Ferdowsi's Shahnameh was not conceived as a national epic, but it does encapsulate another kind of group identity: it provides context and meaning for the glorious pedigree of the Iranian aristocracy. Ferdowsi himself was a member of the Khorasani dehqān gentry whose collective effort in the tenth century CE was turned towards preserving and reshaping their own history and literary heritage in the terms of the new era. This article analyzes the final section of the Shahnameh, dealing with the reign and death of the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III. As such, this section provides crucial clues for the function of the Shahnameh as a means to construct meaning for Ferdowsi's own group in his own time. The description of this crucial moment in history, pivoting between the era of Iranian kingship and the Islamic era, suggested possible modes for interpreting the present. The study reads this section of the Shahnameh with close attention to the use of the word nezhād (“lineage”), which circumscribes the identity of both the aristocrats of Ferdowsi's present, and the kings and heroes of the mythic past. In doing so, the transition between eras appears as a tragedy of nezhād, as the Sasanian dynasty is extinguished, raising permanent existential ambiguities for the entire class of Iranian gentry whose genealogies were associated with it.

Alexander Ludvigovich Kuhn (1840–88) was a Russian Orientalist of German-Armenian descent. The most important period of his activity was his service in Central Asia where on behalf of the Turkestan Governorate-General he collected manuscripts, archives and other materials, joining the military campaigns to Kītāb of ShahriSabz, Iskanderkul, Kokand and Khiva. A large number of the manuscripts were sent back to St. Petersburg to the Imperial Public Library, but some never left Kun's possession until they were donated to the Asiatic Museum after his death. Kun was also in charge of the compilation of the famous “Turkistan Albums”—a major collection of photos testifying to the different nationalities and customs that made up the populations of Central Asia. Until now, Kun's biography has been little known to us. The article takes a look into the personal archive of Kun, and describes the man and his motivations and desires.

In the late 1950s, when Iran was witness to the withering away of social norms and everyday practices concomitant with the country's rapid urbanization, a group of young Iranian film directors embarked upon a new cinematic trend, in attempts to screen the ethereal quotidian of Iranian life. Defining itself against what was perceived to be the “cheap” and “repetitive” commercial “Film Farsi” industry of the time, this alternative (alter-)cinema fused the local and global, by incorporating international cinematic elements in socially and politically conscious national films, and projecting them on local and international screens. Problematizing a homogeneous conception of historical time that subsumes the history of cinema into a conventionalized grand narrative of the Iranian 1979 revolution, this article works with a conception of heterogeneous historical time that first interrogates cinematic temporality autonomously and then in relation to the political history of Iran, especially the events of the 1978–79 revolution. This article explores how the distinct cosmopolitan alter-cinema of pre-revolutionary Iran was born from a cinematic rupture in the 1950s, prompted by series of critiques and professional expectations that colored the attention paid to the vernacular and quotidian in film production.

This paper argues that the designation of heterodoxy for the socio-religious movements of late antique Iran such as Mazdakism is a misnomer. It suggests that the designation of Mazdakism and similar movements as heterodoxies is in fact the product of an early Islamic assessment of post-Sasanian Zoroastrian attempts to create a Zoroastrian orthodoxy which did not exist under Sasanian rule. Pressured by the Abrahamic religions surrounding them, the followers of Weh Dēn in this period felt the need to demarcate and clarify their beliefs, and to make their own beliefs comprehensible to their neighbors and rulers. What was then left out of this attempt was labeled a deviation, and heterodoxy, whose fundamental disagreement with Zoroastrian orthodoxy was then reflected back in time.

In this article I examine the debate over the character of Cyrus the Great in Iran during the last four decades, using it as a prism to view the struggle over the desired balance between religious and ethnic components of Iranian identity. Heated polemics over the historical figure of Cyrus and his legacy reveal undercurrents of Iranian identity dilemmas as well as different and conflicting views of Iranian identity. Beyond a mere historical or religious controversy, the debate over the “right” memory of Cyrus presents an interesting case of shifting emphasis on identity and sources of political inspiration in Iranian society from the late 1960s to the present. Moreover, putting the debate over the ancient king in perspective, there emerges a wider picture of religious adaptation and embrace of what once seemed pagan or secular.

In this research, linguistics is applied to the study of novels through critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analysts take into consideration those elements of discourse which are hidden in order to preserve power hierarchy. Clearly contrary to descriptive-formal surveys of language, they contend that language can be used intentionally in order to support dominance, inequality and struggle against them as well. The novel Modir-e Madreseh (The School Principal) by Jalal Al-e Ahmad is analyzed based on Theo Van Leeuwen's research indexes, namely activation and passivation, nomination and categorization, identification and functionalization, personalization and impersonalization. The analysis illustrates how examination of the linguistic form used in the novel leads to deeper knowledge of the author who tries to alleviate people's miseries while they themselves do not play any significant role in doing so.

This article studies an early Safavid chronicle, Futuhat-e Shahi by Amini Haravi. In 1521, the founder of the Safavid state, Shah Isma‘il, provided Haravi with a number of veterans from the early days of the Safavid uprising as informants. Their narrative presents an alternative view on the early career of the shah that differs from the dominant version current in modern scholarship. From the perspective of the Futuhat, the rise of the Safavids did not occur as a wild apocalyptic explosion, but was a carefully planned and cautious campaign run by experienced commanders who kept a tight rein on the teenage Shah Isma‘il.

This is a comparative study of anger and narrative control in two tragic stories cast in an epic-heroic register, the “Tale of Rostam and Sohrab” of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and “The Knight's Tale” of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The narrators of both stories are heavily invested in upholding a certain normative interpretation of the events they recount, a fatalistic worldview that justifies itself through the necessarily agnostic optimism that these senseless catastrophes gain meaning when situated within a greater order that is beyond the capacity of man to comprehend. The emotional responses of outrage and grief therefore have no legitimate place in this worldview, and must be submitted to a process of rationalization and violent suppression in order to be kept in check. However, this same process also reveals the underlying aporias of its own normative logic, producing a subtextual counter-narrative that resists and undermines the dominant voice of the text. The resulting fragmentation and narrative collapse provides a fruitful opportunity to investigate how both texts respond to a crucial ontological topic in medieval literature and philosophy: what does it mean to be an autonomous subject within a divinely ordered universe, and how can one distinguish justice from tyranny in a world entirely governed by fate?

This article proposes a new approach to three of the most persistent problems in the study of Iranian art and religion from the coming of Alexander to the fall of the Sasanians: the development of Iranian sacred architecture, the legacy of the Achaemenids, and the development of the art and ritual of Iranian kingship after Alexander. Canepa explores the ways in which the Seleukids contributed basic and enduring elements of Iranian religious and royal culture that lasted throughout late antiquity. Beyond stressing simple continuities or breaks with the Babylonian, Achaemenid or Macedonian traditions, this article argues that the Seleukids selectively integrated a variety of cultural, architectural and religious traditions to forge what became the architectural vocabularies and religious expressions of the Middle Iranian era.

The article presents a systematic appraisal of the essential Russian- and English-language scholarship on Russian Oriental studies and particularly on Russia's Iranology. However, the main target of this article is to trace the discursive continuities and epistemological shifts which have existed in late imperial, Soviet and, partially, post-Soviet Russia's Oriental studies since the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the sources of the main Russian political, military and academic archives, the article offers an assessment of the question of rupture or continuity, which is based on a synthesis of the above-mentioned scholarship from an entirely new angle. Dealing with the seemingly overwhelming watershed of 1917, an analysis is provided that transcends the unhelpful continuity/change dichotomy, putting forward a new interpretation, which is informed by the Foucauldian conceptualization of the productive nature of the power/knowledge nexus.

This paper explores the ways in which the Shahnameh thematizes the poet's fraught relationship with language to not only complicate our overall understanding of the epic poem but also our understanding of the language which makes the poem, and the world outside the poem, intelligible. Through a close reading of some of the prologues and epilogues that frame the Shahnameh’s tales, this essay argues that rather than helping us understand how to interpret the epic's morally ambiguous tales, the frames to Ferdowsi's tales, ironically represent a narrator who is in no position to offer us any help. Of course, the poet does give us clues as to why he and consequently we are “helpless” (bichāreh) when it comes to understanding his tales, which, in its own way, can be considered helpful. What seems to hinder understanding at every turn for the poet is, paradoxically, the very language or speech (sakhon/sokhan) that makes understanding possible in the first place.

This paper explores the Middle Persian term agdēn, which is often problematically translated as “infidel.” By tracing this term of otherness through Middle Persian texts such as legal cases in The Book of a Thousand Judgments and polemics in the Dēnkard Book III, this article argues that the concept of the infidel frequently appears in discussions about slavery, intermarriage, and conversion to and from Zoroastrianism. Middle Persian legal and theological texts regarding infidels deal with cases in which Zoroastrian interactions with non-Zoroastrians impinge upon Zoroastrian boundaries of identity. Moreover, the term agdēn often refers to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, thereby offering insight into the ties between Zoroastrian self-identity and other groups which the Persian priests encountered. In the end, this paper demonstrates the need for further intensive studies into Middle Persian technical terms of otherness as they lie at the heart of questions of Zoroastrian self-definition and attitudes towards others.

The under-appreciated role of the press as a tool of public diplomacy was rooted in its origins as a Qajar state project in the nineteenth century, but also cultivated by a shared impulse of Iranian journalists and statesmen to represent Iran effectively in the court of world opinion. Moreover, foreign governments often reacted to the Iranian press generally, not just the official newspapers and not just newspapers produced in Iran, as a forum though which to advance or protect their interests in Iran. The Pahlavi state integrated the press as part of a larger state-run mass communication policy in the 1930s that would eventually include new technologies such as radio, and retained public diplomacy as an essential purpose of the media. This study draws upon archival material, press accounts, and memoirs.

The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV), established in Moscow in 1921 and closed in 1938, presents a unique experiment in Soviet Orientalism. KUTV was the first communist educational institution set up specifically for students from the Orient to study their own countries in their native languages through a Marxist lens. Its purpose was not only to train teachers and revolutionaries for work in their native countries but to bring about a paradigm shift in the study of the East. Orientalism was to be freed from the imperialist prejudices of the past by redistributing the tools of Orientalist scholarship to Orientals themselves and by emphasizing contemporary social and economic history over an idealized and nationalistic antiquity. Iranians made up a strong presence at KUTV among both students and teachers, some of whom returned to Iran to spread learning and revolution, while others remained in the Soviet Union as scholars of Iran, influencing the development of Soviet Orientalism and often serving simultaneously in the Soviet political apparatus. With their students, they produced research and compiled massive collections of reference materials that formed the foundation for future Soviet scholarship and foreign policy. By the second half of the 1920s, KUTV developed into one of the most important centers of Soviet Orientalism, spawning a parallel Research Institute (NIA) that offered graduate programs and published its own periodical, Revolutionary East. With its aim of empowering the oppressed while simultaneously projecting Soviet influence, its attempt to rise above nationalist conceptions while at times succumbing to them, and the repression of its faculty in the Stalinist purges, KUTV exhibits many of the contradictions of the Soviet project itself. Among other sources, this paper uses Soviet case files on Iranian students and teachers at KUTV to shed light on their motivations and backgrounds.

Mirza Gholamreza's status in Persian calligraphy and the artistic quality of his works is well acknowledged both in Iran and abroad. Many of the calligraphic pieces of Mirza Gholamreza (d. 1887) are close in appearance to siahmashq and on the surface can hardly be distinguished from ordinary calligraphic studies, so much so that some critics have come to call him “the siahmashq nevis.” This article is an attempt, to investigate the aesthetics of Mirza Gholamreza's calligraphic art with reference to these so-called siahmashq works. By analyzing some of these works it will be shown that they are not siahmashq, i.e. calligraphic exercises, in the ordinary sense. Far from it, these pieces are perfect examples of high-art, demonstrating Mirza Gholamreza's full understanding as well as ability to use intrinsic plastic features of the nast'aliq form. Mirza's work is therefore the forerunner of what, more than a century later, became a major strain in modern Iranian painting known as naqqashi-khat (script-painting).

Javad Tabatabai, a leading theorist and historian of political thought in Iran, has presented a controversial theory regarding the causes of the decline of political thought and society in Iran over the last few centuries. His ideas on Iranian decline have affected the intellectual debates on modernity and democracy currently underway in Iran. Tabatabai's career-long research has revolved around this question: “What conditions made modernity possible in Europe and led to its abnegation in Iran?” He answers this question by adopting a “Hegelian approach” that privileges a philosophical reading of history on the assumption that philosophical thought is the foundation and essence of any political community and the basis for any critical analysis of it as well. This article critically engages with Tabatabai's ideas of “crisis,” and “decline” by challenging his exposition of the Persian tradition.

Russian Orientalists participated—often in a close but precarious relationship with the state—in the transformation of Central Asia from a tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an “Empire of Nations.” One of them was the former tsarist colonial clerk Aleksandr Semenov (1873–1958), who together with such prominent representatives of the region's Persian-speaking elites as Sadriddin Ayni or Bobojon Ghafurov, and with the support of his academic mentors, such as Vasilii Bartol'd and Sergei Ol'denburg, effectively—albeit somewhat reluctantly—lobbied for the official recognition of the Persian/Tajik language and of Tajikistani statehood. The study of their cooperation shows how Central Asian cultural heritage was researched and preserved, but also how it was reinvented in national terms and codified; and how these processes were negotiated between local intellectuals, scholars and the state.

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.