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.

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.

Raji is a Central Plateau (Iranic) language spoken in Kashan district, in the north-west corner of Esfahan Province, Iran. Here, we investigate the nature of Persian influence on the lexicon of two closely-related Raji dialects: that of Abuzeydabad, a desert outpost at 947m above sea level, and Barzok, a well-watered farming community at 2080m in mountains nearby. As expected, our analysis shows many inherited similarities due to linguistic relationship among the three Iranic varieties; cases of difference and innovation that distinguish them; and profound impact of Persian on both Raji dialects. Nonetheless, the degree and patterning of convergence with Persian is uneven, with the dialect of Abuzeydabad showing greater wholesale borrowing from Persian, as well as evidence of structural hybridization. To account for the divergent effects of Persian influence, we review social and geographic dynamics in the language contact situation. Key factors such as population, distance from the nearby Persian-speaking city of Kashan, language identity, and the impact of media and education are equivalent. However, a stark contrast between the towns’ geographic settings defines their social networks and patterns of mobility, and in turn how speakers of each linguistic code respond to Persian influence.

As part of the collective endeavor to explore the modalities and challenges of the narrative in the Persianate world, this article reconsiders Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), a film characterized by a special cinematographic feature. While accounting for what appears to be a story of swindling and identity theft, Kiarostami keeps the viewer in a state of uncertainty about the nature of what he sees, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, truth and lie, through particular narrative and cinematographic choices. Previous scholarship has focused mainly on the aesthetic implications of the staging and its effects on the viewer. The present study proposes a different type of analysis by discussing specific narrative devices from the perspective of cultural anthropology, with particular attention to the recurrence of the zāher/bāten paradigm, suggested as a cipher by Kiarostami himself early on in the film. The examination of the discursive and aesthetic mobilization of these notions brings to light a subtle game of back-and-forth between the desire to disclose deeper meanings and the will to preserve ambiguity and intimacy, allowing for “soft epiphanies” to arise.

This is a review article of a three-volume book in Persian by Ali Akbar Tashakori on the social history of Yazdi Zoroastrians in medieval and modern times.1 The work goes beyond the history of the Yazdi community, encompassing the broader history of Iranian Zoroastrians. Despite certain novelties, the volumes largely rely on a conventional reconstruction of the history of Iranian Zoroastrians in the second millennium CE. The foundational elements of this reconstruction include the gradual Islamization of Iran and the subsequent “retreat” of Zoroastrians to the “marginal” regions of Yazd and Kerman, the challenging conditions faced by Zoroastrians in medieval and early modern times, the beginning of Iranian Zoroastrians’ social and intellectual “emancipation” in the nineteenth century with Parsi assistance, the community's increasing political and economic influence in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi eras, and the Pahlavis’ exceptional role in elevating the status of Zoroastrians within wider Iranian society. Tashakori's extensive reliance on these narratives offers an opportunity to not only review his own new interpretations, but also to reassess these long-standing assumptions. Additionally, the article highlights neglected primary sources pertaining to the Yazdi community.

One of the most prominent features of Iran's 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising has been the diverse profusion of songs created in its wake. Music has played an important role in Iran's social and political movements at least since the Constitutional Revolution when the poet and musical bard Abolqasem Aref Qazvini (d. 1934) effectively transformed the musical concert into a political congregation. Since then, musicians have given rhythm and rhyme to contentious movements all through modern Iranian history, most prominently during the 1979 revolution and again for the 2009 Green Uprising. Considering the important role of music in Iran's political movements, scholarship on music remains surprisingly marginal in Iranian studies.

The editorial decision to publish a roundtable on the 2022–23 protests in Iran has come with challenges and obvious limitations due to access and immediacy. The ambition of this intervention is to offer some initial reflections and some analytical instruments in the hope that they will be useful for future publications. We also want to write in this moment because we want to register its characteristics—emotions running high, the quick detours of power relations between the state and the protesters, the uncertainty, the changing political weight of the diaspora—along with the difficulty of doing analytical work in the midst of such processes.

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.

This article is concerned with interregional trade dynamics between Elam and Mesopotamia in the early to mid-first millennium BC. During the seventh century BC, two great famines in the Neo-Elamite kingdom, of which climatological changes were a major cause, were documented in the textual records. An era of megadrought made grain procurement from the neighboring regions essential to feed the Neo-Elamite lowland population. This article further explores the impact of the two Neo-Elamite famines and “drought of the century” on the commercial and political mechanisms in the Upper Persian Gulf region.

In this intervention, we discuss the ongoing protest movement and the quasi-revolutionary situation in Iran with the goal of offering contextual as well as background analysis. Our objective is to examine the current wave of revolutionary politics in the frame of a longer history, that is, the one of the “unaccomplished” 1979 revolution. We do not argue that the current movement is in continuity with the so-called Islamic revolution; rather, we ask what afterlives of the 1979 revolution and successive waves of mobilizations reverberate within the current situation. We do so from a political transformative vantage point, which we understand as inherently feminist, in that we refuse to recognize any hierarchy between the struggles, the issues, and the demands as expressed by the protesters. Indeed, we understand liberation as a collective project resulting from the intersection of struggles, demands, and issues. Following this line of reasoning, we interrogate the current moment along three thematic axes: the social composition, the prospects for political convergence, and the genealogy, or the ideational connection, of the current struggle with those of the past.

This article considers three temporary and reversible penal shaming acts in nineteenth-century Iran: the shaving or cutting of hair, irrespective of gender; the shaving or cutting of men's facial hair; and the forcible removal of headgear or the coerced wearing of silly headgear. Drawing on anthropological, historical, and sociological studies of hair, this study argues that hair and hat punishments embodied elements of ritual, sexuality, social control, and marginalization. In order to understand the meaning of these penal acts, the article looks at general taboos around hair and head exposure alongside licit and voluntary forms of cutting or shaving hair. Illicit sex, heresy, and alcohol consumption were recurring moral crimes most often associated with such forms of humiliating punishment. Since restoration of honor was not the sole prerogative of the government, these punishments were often carried out by those acting on behalf of a religious authority or individually and collectively by ordinary subjects outraged by a moral violation.