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.

It would be premature to declare the Cold War over in the summer of 1969. The Cold War rhetoric continues to abound in the United States in the debates over Vietnam and the ABM; dangers of Soviet-American confrontation are serious in the Arab-Israeli conflict; and Soviet behavior in Czechoslovakia is of the Cold War mold. But, as symbolized by Richard Nixon's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, there is widespread agreement among American leaders that an era of negotiation and rapprochment with the Soviet Union has been entered. The indications are already strong that for Iran this portends an era in which the Soviet-American conflict will not influence very significantly Iran's internal affairs.

As this new era begins, there are already signs that the Cold War world view, including the Soviet-American confrontation in Iran, is about to be drastically revised by a new generation of students of the Cold War.

This study is based on fieldwork undertaken in Badakhshān province of Afghanistan in 1968 for the purpose of collecting musical data. A summary of the basic musical styles and instruments current in the area can be found in the,author's Instrumental Music in Northern Afghanistan.

The focus of the present article is the type of Persian verse set to music by the folk singers of Badakhshān. Principally, this includes a description of the texts of the most common folksong form of the region, the felak, drawn from singers of the Faizābād (central), Darwāz (northern), Shughnān (northeastern), Wākhān (eastern) and Keshrn (western) regions of Badakhshān province.

Yesterdays they changed my room. Am I completely cured now? Will I be free to leave next week as the superintendent promised? Have I been sick at all? For one year, they wouldn't give me a pen and paper which I wanted more than anything else. I always thought about the many things I would write once they gave me a pen and paper. Yesterday, without asking, they brought me paper and a pen...something I longed for so much...something I waited for so long. But what's the use? Since yesterday, I have been able to write nothing, no matter how hard I try. It's as though someone were holding me back, as though my arm were paralysed. Now, as I read over the garbled lines which are etched into the paper, the only words I can make out are... “three drops of blood.”

It would indeed be surprising if the recent controversy over revisionist scholarship and the Cold War did not extend to Iran. For the last two decades, most American historians have asserted that United States involvement in Iran was fundamentally a response to Soviet penetration, made manifest during World War II when Russia tried to establish a puppet regime in Azerbaijan. According to the “orthodox” school of Cold War scholarship, America first took an overt interest in Persia in 1946. President Truman sent his “blunt message” to Stalin, the State Department protested sharply, and the United Nations Security Council asked for Russian withdrawal. The Soviets, after boycotting the United Nations discussions, left the territory. America, a disinterested power, had suddenly awaken to her world responsibilities and come to the rescue.

The eight sections of the present essay are drawn from the lectures I delivered at Princeton University and at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969-1970. Because of the diverse nature of the audience I did not go into the details that would be necessary in a new approach to a traditional problem. Instead, my principal aim was to present a brief sketch of the contents of what may be called Persian mysticism, while showing at the same time the remarkable role that this variety of Islamic mysticism has played in the cultural development of Persia.

The origins of Sufism—as Islamic mysticism is generally called—presents a very controversial problem indeed, but that Persia was the cradle of early Sufism is beyond doubt. Moreover, if mysticism is taken to be—as it usually is—an expression of man's belief in direct connection with the godhead, the well-known ethical concepts of the Zoroastrians—for whom every particular deed of daily life, good or bad, is the joint product of man and either the principle of Good or of Evil—might also be considered as unconscious expressions of a pantheistic type of mysticism.

Seven years ago, a political report published by Echo of Iran raised the issue of the difficulty with which the Iranian political elite distinguishes between criticism and subversion. There is still only a hazy boundary separating treason from the lesser evil. Just one example of this level of debate was the suggestion by the “opposition” Mardom Party Newspaper that to attribute administrative misdemeanors to either ministers or to the Imperial Inspectorate was to commit treason.

One of the distressing effects of the failure to make this distinction in contemporary Iran is that a generation may appear which is loyal to the monarchy but which holds attitudes counter-productive to the espoused long-run political goals of the Shah. The attitudes to which I refer include the rejection of policy-oriented political activity and a flexible bargaining stance in the resolution of social problems. This writer met a number of young people in Iran who saw general disorder as the only alternative to the tight rein with which the Shah attempts to guide political activity.