The Safīna-yi Sulaymānī (The Ship of Sulaymān), one of the foremost Persian travelogues from the Safavid period, includes a geographic description of East and Southeast Asia centered on the Indian Ocean. While the Safīna is well-known to scholars, secondary literature on this part of the book is scant and often characterizes it as incoherent and devoid of value. This paper challenges this interpretation through providing a new reading of this text. By casting it in a comparative framework with earlier books of wonders, this paper argues that the geographic section of the Safīna articulates an original view of the Indian Ocean resulting from the encounter between the traveler's observations and experiences and the Islamic tradition of wonders, the ʿajāʾib. As such, it encapsulates one of the central intellectual developments in early modern knowledge production, i.e., the tension between independent inquiry (taḥqīq) and imitation of earlier authorities (taqlīd).

How was Persian literature disciplinized in the twentieth century? This article addresses this question by focusing on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlining the sociohistorical processes that helped to transform scholarly and literary production into a social enterprise. A major outcome of these underexamined processes was the making of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949–79) in Kabul, the first modern encyclopedia produced in Persian. The article explains the multilayered significance of Āryānā's literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reified Persian literature as an object of academic study and national veneration in Afghanistan. A close reading of Āryānā's account of Persian literary history illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 1950s and its contributors’ adherence to a modern methodology. The present study places Āryānā squarely within a transregional ecosystem that brought about the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.

This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian literature, focusing on two different Persian translations of an influential Urdu-language work on Persian literary history, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nuʿmani. The article offers a close, comparative reading of the Afghan and Iranian translations of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in order to understand why two Persian translations of this voluminous text were published within such a short time period. These translations reveal how Indians, Afghans, and Iranians were invested in the same Persianate heritage, yet the emergence of a “Persianate modernity” undergirded by a cultural logic of nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism, along with Iran’s and Afghanistan’s differing relationships to India and Urdu, produced distinct approaches to translation.

The establishment of the colonial universities in India was a watershed moment for the history of Persian studies on the subcontinent. Despite the rise of English and vernacular literatures in the nineteenth century, Persian remained an essential language of instruction in colonial colleges, with generations of Indian students studying Persian to pass university examinations. By closely studying university calendars and courses, this article demonstrates that the colonial universities created and sustained an ecosystem for Persian studies throughout the colonial period, as Orientalists and increasingly Indian Persianists continued to invest in Persian instruction and curricular development. The breadth, diversity, refinement, and expansion of Persian college curricula—which included texts from the classical Persian canon and contemporary literature written by Iranians and Indians—testify to the continued fluidity and dynamism of Persian studies throughout the period. Such a phenomenon demonstrates that the debates and engagement around the Persian language in colonial India contradict its depiction as an obsolete or entirely classical language, and also that colonial college curricula influenced which texts were edited, compiled, printed, translated, and commented upon.

In the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, sound recording technologies—including radio and cassettes—proliferated in Afghanistan and reached transnational lengths. While the state came to dominate these technologies, it could not prevent users from circumventing its censors with alternative perspectives and discourses. This article highlights the examples of Farīda ʿUsmān Anwarī, a noted radio announcer, producer, and journalist, and Aḥmad Ẓāhir, Afghanistan's most popular musical icon to date, to showcase the ways in which the Persianate literary canon served as the medium for sounding dissent amid the changing social and political dynamics of the time. Pushing the boundaries of recorded speech created an alternative space where dissent became possible and the strategic use of mass media paved the way for transnational sonic solidarities among a diverse community of listeners across the Persian-speaking world and beyond.

What is the relevance of the Persianate as a category of analysis in a world wherein even world literature continues to be framed as the literary history of discrete nations? First coined by historian Marshall Hodgson in 1974, Persianate initially referred to cultures such as Georgian, Armenian, Chaghatay, Urdu, and Ottoman, which were heavily influenced lexically and culturally by Persian without themselves being related to Persian linguistically. Gradually, an additional meaning was grafted onto “Persianate,” which referenced cultures such as Judeo-Persian that were linguistically Persian but culturally diverse, bearing multiple alphabets, religions, and identities. These two meanings—the first grounded in cultural affinity and the second in linguistic origins—complement each other and ensure that the concept of the Persianate is reducible neither to language nor to identity.

This article introduces Julius Heise’s Marche Triomphale which reveals a history that was eliminated during the nineteenth century race theory publications. Beginning with an account of Iranians’ encounters with European military music, this article provides a brief history of Iranian military bands in European style, or the bands of muzikānchiān. It then addresses racial motivations behind a short account on Iranian music in 1885 by Victor Advielle, a French administrator. Arthur de Gobineau’s race theories were fashionable in nineteenth century Europe, and Victor Advielle used his fellow Artesian, Alfred Lemaire, to prove their racial superiority. Through Advielle’s account, Lemaire became the main figure of European music in Iran in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The article proceeds with biographical information on two European musicians, Marco Brambilla (d.1867 in Tehran) and Julius Heise (d.1870 in Tehran), and uncovers the earliest known piece published for the bands of muzikānchiān: Marche Triomphale, À Sa Majesté Impériale Nassir-Ed-Din Shah Kadjar de Perse.

In contemporary Central Asia, Soviet-era authors are national heroes. Writers’ natal homes have become lovingly curated home-museums; statues of poets bedeck city squares; and schoolchildren write dictations from twentieth-century novels. Less often discussed in public, such writers also once belonged to the Soviet Writers’ Union, many of these poets called themselves “proletarian,” and their novels purported to imagine “revolution.” Poems about tractors rarely appear in today's anthologies, and new editions of 1930s novels excise the once-obligatory references to Stalin. In reaction to their Soviet-era canonization, some writers have been knocked from their pedestals, as recently happened to Hamza in Uzbekistan. Due to the political sensitivity of many Soviet writers in Uzbekistan, most serious scholarly attention has turned, since 1990, toward transitional Jadid writers of the early revolutionary years who were ultimately devoured by the official regime, such as Cho'lpon and Fitrat.

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.