The question of who ran the Mongol Empire has long challenged historians, and various theories have emerged and retreated in answer to this problem. As far as the question of who ran the Persian part of the empire the answer has been made more elusive by the nature of the sources. Though excellent primary source material for this period abounds, for the most part it is written by the bureaucrats of the Il-Khanate themselves, most of whom were Persian. Very little Mongol material survives. It is this lack of Mongolian material that has prompted historians to speculate that perhaps none ever existed and thus that “the Mongols were happy to leave the tedious minutiae of government to those best qualified to cope with them.” In the case of Persia “those best qualified to cope” meant the traditional bureaucratic classes, and such individual luminaries as ᶜAta Malik Juvaini and Rashid al-Din and families such as the Qazvinis and Simnanis spring to mind.

The February 18, 2000 Parliamentary Elections in Iran Resulted in a clear victory for the groups associated with President Khatami's reform programs. The electorate was allowed to reject the forces of authoritarianism and conservatism through a free election, and the media and the experts considered this event to have historic significance. It seemed that the result of the elections convinced more and more people that democratic transition is possible in Iran through the reform of the system without first dismantling the Islamic republic. But soon after the elections there was a crackdown which included the closing down of a large number of newspapers and the arrest of a few prominent journalists, lawyers, and other political activists thus obscuring the future path of the Iranian polity. How are we to understand the character of this polity and is it possible to make educated guesses about its future?

When the Iranian Revolution of 1979 Overthrew Pahlavi Power in Iran the attention of historians was suddenly attracted towards a study of the antecedents of the revolutionary movement and of opposition to the Pahlavi dictatorship in general. This redirection of attention produced, during the 1980s, quite novel historical and historiographical analyses of modern Iran. The army, however, largely escaped these revisionist approaches. Yet it is clear that the image of the army conventionally accepted, the military structures a bedrock of monarchical rule and the officer corps a key element on which the regime could depend, is a considerable oversimplification. Although ideological trends within the army tended to be dominated by secular nationalism and modernism, political attitudes towards the Pahlavi shahs were always capable of marked variegation. The relationship between the shah and the officer corps, both senior and junior, especially during periods of political crisis and uncertainty such as the early years of Pahlavi rule or the oil nationalization crisis, was susceptible to considerable tension.

This Paper Shall Deal with the Formal Aspects of the Storytelling technique employed by Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73 C.E.) in his Manavī-yi Maᶜnavī (henceforth Manavī). I shall begin with the assumption that there is some kind of form to this work and shall try to investigate the nature of that form.

To the casual observer the Manavī, as a whole, seems to have no narrative sequence with its plethora of apparently unconnected and disjointed stories. Moreover, the narrative order of a particular story may be interrupted by other stories, sermons, expositions of Qurᶜanic verses, aḥādīth, stories of prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāᵓ), popular Islamic lore and glosses, etc. Throughout this entire exercise Rumi's goal is to drive home various precepts of Sufism via the use of these means.

Ever Since The Appearance of the Notion of the “Intellectual,” Writers and theorists have been preoccupied with attempting to define just what an intellectual is, or ought to be. Is an intellectual a detached observer, one who is free from the immediate concerns of life, and interested primarily in the pursuit of timeless and universal truths, as Julien Benda argued in La Trahison des clercs, or is an intellectual one who very much engages with society, necessarily challenges power, one who, in Edward Said's words, “is a spirit in opposition” who raises “embarrassing questions … and cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug”? Sociologists and historians have adopted a variety of approaches to this concept: in a sociological sense, they have applied the term to all those who produce and propagate thought and culture, thus designating a neutral although wide socio-professional category, or in an attempt to narrow down the grouping, they have qualified the word with distinct characteristics, pointing out a certain way of acting in public life.

Long before European merchants working for the Dutch and the English East India Companies sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, there were caste-based Indian family firms operating heavily-capitalized commercial institutions throughout north India. The directors of these firms enlisted many thousands of agents and placed them in markets strategic to their engagement in a variety of commercial activities, including large-scale transregional trade, brokering, money changing, and the financing of complex systems of rural credit and industrial production. Rather than triggering the decline of such indigenous commercial institutions, it is during the very period of European expansion into the Indian Ocean that the Indian family firms began to geographically diversify their portfolios by sending their agents to distant markets in port cities, villages, and major and minor urban centers as far away as Moscow.

In a recent work, Stephen Dale has uncovered the existence of an early modern Indian merchant diaspora with communities dispersed throughout Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus and much of Russia.

The Word for Guile (Kayd) Itself Seems to be Shifty. Sometimes it is positive, sometimes negative, at times divine. It seems to assume its significance from its context. It becomes positive or negative according to the point of view of the one who uses it. It has a variety of meanings: Steingass's listing “deceiving, laying snares, entrapping, plotting mischief; applying a remedy, vomiting; being menstruous; the croak of a raven; war, warfare; deceit, fraud, stratagem; treachery, malignity, malice” illustrates its large semantic field. Kayd can also be a divine attribute. In the Qur˒anic chapter in which the Egyptian ruler admonishes his wife and utters the often repeated verse 29, “Indeed your guile is great,” verse 76 links kayd with God who “did devise a plan for Joseph.” “There are at least thirty-four uses of the Arabic root K.Y.D in the Qur˒an, and a number of them refer to God's action.”

Some of the most admired heroes and heroines of Persian literature are guileful. Most writers, however, have formulated their paradigms of guile with women in mind. Kayd and its numerous synonyms, although not gendered words, are frequently “feminized.”

The fall of Isfahan to the afghans in 1722 marked the end of effective Safavid rule over Iran, but not the disappearance of the Safavids from Persia's political scene. During the entire course of the eighteenth century, many pretenders to the Persian throne made their bids for power by trying to capitalize on their claims to Safavid origins, genuine in some cases, spurious in others. A few of them played a part in the struggle against the Afghans (for instance, Shah Tahmasp II and Mirza Sayyid Ahmad), and others managed to ascend a throne, although only as mere figureheads (like Shah ᶜAbbas III, Shah Sulayman II, and Shah Ismaᶜil III). Since the issue has already been dealt with by John R. Perry in a very detailed article, I need not elaborate further. Perry, however, devoted only a few lines to the very last of them, Abu'l-Fath Mirza b. Shah Sultan Husayn II b. Shah Tahmasp II, also known as Sultan Muhammad II, whose claims Perry dismissed as certainly spurious.

The Haydariyyah and Niᶜmatiyyah were Widespread, Mutually Hostile urban factions of Safavid and post-Safavid Iran, sparsely documented and virtually unstudied. From at least the middle of the tenth/sixteenth century up until recent decades, a number of cities and towns of Iran were perceived as being divided into two groupings of adjacent wards (maḥallah), one grouping known as the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the other as the Niᶜmatī-khānah, the respective (male) inhabitants of which would profess mutual contempt and antagonism, and would periodically clash in massive public fights. The origin of the terms and the cause of the antagonism were not generally known to the participants; the topography and composition of the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the Niᶜmatī-khānah (which in some places extended into the adjacent countryside) was apparently irrelevant; and membership in either of these factions corresponded to no other social, political, or sectarian affiliation.

In a Beautiful Essay, Titled “Justify My Love,” Daniel Boyarin writes, “From almost the first sentence in my first preparatory course in reading the Talmud, I was charmed—in the full antique sense of the word.” So much so that he did not notice that “they [the characters central to the Talmudic narratives] were all men, or that the texts were primarily addressed to me just because I was a Jewish man. I failed to see the exclusions and oppressions that those facts encode and mystify.” Gradually, feminist awareness of these oppressions and exclusions, Boyarin explains, made his life disturbing and untenable, eventually producing a new endeavor, which he calls “to justify my love, that is, both to explain it and to make it just.”

The dilemmas eloquently written about in this essay are in many ways those I have navigated since, as a teenager, I fell in love with the seduction-temptation episode in the Joseph/Yusuf story.

In The Spring Of 1997, I Attended a Memorial Dinner for My Aunt, Dr. Na‘imeh Amin. There, one of her friends from medical school, Dr. Maryam Tusi, shared pictures of herself and my aunt from their medical school days. In 1946, they had been among the first women students admitted to the University of Tehran Medical School directly from Iranian high schools. I was fascinated by what I thought I saw in three of the pictures. One showed ten young women on the steps of the medical school, looking eager and confident. Another showed men and women marching together in a street demonstration. The third was of men and women on a country outing, huddled together to fit into the picture and seemingly unconcerned about traditional anxieties regarding mixed-gender socializing. These images of women's progress and activism could have been produced by the propaganda of the Pahlavi state during its Women's Awakening project, 1936-41. In fact, the picture of the demonstration went beyond Women's Awakening propaganda and implied a new demand for gender equality that appeared in the Iranian press in the wake of the Women's Awakening.

The aim of this paper is to investigate historical change that occurred in a Turkic tribal group, the Afshars in Urmiya, western Azerbaijan, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The Afshars were important in Iranian history as part of the Qizilbash tribal confederation that contributed to the rise of the Safavids, and as the founders of the Afsharid dynasty. Their branch in Urmiya also played notable roles in the civil wars of the eighteenth century.

Numerous attempts have been made by scholars to show the political and military role of the Qizilbash in the early Safavid period. However, few studies have dealt with their later history. Recently, Kathryn Babayan argued that as a result of the centralization policy of Shah ᶜAbbas (r. 1587-1629), the Qizilbash lost their power and their political and spiritual cohesion, but after that we know little about their actual situation. More than twenty years ago, Ann Lambton pointed out that the collapse of the Safavids caused a resurgence of tribes like the Afshars and Qajars, in the eighteenth century, but the process of and reasons for this “resurgence” have never been examined.

The Belief that Persia is the Center of Magic has been Deeply ingrained in Western culture. In fact, the generic term for magic is derived from the name of the Zoroastrian priests, the magi, and Persia has been depicted from antiquity up to the present age as the ancient fountainhead of magic and wonders in Western literature. When in the second century B.C.E. the young philosopher Apuleius of Madaura married a woman fifteen years older because of her wealth, he was suspected of having used magic.

The ShĀhnĀmah Provides an Obvious Starting Point for an Examination of the role of guile in Persian literature. It is the earliest major work in which male and female characters both play significant roles, and in many of its stories guile, by which I mean the whole range of dishonest or deceitful behavior, plays a central role. Rethinking the stories in the Shāhnāmah from this perspective leads to several general conclusions. First, guile is a pervasive presence in the Shāhnāmah. Despite the consistent and ubiquitous condemnation of all forms of dishonesty, and the parallel exhortations to honesty and truth, lies and deceit are familiar weapons in the armory of heroes as well as villains. Second, warriors employ guile, as they do more conventional weapons, when it will yield some advantage over an opponent, and, in particular, when their own strength by itself will not be enough to assure victory. Third, although the ways in which men and women deploy guile varies according to their very different roles in society, men use it as readily as women do. Finally, when a woman does lie or dissimulate, men do not generalize from her behavior to that of all women.

Although The Title of this Paper is Inspired by the Title to Abbas Amanat's now classic history of the 19th-century Babi movement, its concerns are in essence different. Its aims, rather than being a study of the history of the messianic movement itself, are to reflect on the theoretical conditions or the modes of witnessing that structured the engagement with that history by the movement's contemporaries and early inheritors. This paper emerges out of a larger cultural and literary study of the early texts that narrate Babi history.