This article looks at the efforts China and Iran made towards strengthening themselves and their search for independence and integrity after the First World War. Since the nineteenth century, the two countries had been in a similar situation, under pressure from treaties and rivalries with European powers. The change of the world order brought about by the 1914–18 war created an opportunity for China and Iran to claim back their rights, such as ending extra-territoriality. After the war, the Fourteen Points drawn up by the American president, Woodrow Wilson, gave hope for China and Iran to maintain their independence and integrity. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, China and Iran made both gains and losses. China was unable to solve the Shandong Problem but became one of the founding members of the League of Nations, while Iran did not get access to the Peace Conference but obtained Britain’s assurance of independence and integrity by signing the Anglo-Iranian Treaty of 1919, and then joined the League of Nations. China and Iran attempted to bring about cooperation between Asian countries, and therefore signed a treaty in 1920. The significance of the treaty was that the two countries agreed not to grant extra-territoriality to each other, which was what both countries were seeking to achieve at that time.

In Iran surrealism is spoken of by artists and critics as a living element in art, long after its popularity in Europe and North America has waned. This article explores key features of the work of one of the most prolific contemporary Iranian artists, Ali-Akbar Sadeghi. While Sadeghi says that he thinks of himself as a “surrealist,” his work is distinguished from many self-professed surrealists in Iran: whereas the latter are concerned with representing metaphysical, even mystical, meanings, Sadeghi sees his art as a kind of intellectual exercise, presenting a dramatic theater in which the viewer engages in epistemological interrogation. Though Sadeghi’s paintings are full of apparent references to surrealist themes and tropes from the past, here it is argued that his work is not so much a storehouse of surrealist content as a series of puzzles for the viewer to solve.

Among the tribal peoples of the Middle East, from the Atlas to the Hindukush mountains, the most common type of political organization appears to be some form of segmentary structure in which powerful sociocultural mechanisms function to contain every tendency toward the emergence of permanent centralized power figures. Some tribes of Iran characteristically deviate from this general pattern. The Boir Ahmadi is one of them. Their political organization, as it existed during the nineteenth century and up to 1963, consisted in an intrinsically centralized system, that is, a system in which its political power figures showed a vested interest in maintaining, rather than preventing, centralized leadership. In this paper I describe--as much as is possible within a limited space--the bases and the functioning of this system, trace its emergence and inner evolution, and outline its present transformation. In conclusion, to further highlight some of its features, I compare it with European feudalism.

This paper provides a translation and analysis of Sloane Mss. 3259 in the British Library, a Persian farmān from the court of King Chandrawizaya Rājā in the Arakanese Kingdom of Mrauk U (1429−1784). Written in 1728 and addressed to the Armenian merchant Khwājeh Georgin of the port of Chennaipattana across the Bay of Bengal in India, the decree is a permit for the lucrative trade in elephants and ivory from the forests of Arakan. The royal decree reveals the presence of Persian as a mutual language of encounter, exchange, diplomacy, and correspondence in eighteenth-century Southeast Asia. Through the manuscript, a view emerges of a sovereign forest kingdom of manifold rarities at the margins of the Persianate and Mughal worlds.

Perhaps inspired, more than anything else, by The Blind Owl's famous opening lines, the reception of the novel has so far been dominated by a dark view of the narrative. However, subtle inter-textual links and formal patterns in the narrative could help to read a radically subversive laughter in it which targets the novel's predecessors and readers equally and concurrently. This article engages the aesthetic qualities of the novel and attempts to account for and emphasize the literariness of the text in interpretation. By singling out a few inter-textual links and elaborating upon them in detail, the narrative's parodic laughter, its significance and the way it can change our appreciation of the novel are discussed.

Until the twentieth century there was little change in the diet of Iranians. Bread was the major staple, accompanied by vegetables, fruits, yoghurt, and nuts. Meat and rice were a luxury food for most consumers. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries new food items were adopted by Persian consumers. After 1970, the modern Iranian diet—large amounts of white rice, meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and sweet/deserts, with few vegetables, herbs, nuts or fruits—has grown increasingly similar to the US diet, with the same health problems.

In February 1617, Jan Lucasz. van Hasselt arrived in Persia accompanying Pietro Della Valle (1586–1652), a Roman noble. Sometime between 1618 and 1621 Van Hasselt entered the service of Shah ʿAbbas I (r. 1588–1629), for whom he worked as a painter until the death of the shah. Later, during the reign of Shah Safi I (r. 1629–42) and until 1654 he tried to establish himself as a commercial agent for Persia. The present paper examines the career of this Dutch painter in Persia and the Netherlands. Meanwhile the artworks that may be attributed to him will be discussed.

Under the early Qajars, Tabriz rose from being a provincial backwater in ruins to the foremost commercial entrepôt of Iran. Initially, its insignificant foreign trade was limited to Turkey (mostly raw Gilani silk), but, when the major commercial southern and western supply routes of Iran became unsafe and costly, trade moved to the northern route. Moreover, after Russia opened its territory to European goods in 1821, these also flowed via Tiflis to Tabriz. When ten years later Russia revoked this permission, the Tiflis trade moved to Tabriz via Trabzon, gradually replacing not only the Tiflis route but also the Istanbul-Erzerum route. This turned Trabzon into a quasi-“Iranian” port, as initially most of its imports were destined for or coming from Iran. Four-fifths of imports to Tabriz were European fabrics. Initially these had come from Russia, but, as of the 1820s, such were replaced by British, German, French, and Swiss fabrics. By mid-century, Manchester fabrics dominated the import trade of Tabriz. Thus, Great Britain took Russia's place as its primary trading partner, although by 1900 the tables had turned. During the majority of the nineteenth century, Caucasian Armenian merchants dominated Tabriz's foreign trade, with European merchants playing an important but limited role in the import of Manchester goods and the export of raw silk. After 1870, the importance of Tabriz as the commercial hub of N.W. Iran decreased, due to various reasons such as the outbreak of the Gilan silk disease, Russia stopping the transit of non-Russian goods, and the opening of the Suez Canal, but also because it became cheaper to import goods via Bushehr and Baghdad-Kermanshah. Nevertheless, even with a diminished role as a financial center and less foreign trade, Tabriz continued to be Iran's major commercial center until WW I.

As a polymath in fifteenth century Central Asia, Jāmī’s (1414–92) works were widely circulated around the Muslim world. From a global perspective, Jāmī and his prose works achieved outstanding recognition in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper follows the author’s previous research on the introduction of Jami’s works in China, seeking to answer the question of what it was that made Jāmī a legend in China and how this came about. By focusing on the transmission and transformation of Jāmī’s two Persian Sufi prose writings as they moved from Central Asia into China, the article concludes that two groups of people played a role as transcultural agents in this process; these were individual Sufi travelers and the Muslim intellectuals

Just as natural history is the mother of the biological sciences, social history is the mother of the social sciences. Classical political economy was developed in a dynamic era, a period of European history where a series of long-term social developments were approaching their peak in the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution of England. It is not at all surprising that Adam Smith and David Hume spent time with the French Physiocrats, notably Quesnay and Turgot, and with the French philosophes, especially though not exclusively Voltaire and Rousseau.

It was precisely the dynamic quality of the era that led economic and social and political theorists alike to look into the nature and causes of change, and therefore regard history as a principal source of the foundations of their knowledge. A similar process was taking place, but more slowly, among biologists who were trying to discover the nature of life and the origin of species, and the causes of long-term biological changes through time. Darwinism was in fact the end, not the beginning, of this process.

This article considers style in Persian literary history and its critical rhetorical and hermeneutical roles for poets and critics in the medieval and Safavid-Mughal eras. It explores how tarz (manner) emerged as a hermeneutical term in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and achieved a central position in sukhansanjī (evaluating speech) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This account of tarz—grounded in its historicity and multivalent implications—offers new insights into language for early modern Persian literary history, which is often periodized as sabk-i hindī (Indian style) or tāza-gūyī (fresh-speaking). Through a close reading of Safavid-Mughal tazkiras (literary compendiums), this contribution examines tarz as an operating concept deployed by a number of prominent tazkira writers. Finally, the article concludes by discussing this legacy's impact on twentieth-century scholarship.

Historical treatments of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of medieval Persian poetry typically identify their origin in the Sufi poetry of Bābā Tāher, Abu Saʿid, and Sanāʾi and portray them as a poetic instantiation of the intellectual and antinomian critiques of the formalistic modes of piety practiced in the increasingly powerful institutionalized Sufi orders. However, the qalandari panegyrics of the Saljuq court poets Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi—arguably the earliest datable examples of this poetry—analyzed in this article complicate this narrative. They utilize the heterotopic poetics of the qalandariyyāt not to subvert or critique, but rather to augment the sociopolitical authority of the ruler of Qazvin, constructing a new and distinctly Saljuq model of Islamic kingship, a Qalandar King.

Sadeq Hedayat's life and works have been subjected to numerous comments and criticisms of both a general and particular nature. But, with the possible exception of The Blind Owl, there have been very few detailed studies of his individual short stories. This has created two major defects in the understanding of the man and his works: on the one hand, it has resulted in a serious neglect of many of Hedayat's stories which are well worth studying in their own right; and, on the other hand, it has contributed to an imbalance in the overall assessment of his socio-literary achievements. Indeed, it can be argued that a full appreciation of The Blind Owl itself is not quite possible without a careful study of Hedayat's earlier and--to some extent--later works.

Neither this article nor the work of Nadir Mirza is primarily concerned with the Amazon or with the quest for the Nile sources. But a certain amusing curiosity aside, the fact that Nadir Mirza touches on subjects like this in a historical work on Tabriz is a clear hint that we are leaving the traditional boundaries of Iranian local historiography—and not only in the metaphorical sense.

To place Nadir Mirza's history of Tabriz in a more general context is a rather difficult task. Such a context is provided of course by the longstanding tradition of Persian local and regional historiography—as treated in the present collection of articles—and particularly in connection with the late development of this genre in the nineteenth century. Local works of historiography from the Qajar period quite often defy attempts at classification according to medieval categories such as chronicles, biographical dictionaries, or adab-literature.