Considerable progress has been made in recent years in studying the economic history of Persia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, scholars have continued to feel the paucity of adequate source materials for such studies. The papers of Amin al-Zarb, a leading member of one of the great merchant families of the nineteenth century, came to light in the 1960s, suggesting that family papers of the merchant houses, if they could be traced, could offer an enormously valuable window onto economic activities and developments in Persia during this period. Few such family collections have turned up, however. The papers of Hajj Rahim Ettehadieh, a member of a merchant family whose activities in Azerbaijan and Tehran can be traced back at least to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, are not as rich as the Amin al-Zarb papers. Nonetheless, if carefully utilized, they have the potential of offering some intriguing glimpses into the activities and attitudes of the merchant community.

The Arab conquest of the Sasanian empire (633-651 A.D.) provided the Iranian peoples with their first extensive contact with Islam. Prior to this, encounters between Zoroastrians and Muslims had generally been restricted to the lower reaches of the Mesopotamian plain. More importantly, this conquest installed Islam as the religion of the new rulers, replacing Zoroastrianism, referred to as the good religion (Phl. weh dēn) by its followers, which had enjoyed royal favor under the Sasanians. The conquest of the Sasanian empire resulted in large numbers of Arabs entering and eventually settling on Iranian territory. The presence of these Arabs on the Mesopotamian plain and Iranian plateau, and their eventual settlement there, naturally resulted in coexistence and social interaction between Muslims and the native Zoroastrians. This interaction would initially have been slow, as the Arab troops were confined to military garrisons (Ar. Amşār).

There is, in France, a pronounced awareness of an “Iranian world” that can be identified in terms of cultural, linguistic, ethnic (Aryan peoples) or geographic (highlands, cold winters) characteristics common to the civilizations of all Iranian-speaking peoples living in Afghanistan, Iran, Kurdistan or south central USSR, in particular, Tajikistan. This “world” stands in contrast to the Arab, Indian and Turkish ones. The notion of a Middle East extending from Casablanca to Kabul does not exist in French. Newspapers usually refer to the Moslem lands to the south and east of the Mediterranean as the “Arab world,” as if Turkish- and Persian-speaking peoples were peripheral minorities therein.

Owing to its colonial and military heritage, France has long given special importance to the Maghrib (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria), the Near East (Lebanon and Syria, in particular) and, as a result of the Napoleonic campaigns and Champollion's expeditions, Egypt.

In contrast to the situation in most countries, in German-speaking countries the study of Iran is not concentrated in one academic discipline. As a result, the attempt to “reconstruct” the history of Iranian Studies inevitably involves various disciplines. The individual results of these together form the kaleidoscopic spectrum of studies on Iranian themes in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The only academic discipline in the German language area that includes the name “Iran” is the one called “Iranistics” (German “Iranistik”).

In the 18th century, rather remarkably, Iran formed a navy. Up to that time the shahs of Iran had relied on other powers to maintain security in the Persian Gulf. The dominant naval power in the gulf during the 16th century was Portugal, while the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the English, were supreme during the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries. Because Iran's southern borders were safe and secure after the conquest of Hormoz in 1622, it did not need a navy. Hence, Iran relied for a time on the Dutch and the English to maintain security in the gulf.

English naval assistance in the conquest of Hormoz set the pattern for the next century. This reliance on other powers for maintenance of security in the gulf proved to be a workable policy as long as there was no real threat to Iran's coastal borders in the south.

Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, Mokhber al-Saltaneh, was born in 1863 into an aristocratic family in Tehran. He was the son of Ali Qoli Khan, Mokhber al-Dowleh, the pioneer in Iranian telegraphy, and the grandson of Reza Qoli Khan Hedayat, the famous historian and teacher of the Qajar period.

Mehdi Qoli went to school at age seven. At fourteen he was sent, in the company of his brother, Morteza Qoli (Sane ‘ al-Dowleh), to study in Germany. His stay lasted a little more than two months. He had intended to study medicine but returned home with his brother when their sister died. Feeling nostalgic for home, he did not heed his father's advice to stay and study. Later, reflecting on this decision, he said, "Alas, that if I had studied medicine I would be a free man and, now, I am bound, bound to a people...." Thus, Mehdi Qoli's education in Europe was limited to learning the German language and sightseeing in Germany and Switzerland.

The origins of Iranian studies in Italy go back to the second half of the sixteenth century, when there developed a scholarly approach based on a recognition of Persian linguistic and literary evidence. The modern course of scholarly understanding was preceded, and prepared, by a process of political observation and geographical discovery of Iran, which began exactly a century before, with the accession of Uzun Hasan Aqqoyunlu (1457-1478).

Iran had then emerged as an autonomous power which on its western frontier contested the power of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet Fatih, the conqueror of Constantinople (renamed Istanbul) in 1453, was the great rival both of Iran and of Venice for the control of traffic and commerce between Asia and the Mediterranean. Hence the Papal State, interested in the salvation of souls, and the Republic of Venice, the hegemonical maritime power of the Mediterranean's eastern basin, established close diplomatic relations and pacts of alliance first with Uzun Hasan and then with the Safavids.

One of the most striking characteristics Iranian studies in Japan is government initiative. The government has long taken the initiative in establishing institutions and programs for such study. Particularly in the 1930s, the motivation for studying Iran was partly political and strategic. Since the late 1960s, however, there has been a more economic orientation. Another characteristic is that Iranian studies have developed within the framework of scholarship on the Middle East in general. For this reason, the general trend of Middle Eastern studies, as well as that of Iranian studies, will be discussed. It is logical to divide this trend into three eras: 1) the 1930s until the end of World War II, 2) the 1950s through the 1960s, and 3) the 1970s to the present.

Up to the end of the Middle Ages, the opportunities to acquire information about the world of Islam were very few in the Low Countries. Moreover, the little knowledge which could be derived from books, from the participation in a crusade, or from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, did not reach much futher than the coasts of the Mediterranean. The Iranian hinterland of the countries inhabited by Saracens and Turks remained beyond the horizon of the Dutch, intellectually as well as in terms of actual experience

Direct contacts with Iran developed only in the early 17th century when, shortly after the establishment of an independent republic of the Netherlands, the “United Provinces,” Dutch trade began to expand to the four corners of the world. The first journey of a Dutch fleet to the East Indies and back was completed in 1597.

As a result of its union with Lithuania at the end of the fourteenth century, Poland, for about 400 years, came into the immediate neighborhood of Muslim states the Golden Horde, the Khanate of Crimea and, last but not least, Ottoman Turkey. Poland's relations with her Eastern and Southeastern neighbors, though often hostile, were not limited to wars; diplomatic and economic contacts were maintained, and Eastern provinces of the country became a territory of symbiosis and mutual cultural influence. Oriental minorities living within the borders of the Polish state--Armenians, Tatars, Karaites--assumed the role of mediators between the Christian and Muslim realms. Thus, Poland's contact with the Islamic world was relatively close in this period. Both practical and theoretical Oriental interests in Poland were focused on the Ottoman Empire, as was natural for both Poland and other European countries in this epoch of Ottoman domination of the entire Near East.

Soviet scholarship on Iran is extensive and highly organized. Just in the year 1980, 119 articles and books pertaining to Iran were published in the Soviet Union. The publications dealt with such topics as history, literature, economics, and geology (and do not include journalistic coverage of current events). The scale of Soviet scholarship on Iran since World War II is so vast that it would be hopelessly cumbersome to try to review or even list all the books and articles. This essay will attempt to provide an overview of the history of Iranian scholarship in the Soviet Union and Imperial Russia, to describe how the study of Islamic Iran in the Soviet Union is organized and oriented, and to look at a few of the most interesting works of recent years.