The reign of Tammarītu is one of the most enigmatic parts of Neo-Elamite history because documents have attested that two individuals with that name but two different titles, “king of Ḫidalu” and “king of Elam,” played significant roles in the historical events. The lack of dates in many documents complicates establishing a secure chronology and attributing events to Tammarītu, king of Ḫidalu, or Tammarītu II/Tammarītu, king of Elam. Scholars generally agree that the documents in which Tammarītu is called “king of Elam” cannot be attributed to Tammarītu, king of Ḫidalu. However, a comparison of Ashurbanipal's annals with other available documents does not support this viewpoint.

The mischievous quote making up this article's title comes from the Humayunnamah, a chronicle written around 1587 in Persian by Gulbadan Begum (1523–1603). Gulbadan was a Mughal princess of Timurid heritage and the daughter of the founder of the Mughal dynasty, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530).1 In the Humayunnamah, Gulbadan recounts the response Hamidah Begum (1542–1605) gives upon being chastised by her future mother-in-law, Dildar Begum:

By applying narrative inquiry and cartographic reconfiguration of two significantly transformed neighborhoods, Qasr and Heshmatieh, in Tehran, in this study we analyze the practice of remembering within the context of memory politics. We aim to critically examine how residents of these neighborhoods, situated near major state security and military facilities, alter their recollections of the past. Inspired by de Certeau's concepts of strategy and tactics, the analysis seeks to identify the narrative tactics employed by interviewees to interpret the often imposed transformations of the area. Our findings underscore the process of “disremembering” as a hallmark of the transformation, perpetuated through constant “replacements.” Furthermore, they highlight four layers of transformation in the area, discussed within the framework of significant literature on Tehran's spatial transformation.

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.

Based freely on the writings of Hoseyn Qoli Khān Nuri, Persia's first ambassador to the United States (1888–1889), Haji Washington (1982) was Ali Hatami's first feature film following the Islamic Revolution. This article explores Hatami's departure from historical record in light of his aesthetic and political appropriation of Nuri's image as a failure. Viewing the film through a methodology that recasts failure as decolonial praxis beyond post/colonial mastery, I argue that Haji's embrace of failure, and his ultimate adoption of relationality as a mode of worldliness, constitute a “decolonial aesthetics of failure” with broad implications for both the world of the narrative and the moment of the film's production in postrevolutionary Iran.

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.

This research delves into the works of contemporary Kurdish novelist Sayyed Qadir Hedayati, specifically focusing on two of his novels: Bull Roar and Bardinah. These selected novels fall within the Bildungsroman genre, a category not commonly explored in Kurdish literature. The scarcity of such novels in the language prompted the investigation into the underlying reasons for their emergence in Hedayati's works. While Bildungsroman focuses on the formation of the individual, Hedayati's novels, very much like the early German cases of the genre, delineate the social and cultural concerns of a community. Through analysis, it is revealed that Kurdish Bildungsroman can flourish within specific historical and political contexts. The driving force behind the plot of these novels lies in the quest for identity in a controversial historical and political context. Hedayati utilizes the Bildungsroman genre to amplify the voices of a community that has grappled with marginalization. By doing so, he invites readers to immerse themselves in the intricate fabric of Kurdish life and development.

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.

World War I was the period during which decolonization dynamics fully played out in the Muslim world, and the postwar international settlement marked a milestone in nation–state formation in the Middle East. Despite the predominant role played by colonial empires, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 witnessed many previously unrecognized and disempowered nations advancing their goals of independence, resulting in the creation of a radically new international order based on ideas of national sovereignty, self-determination, and global stability. Philip Grobien's Iran at the Paris Peace Conference is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on post–World War I international diplomacy that reassesses the Iranian diplomatic agency in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, reminding us of the importance of non-Western actors in the shaping of the contemporary Middle East.

Manijeh Moradian published a memoir essay in 2009 under the penname Nasrabadi in which she described her relationship with her father. The essay appeared in Callaloo—a journal dedicated to “matters pertinent to African American and African Diaspora Studies worldwide.”1 It was a fitting venue given the elder Moradian's years of service as a professor of architecture at Howard University, an HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) where during the 1970s he sympathized with and supported student activists in the Iranian Students Association (ISA).2 The venue is all the more fitting given the younger Moradian's recent monograph which, among many groundbreaking contributions, demonstrates “affects of solidarity” between Iranian and Black American student activists in the 1970s.