The umayyads faced many challenges in consolidating their authority in the years after the first fitna (35–41 H. /656–61 C.E.). Among these were frequent revolts by Kharijites. While the Umayyads suppressed most of the revolts with little trouble until the second fitna (60–72/680–92), the ideological foundations of Kharijite resistance and the wide sympathy it enjoyed had serious consequences. It undermined the informal traditions upon which the caliphate was based. This was not simply a problem for the caliph in Damascus but more critically for governors exercising authority in distant provinces where caliphal influence proved weak and opposition movements propagated with relative ease.

While little is known of Kirman's history during this period, one of its governors, al-Hakam b. al-ᶜAs, addressed these challenges in the fifties/mid 670s by appealing to an inchoate absolutism. He promulgated legends on his coins linking himself and his government to God.

The Last Half of the Eighteenth Century and the First Half of the Nineteenth century saw Twelver Shiᶜi Islam, especially in Iran, undergoing a number of upheavals as a result of conflicts between different schools of thought. These upheavals were primarily ideological but they also led to conflict, fighting and even deaths. This period began in the political turmoil following the collapse of the Safavid Empire. The Akhbari school of Twelver Shiᶜism had been in the ascendant during the latter half of the Safavid era, but the period following the overthrow of the Safavids saw the defeat of the Akhbari school and the triumph of the Usuli school at the hands of Aqa Muhammad Baqir Bihbihani, known as Vahid Bihbihani (d. ca. 1207/1792) in the shrine cities of Iraq, the main centre of Twelver scholarship. The Usuli school enabled the ulama to give legal opinions (fatwās) and hence intervene in social areas from which the more restrained Akhbari school would refrain.

What have been the Historical Relationships Between the Islamic and Hindu religious traditions? Variations on this question inevitably come to mind in any attempt to assess the significance of the past dozen centuries of South Asian civilization, during which time significant Muslim populations have played important roles, interacting with Indian religions and cultures from a variety of perspectives. Although frequently this kind of question is posed in terms of assumptions about the immutable essences of Islam and Hinduism, I would like to argue that this kind of approach is fundamentally misleading, for several reasons. First, this approach is ahistorical in regarding religions as unchanging, and it fails to account for the varied and complex encounters, relationships, and interpretations that took place between many individual Muslims and Hindus. Second, it assumes that there is a single clear concept of what a Hindu is, although this notion is increasingly coming into question; considerable evidence has accumulated to indicate that external concepts of religion, first from post-Mongol Islamicate culture, and eventually from European Christianity in the colonial period, were brought to bear on a multitude of Indian religious traditions to create a single concept of Hinduism.

Jean-Pierre Digard's recent delightful and informative article on the Persian long-haired cat has stimulated me to write this short note to complement his contribution to the feline discussion. Digard and others before him have thrown doubt on the denomination “Persian” of the long-haired cat. Many reasons, all of them quite reasonable, have been adduced to make this point. I would like to offer some additional information, which is not available in Digard's article and will further muddle this issue. Apart from discussing the background of Persian cats—broadly along the lines of Digard's exposé—I will show that long-haired cats, although they may also have been from Kurdistan or Bukhara, were an article of export from Isfahan and other towns in Iran throughout the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Also, the data adduced show that the Persian cat was different from the Angora cat.

Studies of Iranian Political History often Assume that the Repercussions of physical or mental illness on leadership are inconsequential in determining the course of history. Globally, very few scholars have attempted to systematically examine the effects of illness on leaders and Iranian historians seem to evade this topic entirely. One reason may be a reluctance to grapple with medical issues that they might feel exceed their expertise. Another explanation, one frequently offered by medical historians, is the lack of reported clinical information on patients due to rules of medical confidentiality to which their physicians were bound. While aversion to grappling with medical terminology is understandable, the unwillingness of historians of Iran to explore the illnesses of their subjects might also stem from cultural sensibilities with respect to medical privacy and traditional notions of a leader's stoicism in the face of disease.

This issue of Iranian Studies is Devoted to the Late Medieval Persian Preacher and polymath, Kamal al-Din Husayn b. ᶜAli Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi, and it coincides roughly with the quincentenary of his death in 910/1504–05. It is based on a panel of papers delivered at the Fourth Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies, which was held in Bethesda, Maryland, May 24–26, 2002, under the sponsorship of the Society for Iranian Studies, and co-sponsorship of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies. It brings together papers on a number of Husayn Kashifi's works with the aim of demonstrating the breadth of his oeuvre, and in particular his contribution to the codification, primarily in Persian, of knowledge in fields covering the entire spectrum of learning in medieval Iran at the turn of the sixteenth century. As such, the volume seeks to “rehabilitate” Kashifi, who has usually been regarded merely as a compiler or popularizer, and to present him as a figure who was instrumental in the preservation and transmission of the state of the art of knowledge in a wide variety of fields in late medieval Iran.

The Modern Jewish Community in Afghanistan was Shaped by the Exigencies of long-distance trade. Jewish merchants along with their Hindu and Muslim counterparts provided goods to remote regions and tribes. Often these traders would be the only ones allowed into disputed areas, as they were considered neutral. Jewish merchants in particular also acted as intermediaries to help nomadic groups settle conflicts peaceably. In order to fill this economic role, unusual domestic arrangements developed. Men would depart alone for long periods of time from Herat, the center of the Jewish community in Afghanistan, as the journey was generally too risky for an entire family to undertake. After traveling the long caravan routes, they would live in Jewish caravanserais for much of the year, generally returning for the holidays of the month of Tishri and for Passover.

In his Provocative Work The Continent of Circe, The Anglicized Bengali Writer Nirad Chaudhuri recasts the legend of Circe and Odysseus as a metaphor for India's relation to her “European” conquerors. In his version Aryan tribes who migrated into and/or invaded the Indian subcontinent in the second century B.C. were the first such conquerors to be ensnared by the allure of India's wealth. Once there they utterly forgot their Eurasian homelands, abandoned their vigorous steppe culture and degenerated into the colonized Hindus of whom Chaudhuri spoke with caustic contempt during the Indian nationalist movement in the twentieth century:

The last two decades have seen the construction of an Iranian “national cuisine” in cookbooks published outside Iran, while the post-revolutionary migration of Iranians from their country has led to the opening of Iranian (also called “Persian,” especially in the United States) restaurants all over the world. The menus of these restaurants evince a certain uniformity. Main dishes fall into three categories: chilawkabāb (white rice with grilled meat, widely considered the “national” dish); stews (khūrish[t]s) with white rice (chilaw); and colorful rice concoctions incorporating meat, legumes, vegetables, and occasionally fruits (pulaws). The total comes to a maximum of about twenty dishes, which one could be forgiven for taking to be the corpus of traditional Iranian cuisine. The similarity of restaurant menus everywhere suggests a basic culinary cohesion, while “tradition” implies that Iranians’ eating habits have undergone minimal change over a long period of time. Both propositions need to be qualified.

Hundreds of Manuscript Copies of the Qur’anic Commentary of Husayn B. ᶜAli Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi (d. 910/1504–05), known as the Mavāhib-i ᶜaliyya or Tafsīr-i Husaynī, have been catalogued in libraries and personal collections throughout Iran, Central Asia, Pakistan and India. The enormous popularity of Kashifi's commentary, which was known simply as Tafsīr-i Mullā, can be understood primarily by its unique accessibility and literary quality. Although Kashifi himself was well-versed in the many different sciences of commentary, the Mavāhib rarely addresses the kind of linguistic, philological, legal and theological issues that would require an extensive background in Arabic and Islamic religious scholarship. Instead, Kashifi combined an explanatory translation of Qur’anic verses in simple, concise Persian with highly selective citations from other works of tafsīr and Sufi poetry and prose, to create a remarkably short work for a commentary addressing the entire Qur’an.

It is Generally Agreed that the Beginning of the Persian Literary Renaissance of the tenth–eleventh centuries was concomitant with the emergence of a bureaucratic tradition that had its roots in pre-Islamic Sasanian Iran. The avatars of these bureaucratic principles in medieval Perso-Islamic history—Nizam al-Mulk, Rashid al-Din, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, to name the most famous—were trained in Arabic and Persian, wrote scholarly treatises on a wide array of religious, philosophical, and scientific topics, and advocated, among other things, the need for responsible rule and consistent administration according to Islamic law and custom. These admonitions were generally directed at their Turkic and Mongol dynastic patrons whose steppe traditions were often at cross-purposes with the running of a sedentary society that depended on irrigated agriculture, commerce, public works, and systems of taxation. Prominent Persian bureaucrats and their descendents undertook these duties and were able to accrue considerable power and wealth, but often at a high cost when we read of the fates of Rashid al-Din, Saᶜd al-Dawla and Juvayni.

Cultural diffusion of a partially non-literate kind is intrinsically hard to demonstrate and document. The poles between which cultural currents flow across geographical space are not the simple loci of “high” and “low” cultures or of superordinate and subordinate civilizations. Aspects of elite culture trickle down, features of vernacular culture bubble up, to confound and subvert the orderly progression of literary and religious history beloved of conventional scholarship. And, of course, the key occasions of transfer are usually absent from the record.

One such current that is, however, sufficiently documented in general and specific terms to be accepted nem. con. as truly remarkable in volume, longevity and global efficacy is the overwhelmingly one-way traffic of seminal commodities, artifacts and ideas that flowed westward from the South Asian subcontinent between at least 300 B.C.E. and 1400 C.E. Along this stream, from the Punjab via the Iranian plateau and adjacent waterways to Mesopotamia, Syria, the Mediterranean and western Europe, were borne the Gypsies, the game of chess, the mathematical concept of zero and the notation with which to use it, the literary device of the Frame Story, and a flood of stories to stock it.

Though Cambay is Now a Provincial Backwater, for Over Five Centuries—between the late tenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries A.D.—it was the main port of western India, home to a cosmopolitan population of merchants and traders from all over India and the Islamic world, and a major center of architectural and artistic patronage. Cambay is probably best known among Islamic art historians for its monumental fourteenth-century Friday mosque, the adjacent Kazaruni tomb complex (d.734/1333), and the large body of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Islamic inscriptions and tombstones that survives there. However, the port conceals many Islamic remains that have not been published.

Iran is the most Important Regional Player in the Persian Gulf. It has the region's strongest military. No other navy in the region matches Iran’s. Its GNP is larger than that of most other littoral states and its industrial base more sophisticated. It is also by far the most populous state in the Gulf. Geographically, Iran borders the entire northern shores of the Persian Gulf. Iranian territory also forms the northern side of the Strait of Hormuz. This and multiple islands in the vicinity of the strait give Iran the ability to control this strategic choke point. Consequently, Iranian views on security in the Persian Gulf are worthy of special attention.

This paper explores these views in an attempt to answer such questions as: What are Iranian perspectives on Gulf security? What are the factors that have shaped these perspectives? How have these perspectives influenced policy and how have they evolved over time?

Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi, The Persian Prose-Writer Par Excellence of the ninth/fifteenth century, did not compose his treatise Badāyiᶜ al-afkār fī ṣanāyiᶜ al-ashᶜār [Wondrous Thoughts on Poetical Tropes] to compensate for the lapses of his predecessors, or to make a groundbreaking contribution to the Persian literary sciences. His stated purpose, at least, was rather prosaic. Badāyiᶜ al-afkār was Kashifi's calling card to the new Timurid ruler Sultan-Husayn Bayqara (r. 873/1469–911/1506), which—so he hoped—would secure his place among the literary experts at the Timurid court. That much we know from the author's introduction to the treatise. At the time of Sultan-Husayn Bayqara's ascension to the throne, Herat was at the peak of its glory.

Hushang Golshiri's Āyinah-hĀ-yi DardĀr is not an easy read. Its possibilities do not present themselves without effort, and, on first reading the novel does not generate a very positive reaction. In fact, for reasons that will be discussed later, the first reading brings up seemingly negative points about this work. It is essential to underline these seemingly negative points because when one takes into account the technical structure of the novel, those same negative points change into the elements which give Āyinah-hĀ-yi DardĀr its strength. To provide a context for the description of these elements, we should begin with a short summary of the story.

Āyinah-hā-yi Dardār is a quasi-travelogue. Ebrahim, the narrator, is a writer who rehearses the elements of his travelogue chiefly through writing about the process of writing the travelogue. He talks about his trip to a few European countries and retells parts of stories he has read to different Iranian communities residing abroad.