This study proposes an innovative, triangular close reading of three Persian authors: Nezāmi, Golshiri, and Mandanipour. It argues that the two modern authors, Hushang Golshiri with his famous novella Shāh-e siyāhpushān, the “King of those clad in black,” and Shahriar Mandanipour in his Censoring an Iranian Love Story, are not only bound to each other in a close master-disciple relationship, but also consciously expound on the subversive potential of the twelfth-century poet Nezāmi. In the process, the divide between modern and classical narrative traditions in Persian literature is bound to disappear, allowing for novel interpretations and perspectives on Nezāmi and for his epics to be heard.

This paper investigates the activities of the KGB residency in Iran during the 1978–79 revolution and early years of the Islamic Republic. While some foreign experts were quick to point to the KGB as behind the revolution, it soon became clear that Soviet leadership and intelligence were no less surprised with the events than their counterparts in the West. However, this does not mean that Moscow did not see the revolution as an opportunity. The KGB served as one of the principal tools of Soviet attempts to influence the domestic situation in Iran and, although it achieved little in pursuing its goals, KGB activities in Iran reveal the extent to which binary Cold War thinking limited Soviet leadership in dealing with the challenge of the Iranian revolution.

Focusing on the decades between 1887 and 1936, this article examines the relationship between the Parsi-Iranian network of the printed text—often sustained by abundant visual evidence—and the built environment that then returned onto the published pages of printed books and periodicals. It examines several seminal Parsi and Iranian texts, all of which were published in the Bombay-based Parsi press, containing images of outstanding architectural edifices erected in Iran with Parsi financing to map the broader political discourse on modern reform through the strategy of an artistic revival. The piece foregrounds the codependence of Parsi patronage of print and built architecture. Architecture itself is treated as a text that aimed to ground the instability of language and identity in solid foundations. This codependent relation helped support a modernist discourse on Iranian nationalist rebirth.

This article investigates the history of economic relations between Iran and the Parsi community of India during the Reza Shah period. Encouraged by the policies of the new Pahlavi state, Parsi entrepreneurs began a serious effort to investigate the possibilities of economic investment in Iran. The article details three Parsi economic missions that were conducted in Iran during this period, and analyzes their assessments of Iran's potential for development in fields such as energy, textile manufacturing, commercial agriculture, and modern transportation systems. As the article argues, while these Parsi-led initiatives were part of a larger history of renewed engagement between Parsis and Iranians, for a variety of political and economic reasons, by the outbreak of World War II few of the Parsi plans for investment in Iran had come to fruition. While remaining largely forestalled in the interwar period, the article also suggests that Parsi economic assessments foreshadowed many of the planning strategies carried out in Iran's post–World War II history of economic development.

This article explores the remaniement of three episodes current in the Perso-Arabic Alexander tradition—i.e., Eskandar's confrontation with the Indian king Fur; Eskandar's visit to Queen Qeydāfeh; and Eskandar's encounter with the Gymnosophists—in the anonymous Persian Eskandarnāmeh, a medieval epic narrative in prose (dāstān; ca. 12th–14th c.). Through extensive comparative evidence from other genres, primarily narrative poetry (Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh, Nezāmi's Sharafnāmeh and Eqbālnāmeh), mirabilia (ʿajāyeb), and exegetical works (qesas al-anbeyāʾ and tafsir), this study engages with how the modalities of the dāstān genre, with its strong leaning towards traditional oral storytelling, affect the narrative choices Eskandarnāmeh's author makes in treating these themes. In so doing, this article attempts to develop a more informed assessment of the strategies and devices which, activated both on the production and reception planes, generate competing interpretations of well-known plots recast in different narrative modes.

Based on a textual analysis of the selected works of two writers from Turkey, Mehmed Uzun (1953–2007) and Mehmet Dicle (b.1977), as well as interviews with Kurdish writers and folklore collectors, this study focuses on the links between Kurdish folklore and modern Kurdish literature. Following Gregory Ashcroft's take on heritage, I argue that Kurdish writers’ approach to folkloric motives has evolved through the impact of growing literary experience, inspiration from world literature and deepening knowledge of the Kurdish oral tradition. What is more, Kurdish literature can be treated as an example of cultural and language revitalization, which – according to Justyna Olko – is based on acting in and through the heritage language. Following Doreen Massey's concept of a progressive sense of place, I identify Uzun and Dicle's strategy as linking the local to the universal, suggesting that Kurdish literature should be analyzed within the context of a political geography beyond nationalism.

From a devastating pandemic to worldwide protests for racial justice, 2020 is likely to stand out to scholars of globalization and human interconnectivity for several reasons. Thanks to a pair of original and remarkably complementary monographs by historians Lâle Can and Michael Christopher Low published in 2020, we can add groundbreaking scholarship on the hajj pilgrimage to the list. Drawing from diverse but equally impressive stocks of Ottoman, colonial, and privately held archives from the long nineteenth century, Can and Low have unearthed a lost world of contacts and collisions on the high roads and seas to Mecca. Together—and each in its own way—Spiritual Subjects and Imperial Mecca offer fresh historical insights and compelling arguments on the making of the largest annual gathering of people in the world that is the modern Muslim hajj.

The article contributes to filling the research gap concerning Iranian Zoroastrians in diaspora. Using a narrative approach, it explores how second-generation Zoroastrians raised in the United States learn and practice religion while facing the challenges of a pluralistic American society. The article includes a case study of two young Zoroastrian women interviewed in 2019, members of the Californian community. The contrastive cases shed light on the internal heterogeneity of Zoroastrianism, different ways the religion is perceived and experienced, and different ideas about future preservation of the ethno-religious heritage. The study contributes to an understanding of how Zoroastrianism evolves on a new continent and how it differs from what Zoroastrian immigrants brought from Iran.

The Gharib Shah Rebellion erupted in Gilan in 1629, shortly after the death of Shah ʿAbbas I and the ascension of Shah Safi I to the throne. A close engagement with Gilani chronicles reveals the uprising was motivated by anti-Safavid sentiment and a desire to restore autonomous rule in Gilan. The Gharib Shah Rebellion is best understood in the context of the series of post-conquest rebellions in Gilan, which had both political and economic motivations. It marked the final attempt to regain autonomy from the Safavids, nearly forty years after their conquest of the region. While messianism was not completely absent in Gilan in this period, it was not a factor in this rebellion and its role, in general, has been over-emphasized.

The essay explores the entangled relationship between modernization and women's visibility and representation through three pictorial spheres most redolent of that relationship: photo studio culture (1880s–1930s), satirical cartoons (1920–58), and costume exhibition (1972–76). The study prioritizes minoritarian politics formulated by women through their organizations and public activities, whether charitable in the late nineteenth century, educational in the early twentieth century, or “civilizational” from the mid-twentieth century on. By examining pictorial and textual sources, it proposes that the Armenian woman as a discursive phenomenon was central to Iran's mainstream modernization and foregrounds the complex working of a double marginality to the processes, strategies, and anxieties of late Qajar and Pahlavi modernization.

This article explores the ideas of Iranian reformist scholar Sedigheh Vasmaghi and her contribution to religious reformist thought in Iran. As this article demonstrates, a significant aspect of Vasmaghi's work concerns how she understands the extent to which the legal aspects of the Qurʾān and the associated rulings found in fiqh literature are relevant to the conditions of the modern world. This article investigates Vasmaghi's ideas about the Qurʾān and her contextualist approach to interpretation, arguing that her views on Islam's socio-legal rulings are rooted in her approach to the Qurʾān. As the article will demonstrate, Vasmaghi's ideas add to the work of other prominent Iranian reformist scholars such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Muhammad Mujtahed Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar and Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, but her approach is also subject to criticism, in particular her manner of differentiating between the mutable and immutable aspects of religion.

This article seeks to fill a gap in the literature by sketching a narrative of Republic of China–Iran relations between 1920 and 1949. It analyzes the factors behind Sino-Iranian cooperation and competition in the tea and silk trades and at the League of Nations. Unofficial commercial interests, including Iranian merchants in Shanghai, played a larger role than previously thought in driving the establishment of the Sino-Persian Treaty of 1920. After ratifying the treaty in 1922, the Republic of China established an Iranian consulate in Shanghai in 1934. Diplomacy between the two nations, and the public ceremonies performed by foreign diplomats in Shanghai, were part of a pattern of performative nationalist diplomacy undertaken by both the Chinese and Iranian states.

In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of literature is often conflated with the delimitation and reification of national cultures as different manifestations of a single process. This article examines three anthologies of Persian literature from the interwar Persophone Soviet Union to reconsider the relationship between state cultural institutions’ procedures of literary modernization and nationalization. The anthologies mark out the stages by which classical Persian literature was portioned out to Soviet Eastern nationalities, and in particular the advent of Tajik literary history, but they also reveal the degree to which national literatures coevolved with new post-Persianate literary cosmopolitanisms and internationalisms.

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.

Based primarily on British consular reports, this article studies transborder movement in Iran's eastern borderlands during the two decades following the rise of Reza Khan in 1921. It discusses two kinds of transborder movements: tribal exodus and smuggling. By examining the contexts of these transborder movements, this article explores the desire of the new state to assert sovereignty as it appeared in the borderlands and demonstrates that, rather than simply closing the borders, the Pahlavi state attempted to control the flows of people and goods, with dual effects. It introduced new constraints to mobility and as well fostered the development of borderland networks that enabled diffused transborder movement, making it harder for the authorities to control.

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.

This paper investigates the usage and frequency of what is referred to as K-suffixes in three Balochi dialects, namely Koroshi, Coastal and Sistani Balochi. It shows that K-suffixes are most likely the reflexes of earlier evaluative morphology, traditionally termed “diminutives,” and are characterized by a high degree of multi-functionality. While in Coastal and Sistani Balochi evaluative functions continue to dominate, they have been largely lost in Koroshi Balochi, and the suffix is now used to indicate definiteness. The development appears to have been spearheaded by female speakers, and its frequency is also dependent on genre and speech situation. Data is taken from an extensive corpus of spoken Balochi narratives and from a questionnaire with thirty-six speakers. The results suggest that evaluative morphology can develop into definiteness marking, with the development passing over a stage of combination with deictic markers. The paper concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a pathway that is distinct from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definite marking, though the endpoint may be similar. This is the first detailed documentation of this process for any Iranian language, and one of the few well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking worldwide.

Most studies on language contact in Iran have focused on the effects of Persian on the country’s minority languages. There are also many cases where large regional languages such as Azeri, Kurdish, Balochi, Lori and Bakhtiari exert an influence on smaller regional languages, and a few studies have appeared on this topic. This paper examines the effects of language contact in the city of Juneqan in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran, where the position of two minority languages—Bakhtiari and Qashqai Turkic—appears to be evenly balanced. The analysis is based on a comparison of L1 and L2 speech from two bilingual individuals with a different L1, as found in responses to the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) questionnaire. Drawing on examples from lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax, the article argues that the equivalent influence of each language on the first- and second-language speech of members of the other language community is likely achieved not by simple equal status, but through the counterbalancing of regional Bakhtiari dominance with majority mother-tongue Turkic population in this city.

This paper explores the transformations of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dominant narratives on labor between 1979 and 2009. By analyzing official May Day speeches of this period, it navigates multiple constructions of workers’ roles, which were systematically propagated by the IRI’s Supreme Leader and president over time. The analysis relies on the following primary sources: from the 1979 May Day sermon, pronounced by Ruhollah Khomeini, to the 2009 speech given by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, together with messages sent by Ali Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Showing how workers’ role—understood as a collective and distinct group—was gradually minimized, this paper argues that a bottom-up cleaning up process slowly purified May Day. In fact, the IRI progressively neglected workers as (revolutionary) social actors and interlocutors, as it stopped talking to masses and started speaking to middle classes.

There have been a number of important efforts to map out the languages of Iran, but until now no language atlas, or even a comprehensive and detailed country-level language map, has been produced. One of the recent initiatives which aims to fill this gap is the online Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (http://iranatlas.net). This article delineates objectives of the ALI research programme, atlas architecture, research methodology, and preliminary results that have been generated. Specific topics of interest are the structure and content of the linguistic data questionnaire; the handling of contrasting perspectives about the status of “languages” and “dialects” through a flexible multi-dimensional classification web; and the role of ongoing comparisons between language distribution assessments and hard linguistic data.