In November 1980, a twenty-nine-year-old contract worker in Hammond, Louisiana by the name of Stephen K. Clark was arrested and charged with criminal mischief for painting a thirty-foot mural of Mickey Mouse “making an obscene gesture to Iran” on the side of Sunflower supermarket. According to the store's manager, Clark had been hired to give the store a fresh coat of yellow paint before going wildly off script. The Hammond city prosecutor told the press that Clark would face jail time if convicted for his renegade painting, which, alongside the enormous image of Mickey, featured a word balloon proclaiming “We're fed up. Hey Iran!”1 This was no one-off use of Mickey's likeness to send a message to Iran. At the dawn of the 1980s, the image and sentiment Clark felt compelled to share had become curiously popular across the United States, appearing in surprising places all over the country.

This article draws on documentary texts from multilingual archives of early Islamic Central Asia to illustrate connections between the Arabic and Middle Iranian scribal world. Here, I contend that some lesser-known evidence from Sogdia contributes new elements to current debates on the contact between Arabic and Middle Iranian scribal traditions and provides a measure of “intensity” of Arab rule in the region more generally. In particular, ostraca from various Transoxanian administrative centers provide documentary confirmation that a class of biliterate Arabic-Sogdian scribes was active in the local bureaucracy as early as the mid-8th century. When viewed in dialogue with archives from coeval Iran and Iraq, the Transoxanian evidence helps lead to a more nuanced understanding of the so-called “Pahlavi diplomatic substrate” model.

By examining the history of the Ahvāz pipe mill in the 1960s and 1970s, this article investigates the manner in which competing understandings of Iran's modernizing trajectory among Pahlavi officials were bound up with the material aspects of steel, such as weight, volume, and form. The mill was built to provide pipe for the First Iran Gas Trunkline, a sprawling system intended to gather, refine, and transport natural gas to Iranian cities and the Soviet Caucasus. Officials overseeing the project debated whether the mill's design should prioritize serving the pipeline project or, more ambitiously, establish a new pipe rolling industry able to serve domestic and regional markets. Argued in this article is the significance of attending to infrastructure and materiality in understanding Iran's twentieth-century history of developmentalism.

Focusing on the cultural history of vocal music in Pahlavi Iran, this article examines the senses in modern Iranian history. As the article shows, the performance of Iranian vocal music became subject to a gendered male and female dichotomy. While this dichotomy did not exist in early Pahlavi Iran, in the early 1950s, a gendered consciousness and language emerged among male musicophilias, eventually separating genres of vocal performance across gender lines. Hence, vocal music known as āvāz became increasingly associated with male performers, while tarāneh and tasnif were increasingly associated with female performers. As the article attempts to show, this gender dichotomy should be contextualized in the broader tension between the sense of vision and sight and disciplined notions of aurality and the body. While the “modern woman's” body permeated the visual domain in the public sphere, the cultural ideals of disciplined aurality and body docility informed the male musicophilias countercultural claims in Pahlavi Iran. Eventually, the latter attempted to challenge the female agency in the public music sphere.

This paper examines the materialization of trauma as both a narrative and embodied phenomenon in Hassan Bani Ameri's 2006 novel, Gonjeshkha Behesht ra Mifahmand, using contemporary narrative and trauma theory. The postmodernist narrative, told from the perspective of a photojournalist, reconstructs events surrounding the death of a celebrated Iran-Iraq War commander. I argue that traumatic truths resist full integration into conventional frameworks of understanding, evident in the novel's non-linear, fragmented narrative and its shift from visual realism to confessional surrealism in an ending that challenges traditional storytelling and historical documentation. By vividly simulating the sensory processing of traumatic memories, the novel emphasizes the material reality of trauma that demands to be seen, heard, and physically felt, thus negating celebratory institutional narratives around the culture of war and martyrdom.

To comply with Shiʿi theological-jurisprudential justifications and dogmatic traditions, the Iranian postrevolutionary legal system formally enshrined the principle of legality of crime and punishment within the Iranian Constitution and important legal provisions. Despite this formal entrenchment and codification of its criminal law, which together act as a legal constraint on the traditionally excessive power of Muslim judges, the Iranian theocratic system has exempted religious sins from this principle by blurring the distinction between crime and sin and criminalizing certain sinful acts with unclear language. These two legal mechanisms not only violate the principle of legality and amplify legal uncertainty, but their reference to Sharia law also binds the fate of the accused more tightly to the discretion of the judge than to the letter of the law. Consequently, the religiopolitical predilections of judges have become a determining factor in findings of criminal responsibility and imposition of punishment on citizens.

The history of education and transmission of knowledge in Islamicate societies has long recognized the importance of scholarly circles centered around scholars in medieval Muslim societies. As an illustration of the persistence of similar patterns of knowledge transmission in later periods, this paper focuses on the scholarly circle gathered around Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad al-ʿĀmilī (d. 1030/1621), the prominent Shiite scholar of the Safavid era, exploring the intellectual exchanges and personal interactions between this circle's members through the lens of the manuscripts they copied, read, collated, and studied. Drawing on information gleaned from manuscripts, I argue that Bahāʾ al-Dīn's highly mobile lifestyle, which was an offshoot of his socio-political engagements, rendered the scholarly circle around him into a mobile college, detached from localized madrasas and other educational institutions. This mobile scholarly circle helped propagate Shiite intellectual heritage in places far from the centers.

The School Principal introduces readers to a disillusioned and sarcastic teacher who transitions to the role of school principal in a peripheral primary school. Often regarded as a social criticism treatise rather than a work of art, the novella is characterized by the narrator's pervasive cynicism. However, amidst the sarcasm, the principal's actions reveal a surprising undercurrent of compassion, particularly evident in his interactions with children. This article proposes a compassionate reading of the text, positioning it within the framework of childhood history. The narrative, seen through the lens of childhood history, unveils a cultural shift in Iran during the first half of the 20th century, specifically in the realm of education. It explores the complexities of transitioning from child labor to formal schooling and the evolving perceptions of children as innocent, passive, and dependent. A key conflict in the novella revolves around the clash between Iranian patriarchy and the emerging concept of modern childhood. The principal grapples with adapting to a new model that places children at the center of societal and familial concerns. Despite attempts to prioritize children's welfare, the principal struggles to reconcile the demands of patriarchy with the evolving notion of childhood.

This paper explores Muṣṭafá Khāliqdād ʿAbbāsī's 1590s Persian retranslation of the Panchatantra, commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar. Examining this text vis-à-vis other translations by Khāliqdād, other court-commissioned Sanskrit-Persian translations from Akbar's time, and the long Kalīla wa Dimna tradition in the Persianate world, this paper argues that retranslations, particularly unsuccessful ones, are where literary traditions and translation norms are most clearly negotiated and contested. Studying retranslations, as shown here, is a useful methodology for revealing tensions between different contemporaneous perspectives on what it takes to fully Persianize a text.

While the 7th/13th-century Persian Muslim scholar of the Mongol era ʿAzīz-i Nasafī actively engaged with Sufi traditions in his writings, he also introduced an overlooked distinction by drawing a line between Sufis (ahl-i taṣavvuf) and monists (ahl-i vaḥdat), aligning himself with the latter. This paper argues that Nasafī's clear differentiation between these two groups reflects broader transformations in the intellectual landscape of the Persianate Mongol world. These changes marked the emergence of new modes of thought not easily explainable by the established linguistic conventions of classical Sufism. Consequently, Nasafī's works serve as a window into the intellectual and linguistic challenges faced by Muslim intellectuals as they endeavored to shape the pre-modern and early modern Islamic cosmopolis (7th/13th–9th/15th centuries), revealing points of convergence and divergence with their intellectual predecessors.

Throughout the twentieth century, Azeri Turkish was intermittently banned, occasionally tolerated, but always marginalized in relation to Persian, which was perceived as the unifying, defining, essential language of the nation. Despite the substantial population of Azeri Turkish speakers in Iran—the largest linguistic minority—any attempt to teach the language publicly or to publish in Azeri Turkish has often been regarded, even to this day, as a highly political act of dissidence. Historical analysis of Azeri Turkish texts and a review of policies in language teaching, publication, and censorship within Iranian Azerbaijan reveal a symbiotic but simultaneously paradoxical interaction between this mother tongue and the official master language.

Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, long-distance pilgrimage to Islamic holy sites expanded and quickened, resulting in the spread of cholera among travelers. The necessity of taking circuitous routes to holy cities both inside and outside Iran significantly exacerbated the spread of cholera. Although potential factors such as inadequate public health infrastructure and ineffective quarantine measures contributed to the dissemination of cholera, overall religious mobility in the form of pilgrimage primarily factored behind cholera's spread. Analyzing the influence of religious mobility and rituals sheds light on how pilgrims, as contagions, dealt with the pandemic and the treatment they received from authorities, members of host societies, and individuals within and outside Iran during the cholera pandemics of the1890s and early 1900s.

This article explores the wide range of responses to Persian polymath and poet ‘Omar Khayyām (d. ca. 526/1132) in Ottoman and Turkish literary sources. A great number of intellectuals, past and present, translated Khayyām's famed quatrains into Turkish, albeit with differing motivations regarding subject, style, message, and literary reception. Social critics like Abdullah Cevdet employed Khayyām's quatrains as a vehicle for proving that liberal and progressive mindsets were accommodated in classical Islam. On the other hand, literary scholars like Rıza Tevfik [Bölükbaşı], Ḥüseyin Dāniş, and Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı chose to focus on the intellectual origins of Khayyām's thought, as well as on his connections to Islamic philosophical traditions. In the first decades of the Turkish Republic, there was another wave of interest in Khayyām's quatrains related to prosody, message, and what his legacy and poetic disposition represented with regard to the Islamic past. Whereas poets like Yahya Kemal and Âsaf Hâlet Çelebi regarded him as a paragon of libertine lyrics and Sufi mysticism, Turkish leftist intellectuals such as Nâzım Hikmet, Sabahattin Eyuboğlu, and A. Kadir set him as a socialist or materialist humanist who was a staunch critic of religious bigotry and fanaticism.

The aim of the Isfahan Anthology Project is to create an inventory of, collect, and digitize all extant anthologies produced in seventeenth-century Isfahan. Thousands of majmuʿa were authored and assembled in Isfahan. Presently, we are working together with our graduate students at the University of Isfahan and the University of Michigan in a collaboration that intends to train a new generation of Safavid historians who will continue this digital project into the future. We have begun the vast project of collecting and generating tables of contents for anthologies housed in the capital's most prominent public libraries—Tehran University Library, Majlis Library, Malik Library, and the National (Milli) Library of Iran—to begin our analysis of their anthology collections. Adapting our work to include reconnaissance, we have taken careful account of the content and organization of these anthologies so that we can create a digital and searchable database of Isfahan's anthologies that allows fellow scholars and graduate students across the world to freely have access to these rich Persianate-world sources.

This paper investigates the impact of two French architects, Andre Godard and Maxime Siroux, in early twentieth-century Iran using postcolonial methodology to challenge the reductive prevailing narrative of these architects as representatives of Western imperial powers. Furthermore, this paper argues for the existence of a distinct local modernism in Iran, highlights the enduring presence of Iranian architectural traditions throughout different historical periods, and argues against the narrative of modern architectural works in Iran as simplistic hybrids of pre-Islamic Iranian architecture and Western modernism. In addition, this research underscores the role of Iranian intellectuals in shaping the cultural and social movements that led to the broader modernization of Iran and modernism in Iranian architecture.

Even before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran's border provinces, which contain Arabs, Azeri Turks, Baluch, Kurds, and Turkmen, were marginalized and securitized by the state. These processes and outcomes have created a vicious cycle and self-fulfilling prophecy within the context of the so-called security-development nexus. Iran's peripheral provinces border Iraq and Turkey in the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. They are located far from Tehran in the inaccessible and inhospitable terrain and climate of mountains and deserts. This geography and topography partially explain why these provinces have been traditionally neglected by the state. Beyond the geographic remoteness and topographic inaccessibility of these provinces, their ethno-religious demographics and marginalization-based grievances, including those that existed during the shah's industrial and urban-focused development drive before the revolution, have fostered local opposition to the state. Most recently, between 2022 and 2023, this opposition has culminated in the Jina Mahsa Amini or Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

It may seem perplexing, in the beginning, to see Iranian poet Khayyām's rubaies and other Persian poems on the gravestones of Bidlis from the late nineteenth century. However, when scrutinizing Bidlis's political and cultural history, it is clear that Persian language and culture has deep, longstanding roots in this city and been integrated into high Iranian-Islamic culture in both respects. Based mainly on primary archival sources and inscriptions, I touch on the adventures and preponderance of Persian—the lingua franca of the rulers of Bidlis, a Kurdish principality located on the Ottoman-Iranian frontier—and its intellectuals after the city was integrated into the Ottoman world, and thus the decaying ascendancy of Persian.

Mohammad Amin Riyāhī's book, Nofūz-e zabān o adabīyāt-e Fārsī dar qalamrov-e Osmānī, is a well-known study in this respect, but mostly focuses on the adventures of Persian in and around court circles. Another comprehensive book on the subject, The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, illustrates the frontiers of Persian's usage in the vast geography stretching from China, Central Asia, and India to the Ottoman world. By focusing on a limited area like Bidlis, the region's most prestigious principality, this article attempts to elucidate the impact of Persian in the Ottoman-Iranian frontiers, unearthing its influence as a language of both diplomacy and literature as well as a lingua franca of Bidlis intellectuals in the lands ruled by Kurdish rulers.

Archival documents from Russia, which are becoming more accessible, help to provide a more accurate accounts of Iran's political past. Based on Soviet documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, as well additional primary and secondary sources in various languages, the focus of this article is on the challenges and obstacles which the Tudeh Party faced from the British and their proxies in Iran during the Allied occupation of Iran in Second World War (thus creating Tudeh's ‘British Problem’). The article delves not only on describing and analyzing those challenges and obstacles, but also on the way the Tudeh was able to overcome them, and its political breakthrough and success in the Fourteenth Majlis elections and later in introducing three of its members into Qavam's coalition government. Faced with such successes of the Tudeh, and worried about the future of their own interests in Iran, and especially the oil installations of the AIOC, the British sought American assistance. According to the Soviet view, it was only through an Anglo-American cooperation that Tudeh's political rise in Iran was checked.

This article presents a new reading of the Dārāb-nāma (Book of Dārāb, ca. eleventh–twelfth century), a medieval popular narrative in prose (dāstān) ascribed to the storyteller Abū Ṭāhir Ṭarsūsī. While the narrative belongs to the Persian tradition of the Alexander romance, the Alexander figure it depicts bears little resemblance to that presented in high classical verse-forms by the likes of Firdawsī, Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī, or Jāmī. Although still a conqueror, legitimate ruler, and champion of Islam, the Alexander of the Dārāb-nāma appears in a strongly negative light: he is lame, cowardly, and sly. In fact, most of his success he owes to his once opponent and later wife, Būrān-dukht: could she be the true hero in the story? Drawing on a critical examination of characters based on Greimas's actantial model, this study probes the authorial program and intended audience of the Dārāb-nāma, and suggests the work can be read as mock-epic, possibly to cater to a Zoroastrian audience.