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.

This article examines the Russian investigation of the death of Hedayat-Allah Khan, who ruled Gilan from the mid-1750s until his death in 1786. Using Russian consular reports and records of the 1795 Russian investigation of his death, the article offers two major conclusions. First, Hedayat-Allah Khan ruled a Caspian-centered polity linked to the Russian consulate and trade through partnerships with merchant intermediaries. As Qajar hegemony in Iran emerged by 1786, the consulate and merchants threw their support to Aqa Mohammad Khan. Second, the 1795 Russian investigation of his death was opened by Catherine II to solidify alliances in response to Qajar claims to Tiflis in 1795. Shifting Russian strategic priorities under Emperor Paul removed the need for this investigation.

Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.

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.

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 article focuses on Arthur Christensen's meeting with the Iranian intelligentsia in 1929. Arthur Christensen's L'Iran sous les Sassanides had a tremendous influence on the Iranian nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, Christensen's encounter with Iranian intellectuals in 1929 shows that from the very beginning they had much in common, and furthermore that Christensen was influenced by Iranian nationalism.

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.

Azerbaijani national identity emerged in post-Persian Russian-ruled East Caucasia at the end of the nineteenth century, and was finally forged during the early Soviet period. After the fiasco of the short-lived independence period of 1918–20, Azerbaijan became Soviet. Soviet power then instrumentalized Azerbaijan for political and ideological penetration into Iran by galvanizing local separatist movements. Azerbaijani Iranology was shaped within Soviet oriental studies and put into service of Azerbaijani nation-building. Exiled Iranian communists found asylum in Baku, joined local research institutions, wrote the first Persian academic and school textbooks, and contributed to the translation of classic Persian poetry into Azerbaijani. Soviet Azerbaijani Iranologists were sent as translators to the Soviet missions to Iran and Afghanistan. After Azerbaijan regained independence in 1991, its Iranological infrastructure was represented by several departments at the National Academy of Sciences and the Iranian Studies Program at Baku State University. While the number of Persian classes at schools during the last three decades diminished, a new generation of post-Soviet Iranologists—those who studied in Iran—emerged. While Soviet Azerbaijani Iranologists never created a solid bilingual dictionary of Persian, several Persian–Azerbaijani and Azerbaijani–Persian dictionaries were published in the 2010s. Post-Soviet Azerbaijani Iranology is still trying to find its place within humanities in the transitional nation.

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.

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).

This essay examines Nader Shah Afshar's attempts to legitimize his rule by dint of his Turkic background. Over the course of his rise to power and reign, Nader consistently argued that his Afshar and Turkman affiliations granted him the right to rule over Iranian territory as an equal to his Ottoman, Mughal, and Central Asian contemporaries. Aided by his chief secretary and court historian, Mīrzā Mahdī Astarābādī, Nader's assertions paralleled those found in popular narratives about the history of Oghuz Turks in Islamic lands. This element of Nader's political identity is often overlooked by historians because it did not outlive the brief Afsharid period, but it demonstrates how the Safavid collapse led to the circulation of dynamic new claims to Iranian and Islamic political power.

This article examines the life and works of Hossein Kazemzadeh Iranshahr, focusing on the evolution of his thought from an ardent nationalist to a cosmopolitan mystic. It offers a detailed account of the spiritual transformation that Iranshahr went through around 1920 in Europe—a topic that has never been addressed in existing scholarship. It contextualizes his esoteric views, especially the influence of Theosophy on his thought in the context of the so-called “Occult Revival” in Weimar Germany. Finally, it discusses how Iranshahr's emerging spiritual worldview impacted his intellectual outlook, especially his views on religion, nationalism, civilization, and race.

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.

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.

Despite being in operation for a mere five years, the Soviet-era Tajik (Persian) journal Rahbar-i Dānish (1927–1932) was a key venue for exploring and debating the merits of Tajik literature in the context of new ideological and literary trends. Established litterateurs as well as literary newcomers published examples of their literature and literary criticism in this first Tajik monthly social, educational, and literary journal. The present article reviews the history of Rahbar-i Dānish and some of its authors to trace their influence on Tajik literature and literary criticism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The article addresses the difficulties of creating a Soviet Tajik literature and scrutinizes the various genres featured in the literary section of the journal. Finally, it presents the trajectories of two literary newcomers, Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām (who later became known as Jalol Ikromi) and Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī (who died in a Soviet prison in 1944), whose short stories were most prominent in Rahbar-i Dānish. This article is based on an almost complete set of the forty-five issues of the journal, published between August 1927 and March 1932.

The arrival of the Mongols in Iran in the thirteenth century made a deep impact on the political, economic, and religious life of the region. With the establishment of the Ilkhanate (1250–1335), the cultural life of Iran was also transformed. The territories under Mongol control saw the appearance of new architectural styles, a renaissance of Persian literature, and a burst in the production of Islamic manuscripts. Regarding this literary production, scholars have concentrated their efforts on studying important works composed in Mongol Iran either for their scientific, literary, or artistic value. However, most of this research focuses on individual manuscripts or specific works belonging to a concrete literary genre; these do not provide a holistic picture of the production, distribution, and consumption of the huge number of manuscripts surviving from the period. In an attempt to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon, this study looks at six different manuscripts, jointly referred to as the “Kāmūsī corpus,” that share the rare characteristic of having all been copied by the same hand in fourteenth-century Iran. This article investigates the individuals involved in the production of these manuscripts, identifies the different works included in this corpus, and connects the production of these texts and the dissemination of knowledge in Ilkhanid Iran.

This paper presents some of the preliminary findings of the research on the history and religion of the Ahl-e Ḥaqq in nineteenth century Iran. It seeks to shed light on the Qajar-era statesmen's efforts to learn more about and thus better understand the otherwise enigmatic community, their origins, identities, beliefs, and practices as well as political loyalties. In particular, the article discusses arguably the most important text pertaining to the group and produced in late nineteenth century Iran, addresses the question of its authorship and sources, seeks to contextualize its composition and finally offers its full translation. Lastly, the paper offers a partial review of the most important Persian-language research and scholarship on the subject, points to several hitherto untapped primary sources for the study of the Ahl-e Ḥaqq, and also discusses the major actors and trends essential to understanding of and further research on the history of the community during the period in question and beyond.

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.