The popular press and the Iranian exile community have suggested that the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces ceased for the most part to exist as a result of the Islamic Revolution. This view has also been held by some scholars. However, the continued success of the Iranian military on the battlefield against Iraq is strong circumstantial evidence for questioning such a view. While it is true that Iran's professional military fell into considerable desuetude during and after the revolution, this results from other factors, not the postrevolutionary purge of the armed forces. This study will demonstrate the relatively limited scope and impact of the postrevolutionary purge.

The purge of the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces took place in two phases: the first from February 1979 to September 30, 1979, the second from October 1979 to mid- September 1980. Each phase differed in intent, scope, intensity, and method.

The region between the lower course of the Tigris and its joint estuary with the Euphrates on the west, the head of the Persian Gulf on the south, and the Zagros Mountains on the east and north was known in classical Islamic sources as Khuzistan. The tenth-century geographer Ibn Ḥawqal described the province in a separate chapter of his Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ and included a map--“Ṣūrat Khūzistān.” In the thirteenth century, Yaqut reserved a detailed entry for “Khuzistan” in his compendium Muᶜjam al-buldān.

In Safavid times, however, the province began to be called Arabistan, and the older name became obsolete. The term Khuzistan reappeared in the 1920s, but Arabistan has continued to be used by some scholars and politicians. Both names were a matter of controversy in the early stage of the present war between Iraq and Iran. The purpose of this article is to examine the history of these two names and the reasons for their existence or disappearance.

Avetis Mikailian, better known as Sultanzade, was born in 1890 in Maragheh, a small town in northwestern Iran, to an extremely poor peasant family. According to an Armenian source, he attended a small Armenian school in his native town between 1903 and 1906, where the first section of Hnchak (the Armenian left Social-Democratic Party) had been founded in 1896. A former director of that school, Alexander Der-Vartanian, has reported that the young Avetis was sent to Djamaran, an Armenian ecclesiastical college in Ejmeyasin, near the city of Yerevan, although his father, Husayn Sultan, and his mother, Maryam Badji, had already embraced the Muslim faith. The school director relates that the young Avetis had, during the course of his studies, been strongly influenced by the Hnchak Party, a majority of whom later turned to Bolshevism.

Islamic chronicles have always been an important source, and in most cases the only source, for studying the history of the Middle East and Central Asia. Consequently, scholars have, as a rule, concentrated on the facts contained in them while overlooking their narrative styles. Moreover, the complexity of many chronicles has made it difficult for scholars to grasp their contents on the one hand while making it easy for them to be critical of these sources on the other.

However, a number of scholars have formulated a quite different approach to the language of medieval works. For example, I. Yu. Krachkovskii has concluded that it is necessary to consider the Quran not only a religious, philosophical, and legislative composition, but also a work of fiction. A. K. Arends has the same opinion of Bayhaqi's eleventh-/fifth-century chronicle, Tarikh-e Mas'udi.

Ardeshir Mohassess has often been called Iran's leading caricaturist and graphic artist. Yet, as the powerful images on the following pages show, neither appellation fully describes the breadth, depth, and complexity of his art and vision.

The artist himself also defies simple description. Through his art one sees him as a man of sharp and angry perception who wields his sarcastic pen mercilessly--decapitating bodies, twisting them into unnatural shapes, turning the world upside down, all in an attempt to expose the bitter truth that lies, he seems to feel, under the banal surface of everyday reality. In person, Mohassess is a remarkably sensitive, humble, and mild mannered artist with a philosophic sense of humor which focuses, not on the foibles of particular individuals, but on what he finds to be pathetic or absurd in the human condition.

It is not yet possible to say with any certainty what the total number of Babis may have been. According to the Bab himself, in a work written in the latter part of 1848, 100,000 adherents had been converted during the first four years of his career (MacEoin, 1982:117-18), a figure also referred to by the Russian Ambassador Dolgorukov in February 1849, by the Iranian chief minister, Amir Kabir (Dolgorukov, 1966:19), and by the British minister Sheil in May 1850 (Momen, 1981:7n). That this figure was very much a guess, at least where the two diplomats were concerned, is underlined by Sheil's reference to an alternative (but presumed to be less likely) figure of 50,000. Whatever the case, no detailed support for any figure can be supplied because of the semisecret nature of the Babi organization.