How was Persian literature disciplinized in the twentieth century? This article addresses this question by focusing on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlining the sociohistorical processes that helped to transform scholarly and literary production into a social enterprise. A major outcome of these underexamined processes was the making of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949–79) in Kabul, the first modern encyclopedia produced in Persian. The article explains the multilayered significance of Āryānā's literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reified Persian literature as an object of academic study and national veneration in Afghanistan. A close reading of Āryānā's account of Persian literary history illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 1950s and its contributors’ adherence to a modern methodology. The present study places Āryānā squarely within a transregional ecosystem that brought about the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.

The essay explores the entangled relationship between modernization and women's visibility and representation through three pictorial spheres most redolent of that relationship: photo studio culture (1880s–1930s), satirical cartoons (1920–58), and costume exhibition (1972–76). The study prioritizes minoritarian politics formulated by women through their organizations and public activities, whether charitable in the late nineteenth century, educational in the early twentieth century, or “civilizational” from the mid-twentieth century on. By examining pictorial and textual sources, it proposes that the Armenian woman as a discursive phenomenon was central to Iran's mainstream modernization and foregrounds the complex working of a double marginality to the processes, strategies, and anxieties of late Qajar and Pahlavi modernization.

The Gharib Shah Rebellion erupted in Gilan in 1629, shortly after the death of Shah ʿAbbas I and the ascension of Shah Safi I to the throne. A close engagement with Gilani chronicles reveals the uprising was motivated by anti-Safavid sentiment and a desire to restore autonomous rule in Gilan. The Gharib Shah Rebellion is best understood in the context of the series of post-conquest rebellions in Gilan, which had both political and economic motivations. It marked the final attempt to regain autonomy from the Safavids, nearly forty years after their conquest of the region. While messianism was not completely absent in Gilan in this period, it was not a factor in this rebellion and its role, in general, has been over-emphasized.

This paper sheds light on Ismāʿīl al-Qasṛī, his scholarly and pietist networks, Sufi genealogy, and its later transmission. Other than his debated role in Najm al-Dīn Kubrā's initiation into Sufism, very little is known on this understudied yet significant Sufi from Khuzistan. The paper argues that Ismāʿīl al-Qasṛī and his western Iranian Sufi genealogy was the primary, rather than secondary, initiatory chain claimed by Kubrā, his associates, and the later heritage. Besides, al-Qasṛī's robe continued to be transmitted beyond Kubrā's Sufi chain, and received multiple names in the absence of a prominent, eponymous master to claim it. Also introducing the figures in al-Qasṛī's, and hence Kubrā's, spiritual genealogy, the paper discovers the overlooked yet decisive impact of Iranian masters, most notably the famous pietist of the Fars area, Abū Isḥāq al-Kāzarūnī, on Sufism in the later tradition.

In the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, sound recording technologies—including radio and cassettes—proliferated in Afghanistan and reached transnational lengths. While the state came to dominate these technologies, it could not prevent users from circumventing its censors with alternative perspectives and discourses. This article highlights the examples of Farīda ʿUsmān Anwarī, a noted radio announcer, producer, and journalist, and Aḥmad Ẓāhir, Afghanistan's most popular musical icon to date, to showcase the ways in which the Persianate literary canon served as the medium for sounding dissent amid the changing social and political dynamics of the time. Pushing the boundaries of recorded speech created an alternative space where dissent became possible and the strategic use of mass media paved the way for transnational sonic solidarities among a diverse community of listeners across the Persian-speaking world and beyond.

Zāl is the embodiment of the heroic culture which shapes and determines the conduct of the Shāhnāmeh heroes from Manūchihr through Rustam's death. For Zāl to attain that level of moral authority, the poem semiotically endows him with innate wisdom symbolized by his white hair at birth. By the end of the story, when he is still a relatively young man, he has gained the authority to change the ruling dynasty by choosing and crowning kings at will (e.g. his crowning of Zav and Kayqubād). Zāl's story is thus a tale of transformation that seamlessly fits into the overall narrative of the Shāhnāmeh. It helps the poem's narrative make the transition from the age of ancient kings in whom heroism, royal authority, and magical potency are combined, to the era of a different line of rulers who govern by royal authority alone. This process moves in two parallel lines: the transfer of the magical wisdom of the primordial kings to the person of a sage who functions as the embodiment of sagacity and prudence, and the transfer of their heroic aspect to a great warrior who serves as the country's “chief hero,” its jahān pahlawān. With the exception of Kaykhosraw, whose character has very strong supernatural and religious dimensions, every important legendary king after Manūchihr has a sage on whose advice he depends (e.g. Zav, Kayqubād and Kaykāvūs have Zāl, Gushtāsp has Jāmāsp, and Alexander has Aristotle). The king also has a warrior who holds the office of the jahān pahlawān (Kaykāvūs and Kaykhusraw have Rustam, Luhrāsp has Zarēr, and Gushtāsp has Isfandiyār).

The early 1920s witnessed an upsurge in Soviet interest in Islam on an international scale. This interest was to a large extent guided by Great Game logic, at a time when the idea of Islamic jihad against the British was extremely popular all over the Middle East. Contrary to the common assumption that the Marxist rationale of the Bolsheviks excluded any possibility of integrating religion into Soviet policy, the highest authorities in Moscow adopted a rather opportunistic position with regard to Islam both at home and abroad. Drawing mainly on Russian archival sources, this study questions the origins and nature of the Islamic turn in Soviet discourse, diplomacy, and propaganda in Iran. The article concludes that although the Soviet rapprochement with some members of the Iranian clergy and the integration of religious elements into communist propaganda were carried out for the sake of short-term geopolitical goals, these maneuvers were much conditioned by Soviet domestic policy and post–World War I regional interdependencies.

This article considers style in Persian literary history and its critical rhetorical and hermeneutical roles for poets and critics in the medieval and Safavid-Mughal eras. It explores how tarz (manner) emerged as a hermeneutical term in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and achieved a central position in sukhansanjī (evaluating speech) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This account of tarz—grounded in its historicity and multivalent implications—offers new insights into language for early modern Persian literary history, which is often periodized as sabk-i hindī (Indian style) or tāza-gūyī (fresh-speaking). Through a close reading of Safavid-Mughal tazkiras (literary compendiums), this contribution examines tarz as an operating concept deployed by a number of prominent tazkira writers. Finally, the article concludes by discussing this legacy's impact on twentieth-century scholarship.

The establishment of the colonial universities in India was a watershed moment for the history of Persian studies on the subcontinent. Despite the rise of English and vernacular literatures in the nineteenth century, Persian remained an essential language of instruction in colonial colleges, with generations of Indian students studying Persian to pass university examinations. By closely studying university calendars and courses, this article demonstrates that the colonial universities created and sustained an ecosystem for Persian studies throughout the colonial period, as Orientalists and increasingly Indian Persianists continued to invest in Persian instruction and curricular development. The breadth, diversity, refinement, and expansion of Persian college curricula—which included texts from the classical Persian canon and contemporary literature written by Iranians and Indians—testify to the continued fluidity and dynamism of Persian studies throughout the period. Such a phenomenon demonstrates that the debates and engagement around the Persian language in colonial India contradict its depiction as an obsolete or entirely classical language, and also that colonial college curricula influenced which texts were edited, compiled, printed, translated, and commented upon.

This paper aims to describe and explain the different morphosyntactic and semantic features of some double verb constructions in Persian, an Indo-European language mainly spoken in Iran. It is argued that these double verb constructions are not instances of serial verb construction, but instances of emerging aspectual verbs with varied degrees of grammaticalization. It is argued that numerous factors lead to grammaticalization of these verbs, including context, the semantic class of the verbs, and their frequency. A corpus-based analysis shows that these aspectual verbs have been grammaticalized in different ratios during the last one hundred years, demonstrating ongoing change in the Persian language.

This article examines how Zeyā al-Din Barani may have imagined that contemporary audiences would consume his Tārikh-e Firuz Shāhi. Would it only be read visually or also read aloud (directed at the ear rather than the eye), and thus be received aurally, or would it even be performed in front of a larger audience? The plot and protagonists of Barani's story on Moʿezz al-Din Keyqobād present a tragedy that develops around a sultan doomed to fail. An examination of the set-up of Barani's narrative reveals that it contains numerous textual devices that would enable a storyteller to perform the story, using the text as a kind of tumār. As tragedies are written for the stage, not the study, these features of the text indicate that matters of orality, which are crucial for many genres of premodern Persianate courtly literature, are also relevant to the Tārikh-e Firuz Shāhi.

Historical treatments of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of medieval Persian poetry typically identify their origin in the Sufi poetry of Bābā Tāher, Abu Saʿid, and Sanāʾi and portray them as a poetic instantiation of the intellectual and antinomian critiques of the formalistic modes of piety practiced in the increasingly powerful institutionalized Sufi orders. However, the qalandari panegyrics of the Saljuq court poets Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi—arguably the earliest datable examples of this poetry—analyzed in this article complicate this narrative. They utilize the heterotopic poetics of the qalandariyyāt not to subvert or critique, but rather to augment the sociopolitical authority of the ruler of Qazvin, constructing a new and distinctly Saljuq model of Islamic kingship, a Qalandar King.

Scholars have generally recognized the Ottoman poet Nefʿī (d. 1635) for his refinement of the panegyric in Turkish and his skill in its unflattering twin, the invective. They have thus paid little attention to the fact that he composed poems in Persian, and sufficient to compile a collection of them, simply viewing his output as a byproduct of his taste for the fresh style emanating from the East, particularly India, with no consideration of other factors at play. The article addresses this contextual gap by situating Nefʿī's engagement with the fresh style in relation to wider efforts at poetic renewal and also to literati disputes about the extent to which the fresh style and other currents from the East ought to be adopted and assimilated, in which differing formal and generic preferences, as well as linguistic and rhetorical concerns, were central. The article ultimately suggests that Nefʿī's overall work should be seen as part of those wider efforts that also aimed at making Ottoman practice distinctively fresh.

In 1989, the acclaimed Iranian novelist Moniru Ravanipur (b. 1954) sent ripples through her homeland with a book that spoke out about the plight of a remote village, fighting for survival in the face of the country's rapid modernization. Ahl-egharq, or The Drowned, tells the story of the author's birthplace, Jofreh, on the Persian Gulf; an isolated village where life is shaped by myth-telling, rituals, and a reliance on the sea. The 2019 publication of Ravanipur's novel in English translation gives occasion to critically reflect on its place in the canon of modern Persian fiction.

Drawing upon three decades of postrevolutionary textbooks, this article traces the development of the Arab Muslim as a recurring character in the early elementary curriculum of the Islamic Republic, set against the historical context of Iranian modernization and state formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sympathy for the Arab by the postrevolutionary state included a rebuke and an affirmation: Look at what has happened to the Arabs who were not able to defend their homes and their homeland, and look at what has not happened to us. Set against the Palestinian Arab figure are the accomplishments of American scientists and inventors who feature prominently in the postrevolutionary curriculum as sources of emulation for young readers. Star turns from Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Orville and Wilbur Wright invite a reconsideration of the role of the foreign Other in the construction of Iranian national identity, notably the expectation that the dispossessed constitute natural allies in Iran's ceaseless struggle against “the West.” Islamization of the primary school curriculum since 1979 has not come at the expense of Iranian national identity but as its expression, elucidating the ways postrevolutionary educational materials can serve as a repository for tracing the continuities and permutations in depicting the Arab or Western Other as well as different civilizational ethos of the Islamic and Persianate world across time.

Despite the impressive research of scholars on Middle Persian grammatical problems, there are still many words in surviving texts that are shrouded in ambiguity. One of these words, whose pronunciation in the inscriptions we owe to the Manichaean texts, is dastan. In this article, first the few available instances of this word in Middle Persian inscriptions and Manichaean texts are mentioned, and scholars’ interpretations of its meaning and grammatical category are discussed. Then it is revisited through the analysis of another word, tuwān, with which it is paired in the Manichaean instance. After a review of prior scholarly interpretations of this latter word, it is argued that in Middle Persian tuwān is a noun, and that it became a modal verb during the process of its application to the possessive structure. Finally, it is asserted that dastan also is a noun, due to its conjoinment with tuwān in the Manichaean example.

This article introduces Julius Heise’s Marche Triomphale which reveals a history that was eliminated during the nineteenth century race theory publications. Beginning with an account of Iranians’ encounters with European military music, this article provides a brief history of Iranian military bands in European style, or the bands of muzikānchiān. It then addresses racial motivations behind a short account on Iranian music in 1885 by Victor Advielle, a French administrator. Arthur de Gobineau’s race theories were fashionable in nineteenth century Europe, and Victor Advielle used his fellow Artesian, Alfred Lemaire, to prove their racial superiority. Through Advielle’s account, Lemaire became the main figure of European music in Iran in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The article proceeds with biographical information on two European musicians, Marco Brambilla (d.1867 in Tehran) and Julius Heise (d.1870 in Tehran), and uncovers the earliest known piece published for the bands of muzikānchiān: Marche Triomphale, À Sa Majesté Impériale Nassir-Ed-Din Shah Kadjar de Perse.

Mathematics is a particularly important challenge for embodied approaches to cognition, as it is probably the most abstract domain of human knowledge. Humans use metaphors in all aspects of life. This paper studies the effects of human body parts on numerals, numeral systems, and mensural and sortal classifiers. The evidence for this paper comes from the Tāti language group, an endangered Iranian language of the Indo-European language family. The Tāti data shows these languages make use of base-10, base-20, and base-50 numeral systems, some of which are among the most common and earliest counting systems worldwide, while the last is unique and peculiar to the area. Body parts may also play an important role in forming mensural and sortal classifiers, as is the case in the Tāti language group.

The criminal laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran are organized around the right of the victim. In cases of murder and other intentional injuries, the judiciary recognizes the victim's next of kin or the victim as a private plaintiff with the right to retribution (qisas). The injured party confronts the perpetrator in court and decides whether to demand retaliation or forgo it in lieu of a monetary compensation (diya). If they choose qisas, they are legally bound to witness the punishment. In cases of forbearance, the maximum sentence that the state can levy for murder is three to ten years. While the rates of capital punishment in Iran continue to be among the highest in the world, the majority of murder cases culminate in forgiveness. Why would an aggrieved party forgive when the law gives them the right to retribution?