Gāthās in fact describe and accompany a rite whose purpose was the preservation/renovation of the cosmic order. Students of the Gāthās working within the new paradigm have taken up Molé’s general frame. They have tried to show that the Gāthās, collectively or individually, is the text of a particular rite that served, among others, to preserve the cosmic order, especially the daily rise of the sun. The article questions the validity of this thesis. Its focus is on the version of the thesis we find in a number of recent publications by Jean Kellens. He tries to show that the first Gāthā (Ahunauuaitī) describes a unitary pre-dawn ritual that comprised a haoma rite and an animal sacrifice, and had cosmological and eschatological pretensions. His textual analyses and arguments are examined in some detail. The article concludes that Kellens's attempt must be deemed unsuccessful.

Ahmad Shamlu is the primary, most prolific and most popular engagé Persian poet of post-Mosaddeq Iran. While critics in general view Shamlu's poetry as a mirror reflecting the stages of modernist Persian poetics from Nima Yushij (1895-1960) onward, Reza Baraheni has also described it as "a biography of our society." As a sociological study of this very important Iranian writer, this essay provides a chronology and analysis of Shamlu's relationship with his reading public and "the people," an overview of the nature of modernist engagé Persian poetry in general, and an assessment of the influence the "committed" poet has been able to exercise on Iranian society during the past three decades, in" particular.

In July 1980, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi died in Egypt, approximately a year and a half after the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy and the subsequent establishment of the Islamic Republic. Once asked whether Madame de Pompadour's celebrated phrase, “Après nous le déluge” echoed his own sentiments, the shah had willingly agreed, and indeed, Iran has in the period since his ouster experienced the turbulent existence of a society in the throes of revolution. The prevailing climate of instability, interspersed by alleged conspiracies and widespread purges and executions, has given every indication of developing into a chronic condition, if it has not already done so. The economy has faltered under the burden of inflation, unemployment, and the inadequacy of managerial skills, and in the process, become wholly reliant on the revenues that accrue from the export of petroleum.