Although theater forms as we know them in ancient Greece (circa 490 B.C.) and India (from the first to the fifth centuries A.D.) did not exist in Iran, some fascinating rituals and entertainment evolved into various dramas and performances.

Archeologists believe that certain figurines, seals, and stamps from western Iran dating to 4000 B.C. (depicting men with ibex-horned heads, hairy bodies, wearing shoes with turned-up toes and carrying wide collars receding down the back into bird tails) could represent ibex gods or “masters and protectors of game” or “mythical sorcerers playing the part of animals or humanized animals.” It is possible, however, that they were masked men, half sacred, half profane, who served as we shall see later on, as entertainers.

In October 522 B.C., a magi who had usurped the Iranian throne was killed by Darius of the Achaemenian dynasty, thus beginning a general massacre of the magis.

During the last third of the nineteenth century, Isfahan was the third largest city in Iran after Tehran and Tabriz. As was the case everywhere else in Iran, the process of economic linkage with Europe was beginning to have an impact on Isfahan, too. But the city was also caught in its own history and geography. It had lost its role as the center of political power in Iran and had experienced 150 years of sorry decline. In 1860 a German traveler noted:

It seems that not until 1880 was the population slowly increasing again.

In 1961, in my last year of high school in Tehran, I wrote two emotional poems inspired by current black liberation movements in Africa and America. Like most Iranians, I did not suspect that the Middle East was as guilty of racism against blacks as Europe and America were. Ironically, it was in New York, in the late ‘60s, that I came across medieval Iranian sources showing racism against blacks. I decided then to do a paper on the subject, but resisted the project for a decade. In November 1979, when Khomeini ordered the release of all blacks among the American hostages “because [blacks] are oppressed by American society” (The New York Times, November 19, 1979, A:12), I was finally prompted to undertake the present study, to set the record straight.

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.

Comprising some 900 pages in the Furughi edition, the works of Sa'di include a variety of genres. The Kulliyyat (Complete Works) opens with six “Risalahs” (Homilies), containing orthodox religious and moral teachings. The homilies precede the worldly and anecdotal “Gulistan” (Rose Garden) and the more profound and spiritual “Bustan” (Orchard)--Sa'di's best known works. Next are the “Qasa'id” (Elegies, or Odes) in Persian and Arabic, the “Marasi” (Thronodies), and the “Mulamma'at” (Bilingual poems in Persian and Arabic). The “Tarji'at” (Strophe Poems), the “Tayyibat” (Sweet Poems), the “Badayi’” (Cunning Odes), the “Khavatim” (Gems), and “Ghazaliyyat-i qadim” (Old Sonnets)--altogether 300 pages in the Kulliyyat--consist mostly of love poems, covering the whole gamut of this emotion from the secular love of women and boys to the mystical love whose object is union with the divine. Miscellaneous shorter pieces appear at the end of the Kulliyyat under the headings “Sahibiyyah,” “Masnaviyyat” (Couplets), “Qata'at” (Short Poems), “Ruba'iyyat” (Quatrains), and “Mufradat” (One-liners).

By all accounts the departure of the shah from Iran in January 1979 was met by most Iranians with the expectation of greater freedom for both the individual and the group. For a number of minority groups, this included the expectation of greater cultural and political autonomy. Initially, the new regime appeared to be sympathetic to such expectations, but by the summer of 1979 violent conflicts were erupting between the central government and members of several tribal, regional, and ethnic minority groups. While the central government appears to have contained the ethnic and regional autonomy movements, officials and analysts have continued to express concern over the possible fragmentation of Iran, and autonomy movements are viewed by many as a significant obstacle to the consolidation of the new regime and/or a threat to its stability.

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.

My earlier article on this subject (Iranian Studies XVI, 1-2, Winter-Spring 1983) concerned the situation up to the summer of 1981, i.e., the time of Bani-Sadr's dismissal and the first major bombing of the clerical leaders. This article, based on another visit I made to the village in 1983, describes the attitudinal changes that had occurred during the two intervening years.

For the most part, there appeared to be increasing pressure to adhere strictly to the “Islamic” code of dress and public behavior. Not only were there now a permanent contingent (of varying size) of mainly locally derived pasdar in the village, and a hezbollahi (i.e., fanatic, in the usage of the liberals) bakhshdar who served to enforce such behavior, but the members of the newly established village council and also government employees served the same function. Even school children were requested to tell their mothers to wear proper hejab.

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.