Among the tribal peoples of the Middle East, from the Atlas to the Hindukush mountains, the most common type of political organization appears to be some form of segmentary structure in which powerful sociocultural mechanisms function to contain every tendency toward the emergence of permanent centralized power figures. Some tribes of Iran characteristically deviate from this general pattern. The Boir Ahmadi is one of them. Their political organization, as it existed during the nineteenth century and up to 1963, consisted in an intrinsically centralized system, that is, a system in which its political power figures showed a vested interest in maintaining, rather than preventing, centralized leadership. In this paper I describe--as much as is possible within a limited space--the bases and the functioning of this system, trace its emergence and inner evolution, and outline its present transformation. In conclusion, to further highlight some of its features, I compare it with European feudalism.

The origins of Iranian studies in Italy go back to the second half of the sixteenth century, when there developed a scholarly approach based on a recognition of Persian linguistic and literary evidence. The modern course of scholarly understanding was preceded, and prepared, by a process of political observation and geographical discovery of Iran, which began exactly a century before, with the accession of Uzun Hasan Aqqoyunlu (1457-1478).

Iran had then emerged as an autonomous power which on its western frontier contested the power of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet Fatih, the conqueror of Constantinople (renamed Istanbul) in 1453, was the great rival both of Iran and of Venice for the control of traffic and commerce between Asia and the Mediterranean. Hence the Papal State, interested in the salvation of souls, and the Republic of Venice, the hegemonical maritime power of the Mediterranean's eastern basin, established close diplomatic relations and pacts of alliance first with Uzun Hasan and then with the Safavids.

The Tahmineh and Rostam episode, as presented in modern text-critical editions of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, is compared vis-à-vis both the pre-modern scribal interventions in the manuscript tradition of the poem, as well as two oral presentations of the same episode by traditional storytellers (naqqālān), as preserved in their prompt-books (tumārs) and in recorded performances from the twentieth century. The mise-en-scène, the social circmstances, as well as the expansive nature of such oral performances, are described, and a translation of an oral version of the Rostam and Tahmineh episode is given. The narrative strategies employed to negotiate the intersection of new episodes or contemporary moralistic considerations with the written text of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh are then explored, analyzing the nature, motivations and functions of the scribal and oral interpolations to the Tahmineh episode, and demonstrating how modernizing reinterpretations impart a certain dynamism to the living Shāhnāmeh tradition. The naqqālān are shown to alter the Tahmineh episode to comply with the moral and religious values of their audiences, the requirements of extended narration cycles, and the horizon of expectation of the genre of epic. The article closes with a brief consideration of how moral and religious values apply differentially across various genres (heroic epic, romance, etc.), and how these differing horizons of expectation impact the reinterpretation of the narrative material.

Assuming that every student of the Middle East ought to be at least passingly concerned with the attitudes of Middle Easterners towards him, the group he represents, and the results of their collective academic endeavors, the recent efflorescence of interest in Western “Orientalism” on the part of Iranian scholars and writers deserves the attention of all serious students of Middle Eastern culture and society. Insofar as this interest may be construed as an attempt to set the historical record straight by providing an eastern corrective to West-centered interpretations of Middle Eastern history, it may also be considered a natural and logical consequence of the changing nature of international political and social conditions, particularly as these have obtained since World War II. In this sense it can only be welcomed and applauded in the community of scholars at large.

Among other Middle Eastern countries, Iran and Turkey stand out as the two neighboring countries with many linguistic and cultural similarities. The question that comes to the fore is: to what extent do these two countries know each other? This article attempts to provide a picture of the state of Iranian Studies in Turkey with specific attention to three monographs originally written as PhD dissertations in various Turkish universities over the last three decades. Produced from within three different social science and humanities divisions, i.e. Political Science, Persian Literature and History, these are three of the very few scholarly monographs produced on Iran in Turkey. Based on a close reading of these studies, it seems possible to observe that they are mostly ill-balanced by methodological, ethnocentric as well as Turkish nationalist biases.

Just as natural history is the mother of the biological sciences, social history is the mother of the social sciences. Classical political economy was developed in a dynamic era, a period of European history where a series of long-term social developments were approaching their peak in the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution of England. It is not at all surprising that Adam Smith and David Hume spent time with the French Physiocrats, notably Quesnay and Turgot, and with the French philosophes, especially though not exclusively Voltaire and Rousseau.

It was precisely the dynamic quality of the era that led economic and social and political theorists alike to look into the nature and causes of change, and therefore regard history as a principal source of the foundations of their knowledge. A similar process was taking place, but more slowly, among biologists who were trying to discover the nature of life and the origin of species, and the causes of long-term biological changes through time. Darwinism was in fact the end, not the beginning, of this process.

This essay delves into the 1927 anti-conscription movement and the causes of its failure. It argues that the Shia ʿulamāʾ of Iran and Iraq suffered from endemic divisions within their ranks, which in turn kept them from agreeing on a unified position against the extensive socioeconomic and military reforms under Reza Shah. The essay sheds light on the government’s use of religious justification that facilitated modern reforms. It also demonstrates how certain elements within the clerical establishment helped the Reza Shah government to win the senior clerics over or at least neutralize their opposition. This allows us to discern the fluid boundaries of tradition and modernity as modernizing reforms checked the Shia ʿulamāʾ’s long-standing authority in Iranian society.

Sadeq Hedayat's life and works have been subjected to numerous comments and criticisms of both a general and particular nature. But, with the possible exception of The Blind Owl, there have been very few detailed studies of his individual short stories. This has created two major defects in the understanding of the man and his works: on the one hand, it has resulted in a serious neglect of many of Hedayat's stories which are well worth studying in their own right; and, on the other hand, it has contributed to an imbalance in the overall assessment of his socio-literary achievements. Indeed, it can be argued that a full appreciation of The Blind Owl itself is not quite possible without a careful study of Hedayat's earlier and--to some extent--later works.

Identification and analysis of environmental conditions associated with the emergence and development of political parties in generals and different types of parties in particular, are important to an understanding of the problems and prospects of representative government in emerging nations. This paper presents a study of the genesis and development of political parties, their possible prototypes, and their functional substitutes in Iran.

The Indian Subcontinent has been One of the Most Prominent Areas of Persian cultural efflorescence. The Parsis, with their Iranian religious heritage, have played an important role in Indian thought and commerce that continues today. Iranian Islam has since medieval times had a powerful influence, competing with Muslim currents from Central Asia and the Arabian subcontinent. From the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the most important administrative language for Muslim states in the area. Enormous numbers of historical chronicles, books of poetry, and Sufi works were composed in Persian by both Muslims and Hindus in these centuries, some of them classics of world literature such as the Akbarnāma or the works of Bidel. It has even been argued that in the eighteenth century more Hindus may have read the Bhagavad Gita in Persian translation than in the original Sanskrit, given the very large class of Hindu Persian scribes and administrators and the relatively smaller numbers of Sanskrit scholars. India had an important cultural, commercial, and intellectual influence on Iran, as well, an influence now largely forgotten.

The figure of the martyred soldier is so ingrained in the Iranian public sphere that today, thirty years after the Revolution and twenty years after the cessation of the hostilities against Iraq, Iranian revolutionary painting on canvas keeps drawing most of its inspiration from the Shiite rhetoric of the martyred body and from the war. this article identifies and analyzes the iconographic forms of the martyred body in this pictorial production, which expresses primarily the concerns of the state. Relying on six works on canvas – painted before, during and thirty years after the Revolution – a scalable approach to the various representations of the martyred body is proposed, referring to Iran's history.

In feminist theory, the “female gaze” is a reaction to the imbalance of power created by the “male gaze”. Yet, since the concept lacks sound grounding in theory, it solely poses “a simple (antagonistic) response” to male voyeurism. This article traces the manifestations of the female gaze in Lost Highway and The Blind Owl, a film noir and a novella. It is concluded that instead of offsetting the imbalance of power, the female gaze only reverses it, turning the concept into yet another catchphrase of patriarchal hegemony to further commodify and subjugate women.

Yasna 19 contains an Avestan exegesis of the Gāthic stanza Ahuna Vairiia, the most revered text in Zoroastrianism. The stanza is traditionally understood to be the essential statement of the religion of Mazdā. Thus, in Y 19 we have a unique opportunity to ask about the significance that the Gāthās of Zarathuštra held for the later Avestan tradition. In what intellectual horizon did Zoroastrian priests place their founding text? Although Y 19 exegesis of the Ahuna Vairiia contains semantic obscurities, it is possible to establish the meaning of the commentary through syntactic and conceptual analysis of two key terms and the phrases where they occur. The article critically examines the earlier interpretations of the text. Having found these inadequate, it proposes a new reading and understanding of the Avestan exegesis. In particular, the article argues that the Avestan exegete understood the Gāthic stanza within an eschatological horizon.