Mashhad, the site in northeastern Iran of the shrine of the eighth Shiʻi imam, is arguably one of the largest and wealthiest sacred shrines in the world. The gilded dome over the imam's mausoleum stands amidst an expansive complex of courts, monumental gateways, libraries, museums, guesthouses, and administrative offices that cater to thousands of pilgrims each year. This paper examines the period, under the aegis of the early Safavid shahs, when Mashhad was established as the preeminent Shiʻi pilgrimage center in Iran. Appropriating the Timurid ecumenical vision for the shrine, the Safavid shahs refashioned the holy city into a site that celebrated the triumph of Twelver Shiʻism in the Safavid realm and reinforced Safavid claims of legitimacy. While highlighting Shah Tahmasb's personal devotion to Mashhad, and his privileging of the shrine within Safavid sacred topography, the paper focuses on Shah ʻAbbas's urban reshaping of Mashhad and the architectural and institutional expansion of the shrine during his reign, thereby enhancing its status as the leading spiritual center in the Safavid empire.

This paper discusses the role of social entrepreneurship and the discourse of techno-nationalism in defining national selfhood in contemporary Iran. To examine the issue, this paper develops an in-depth case study of the development of stem cell research, and shows how an alliance between the leaders of the scientific community and Iran's politico-religious authority contributed to building technological capacity in the field of stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The paper also highlights how the preliminary success of stem cell research, along with other knowledge-intensive technologies, has created a shared feeling of national pride and has served as the material base for the contemporary discourse of techno-nationalism. The paper concludes with the notion that the techno-nationalist discourse has the inherent potential to unwittingly help to redefine the dichotomy between Iran and the West in such a way that it becomes less antagonistic, should other factors permit.

This article looks at the negotiations leading up to the Persian Tobacco Régie of 1890 as well as a previous failed Tobacco Régie in 1886. There exist only a few allusions to these two phases of the tobacco concession in the existing literature. Due to the newly uncovered diaries of the main commercial intermediary in these negotiations, the present article will be able to retrace, with precision, the events leading up to this economic concession of historical significance.

Political satire has had a prominent part to play in the social and political sphere of journalism in Iran since the appearance of an independent press in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper examines the problems of political satire in the Iranian press during the 2000s with respect to their historical context during the past century. The paper argues that, addressing the essential relationship between satire and criticism, and the primary role that criticism has in the freedom of press, what happened to political satire and satirists in Iran can be seen as an index of the freedom of the press and journalistic expression for an era.

In general terms, the history of the Kurds in the medieval period—or at least those described as being Kurdish in our sources—has attracted relatively little attention within western academia. Moreover, those scholars who have thought to comment on the subject have in general relied on the work of the eminent Russian orientalist Vladimir Minorsky. Hence there has been very little re-examination of the Arabic sources which Minorsky consulted. This article constitutes a first attempt to re-examine some of the “historical orthodoxy” regarding the meaning and nature of the term Kurd in the Middle Ages. More precisely, it aims at questionning the work of those scholars who argue that, due to its ambiguous usage, the term Kurd in the medieval period did not denote an ethnic people. This paper argues that in fact the very ambiguity surrounding the term is indicative of its ethnonymic value and through an examination of the meaning of the term Kurd in this era we can gain a greater understanding of conceptions of ethnic difference in Arabo-Muslim sources.

The 1979 revolution in Iran was one of the most popular revolutions of the twentieth century. It was supported by all the classes of Iranian society, and crossed social strata, positions, and religious affiliations. A lot is known about the participation of different parts, such as students, urban professionals, religious leaders, bazaaris, and leftists, yet little is known about the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movements. This article sheds light on a little-known event in the life of the Jewish Iranian community and seeks to tell the story of different segments of the Jewish community during the tremulous years of the “Islamic Revolution.” This article examines two main arenas in which the Jews facilitated the revolution—the Society of Jewish Iranian Intellectuals, and the Sapir Charity Hospital in Tehran—and seeks to draw attention to the minorities' contribution to the most important national revolution in Iran.

The Iranian crisis of 1946 occupies a significant place in the early history of the Cold War. While this fact has been increasingly acknowledged by scholars, there remain aspects of the crisis, in particular the motivations of the major actors involved, which demand further exploration. This article reconsiders the roles of early Cold War actors, including the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union and Iran itself in the Azerbaijan crisis and offers a synthesis of different perspectives. In revisiting the crisis it draws upon Cold War and post-Cold War literature including recently available archival material. It aims to combine contributions from International Relations, the Cold War and Iranian history to offer a balanced and integrated narrative of events.

Perhaps inspired, more than anything else, by The Blind Owl's famous opening lines, the reception of the novel has so far been dominated by a dark view of the narrative. However, subtle inter-textual links and formal patterns in the narrative could help to read a radically subversive laughter in it which targets the novel's predecessors and readers equally and concurrently. This article engages the aesthetic qualities of the novel and attempts to account for and emphasize the literariness of the text in interpretation. By singling out a few inter-textual links and elaborating upon them in detail, the narrative's parodic laughter, its significance and the way it can change our appreciation of the novel are discussed.

This article examines four mystical treatises by the Safavid scholar Fayd al-Kāshānī (d. 1090/1679). Of the four, al-Kalimāt al-Maknūna (“the Hidden Words”) serves as the basis for the three other versions, al-La'āli', Qurrat al-‘Uyūn, and al-Kalimāt al-Makhzūna, composed at different times for different audiences. Comparison of their structure and content reveals changes that occurred in Kāshānī's presentation of the thought of Ibn ‘Arabī and Mullā Sadrā. Kāshānī's later emphasis on Shi‘i hadith sources says much about the context in which he wrote and perhaps more about his later assessment of the place of sufi cosmology, Islamic philosophy, and scripture in scholarly and popular circles.

Two dichotomies, one that resents the West and another that admires it, seem to have long polarized both Iranian intellectuals and the public imagination. Darioush Ashouri discusses this issue in terms of “ressentiment,” a term he borrows from Nietzsche. This study puts Ashouri's scattered views within a Nietzschean framework to form a coherent theory, and places it against the background of a brief history of ressentiment in Iran. It then argues that signs of a ressentiment-less young generation, mostly university students, seem to be appearing, and a certain kind of social behavior on Facebook and a work by the Iranian musician Mohsen Namjoo are analyzed as evidence of this emerging mindset.

Rawls formulates liberalism according to two conceptions of reasonable and rational, which, tied to two particular notions of society and person, define the basis of liberalism in Rawlsian thought. This article argues that Mehdi Haeri Yazdi's important work, Hekmat va Hokumaat, should be considered as a work of liberal theory, and shows how it endorses liberal conceptions of the reasonable and the rational. The main elements of Ha'eri's liberalism are his thesis that philosophy has priority over jurisprudence, his doctrine of contract based upon concepts of agency contract (aqd-e vekalat) and joint private ownership (malekiyat-e shakhsi-ye musha), and his defense of individualism against the alleged collectivism of Rousseau.

The essay begins with a brief introduction to the early Persianate institutions of learning whose buildings have since vanished, because they were erected using short-lived construction materials. However, a large number of Persianate manuscript paintings of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, which depict the practice of teaching in architectural settings, has survived. Is it possible to describe these places where the teachers and children gathered as they are presented in the illustrations? Were they mosques, madrasas, or private residences, or did the artists invent these architectural settings? The article explores twelve selected images, and proposes an explanation of these representations of the elementary schools (maktabs), including the construction methods, and the techniques of inner and outer decoration of these buildings.

Eli Teremaxi's Serfa Kurmancî has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. It was dismissed by Auguste Jaba as a text of “minor interest,” but in fact it is of paramount importance both for the study of the Kurdish language and for the history of Kurdish learning. Not only does it contain the oldest extant detailed remarks on Kurdish grammar, in all likelihood preceding even Garzoni's 1787 Grammatica; it is also among the first examples of Kurdish-language prose writing. The rise of prose texts of learning in Kurdish in the eighteenth century is an aspect of so-called “vernacularization,” i.e. the use of a vernacular language for new purposes of written literature and learning. Vernacularization is, this article argues, a crucial prerequisite for the rise of a national language. The article also briefly discusses traces of a similar development in some of Teremaxî's near-contemporaries.

Although it is generally accepted that the Soviet Union did not play a significant role in the events leading to the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, little has been written about how the Soviets perceived the Iranian leader and the movement he inspired. This article argues that Soviet leaders generally saw Mosaddeq as weak and ill-disposed towards the Soviet Union. The Soviet failure to secure an oil concession in Iran in 1946 and general conservatism about anti-colonial movements during the late Stalin period conditioned their assessment of Mosaddeq's premiership. After Soviet policy towards the Third World changed in the mid-1950s, Mosaddeq's movement was reinterpreted as a genuine “struggle of national liberation.”

The specific sense that the word xratu- possesses in the Gāthās has not received the attention it deserves. As this article will show, this specific sense points to the eschatological foundation of Zoroastrianism. Eschatological concerns did not first develop in the frame of an established “monotheistic” religion; rather, Zoroastrianism arose from those concerns. The xratu- has a strictly eschatological function in the Gāthās. The noun retains this semantic capacity not only in the Young Avestan but also in the Middle Persian Zoroastrian texts. Iranian languages share the noun with Vedic and (archaic) Greek, where it has the basic meaning of the mental capacity to achieve proposed goals, hence practical intelligence, resourcefulness, or efficacy. If this is in fact the general sense that xratu- has in Iranian, as will be briefly pointed out, the specifically eschatological meaning that it acquires in the Gāthās must indicate the type of religious discourse to which these compositions belong. The noun may, further, have developed its eschatological meaning before the time of the Gāthās and already become a technical term. In this case, it would be legitimate to ask whether there are traces in the Gāthās that point to the institutional background of the term. There do indeed seem to be such traces. The term seems to have been used in the technical sense of the mental power to attain the divine sphere in the daēva cult.