The episode under discussion in this article comes from the Middle Persian text Kārnāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān. It does not appear in any published edition of the Shāhnāmeh, nor does it seem to be recorded in any manuscript consulted for these editions. The episode is versified and illustrated in a nineteenth-century manuscript preserved in the Government Museum in Alwar, India. If it is an early interpolation, why is it not found in major Shāhnāmeh manuscripts? And if it is a late interpolation, how did it find its way into an Indian manuscript at such a late date? The article proposes a provenance for the manuscript and draws attention to the possible role of the Zoroastrian community in India in the transmission of Ferdowsi's opus.

This research is a comparative study of the typological parameters of contemporary spoken Persian language and Saravi, a main dialect of the Mazandarani language, using some Greenbergian universals as its theoretical framework in word order correlations. The study aims to determine the common parameters and the variations of specific syntactic constituents among the systems studied here. On this basis it investigates the unmarked word order in declarations, as well as preparing a systematic comparison of phrasal genitive and adjective structures in the systems under investigation, along with examining their self and possessive pronominal orders. Together with revealing the use of differential orderings within the systems in these respects throughout the paper, the findings uphold Greenberg's language universals as a useful tool in classifying language types as well as specifying the variations of the syntactic constituents.

This paper is a report on the Soviet cultural legacy in Tajikistan. It takes an in-depth look at the institutions that were created to manage artistic and cultural activities, budgeting, training and promotion under the Soviets. The paper suggests that, except for art and culture related to religion, other genres were enhanced, albeit with an emphasis on ideology. However, independence in 1992, along with the civil war that erupted immediately afterwards, had a devastating effect on art and culture in Tajikistan and on the lives of the artistic community. The paper is part of a comprehensive study of post-Soviet art and culture in Central Asia in the critical years immediately after the Soviet collapse. For this study, over one hundred interviews were conducted with officials, musicians, dancers, writers and singers, as well as visits to centers of art and culture in those republics.

In 1953, the United States assisted in a coup that removed Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq from office. Analysis of radio broadcasts during and after the coup provides a window for scrutinizing the event and understanding the motivations of all sides. The United States monitoring agency, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), snatched these ephemeral broadcasts from the ether for posterity. This study expands the coup narrative based on these broadcasts. An analysis of the transcripts suggests that assertions that the Central Intelligence Agency's covert propaganda program resulted in the coup's success are an oversimplification. On the contrary, the effect of both Mosaddeq's and the Tudeh party's actions unwittingly legitimized the coup-plotters' propaganda in the weeks prior to the coup and contributed more to the success of the coup.

This article presents a detailed criticism of Darioush Bayandor's book Iran and the CIA. Bayandor argues that certain Shi'a clerics, rather than the US Central Intelligence Agency, were the main actors responsible for overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953. Bayandor presents no major new evidence to support this claim. He gives too much weight to certain statements, draws unwarranted inferences from others, and discounts or disregards a wealth of evidence that conflicts with his account. He overemphasizes the role of civilian crowds in the overthrow of Mosaddeq and underemphasizes the role of Iranian military units organized by the CIA. And he fails to acknowledge the importance of US and especially British efforts to foment opposition to Mosaddeq before the coup.

This article argues that the Avestan text Yasna Haptaŋhāiti (“Yasna of the seven chapters”) was not originally divided into seven chapters. It was divided into three parts that were not considered hāitis (chapters) in the same way as the gathic hāitis. The division of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti into seven parts and its corresponding title is based on the arrangement of the Old Avestan texts. These texts try to reproduce the structure of the prayer Ahuna Vairiia; three verses with two hemistichs each correspond to three pairs of compositions with 7, 4 four and 1 hāiti each of the Old Avestan texts.

This paper examines the relationship between remediation and intertextuality in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008), arguing that the act of absorbing and transforming other texts and media within one film creates new conditions for collective vision within the post-revolutionary Iranian discourse of visuality. Focusing on the faces of 114 actresses as they watch a film adaptation of the story of “Khosrow and Shirin,” Kiarostami challenges the post-revolutionary modesty laws and their emphasis on not looking at women and at avoiding a spectator–image relationship based on the fulfillment of the desiring male gaze. By making women the spectators, the film suggests that there is no collective vision without women's vision.

This paper seeks to understand the political economy implications of nicotine addiction in Iran, focusing on the US Office of Foreign Asset Control's granting of Iran operations licenses to American tobacco companies. Presuming that tobacco taxes, levied both as import duties and ad valorem, would financially benefit the Iranian government, the introduction of a highly desired US product to the market would be antithetical to the sanctions regime currently in place. By comparing Iran's tobacco industry, and the attendant public health crisis that has arisen from high rates of nicotine addiction, to conditions in Turkey, it can be demonstrated that Iran is uniquely unable to extract revenues from the sale of tobacco products. The primary point of comparison between Iran and Turkey is smoking-attributable annual productivity losses of each country, as estimated through the use of Smoking-Attributable Mortality, Morbidity and Economic Costs Software (SAMMEC) and the available related literature. According to the calculations derived from the SAMMEC model, Iran is burdened with an astonishing economic cost due to the high prevalence of smokers. It is concluded that an awareness of this condition enables OFAC to award licenses to Big Tobacco without fear of undermining current foreign policy initiatives.

Isabella Bird Bishop's Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan is presented as an objective picture of Persia, purportedly reflecting eye-witness accounts. Setting the narrative in its historical context and employing the concept of exoticism, this paper aims to unearth its subtle imperialist underpinnings. It argues that Bird's portrayal of Persian women and their mores and manners as exotic is an effect of a mode of representation which depicts and constructs difference based on a British-oriented system of evaluation, in line with its imperialist interest in Persia. As such, the exotic representation of Persian women in need of British benign tutelage and a chivalric mission could be interpreted as lending implicit support to Britain's colonial intervention in and imposition on Persia.

In the first decade of the fourteenth century, Rashiīd al-Dīn Fazl Allāh penned a remarkable endowment deed in which he meticulously detailed his plans for the creation of a utopian community. He named it the Rab‘-i Rashīdī. In this document, he provides socio-economic data concerning the day-to-day operations of this settlement unparalleled in comparable texts. This article focuses on the hospital ward of the Rab‘-i Rashīdī, and provides a broader historical context for this medieval hospital and its personnel by examining the financial and monetary information in the endowment deed in order to piece together the inner workings of this community. In so doing, we are granted a rare opportunity to explore the daily lives of ordinary people whose endeavors, however significant, often went unnoticed.

Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world is noted.

Analysis of British policy towards Iran during the shah's final years has tended to be the preserve of those who formulated it. In general, it has focused on the extent to which British policymakers predicted the events of the Iranian revolution (published accounts by British policymakers include: Anthony Parsons, The Pride and The Fall: Iran 1974–1979 (1984); David Owen, Time to Declare (1991); Ivor Lucas, A Road To Damascus: Mainly Diplomatic Memoirs from the Middle East (1997), and “Revisiting the Decline and Fall of the Shah of Iran” (2009)). This article is different in both its sources and scope. Unlike any other published study on Anglo-Iranian relations, it relies on government records recently released in the National Archives. Instead of focusing on the British response to the Iranian revolution, it seeks to account for the strength of the shah's leverage and illustrate its consequences during one of the most important periods in Iran's history.

This article discusses the use of food as a mode of differentiation and identification according to Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Persian texts of the late antique period. In these texts, the list of foods consumed by Arabs and Indians are juxtaposed with that of the Iranian diet, and each group is given anthropological treatment. The article contends that the Zoroastrian dietary law, based on the Middle Persian texts, provides a mode of purity and impurity vis-à-vis others. Finally, the article touches upon the idea of moderation and the consumption of wine as dealt with in some Middle Persian sources.

This paper critically analyzes the Sharafnama, a history of the Kurds, written by the late sixteenth century ruler of Bitlis, Şeref Xan. Given the politically sensitive nature of the Middle East's “Kurdish Question,” the Sharafnama has become an extremely important resource through which Kurdish nationalists have sought to construct a coherent “national narrative.” This is due to the fact that Şeref Xan's book constitutes one of the few systematic histories of the Kurds written before the twentieth century. This paper moves away from nationalist inspired interpretations of the Sharafnama, which see the work as a “national(ist)” history. Instead, it posits that, although the piece can be regarded as a manifestation of Kurdish “ethno-politics,” it is necessary to look at it within the context of the relationship between the Kurdish tribal princes who ruled large areas of “Kurdistan,” on one hand, and the Ottoman and Safavid empires who competed for control of this region, on the other. In particular, it brings to the fore an often forgotten and/or ignored aspect of Şeref Xan's history, namely its pro-Ottoman bias. In this way, the article makes broader points relating to the nature of the Kurdish identity in the early modern period, and the influence of such conceptions on the later construction of the modern Kurdish identity.

Over the decades that followed the overthrow of Mosaddeq in August 1953 a narrative attributing the fall exclusively to foreign conspiracy has taken hold and become institutionalized. In this narrative the internal factors are reduced to the simplest level of abstraction. They do not exist outside foreign conspiracy! This narrative is premised on an Anglo-American coup plot code-named TP-AJAX that was attempted in the late hours of 15 August but failed. The ensuing flight of the Shah generated dynamics which led to the fall of Mosaddeq four days later. The CIA chief operative in Tehran Kermit Roosevelt was quick to take credit claiming that these dynamics were inseminated by his ingenious and spontaneous planning. For abiding internal reasons both the CIA and the MI6 headquarters preferred to claim victory rather than admit failure. Evidence that emerged following the declassification of the State Department papers in 1989 and the leak of a secret CIA internal history in 2000 produced glaring evidence that the fall of Mosaddeq on 19 August 1953 had taken Washington, even its embassy in Tehran, by complete surprise and that post facto claims by Roosevelt were inconsistent both with Washington's explicit policy directives and Roosevelt's own situation reports filed with the CIA Washington during the interval between the two events. Roosevelt later published a phantasmagorical account of the event which, together with reminiscences of a few unnamed former operatives, was given credence by Professor Gasiorowski and associates, who curiously chose to ignore archival evidence.

This paper looks at a group of photographs entitled Qajar Series (1998) by artist Shadi Ghadirian. Ghadirian recreates sets to look like those used in photographic portraits taken during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of the Qajar dynasty period and dresses her female sitters in costumes reminiscent of clothes from the era. The artist also integrates contemporary objects that do not fit within the historical setting created for the camera. This essay examines how the artist uses performance to stage this anachronism and think critically about temporal discourses and their links to the categories of modernity and tradition.

The overthrow of the government of Mosaddeq has received considerable attention, scholarly and otherwise. The scholarly explanations differ in emphasis, but not in the general contours, particularly regarding the significant role of the Anglo-American secret services. There have also long been attempts to portray the overthrow of Mosaddeq as an isolated event taking place on 19 August 1953 and representing a conflation of royalist and traditionalist sentiments among soldiers and civilians. More recently it has been contended that it was not the Anglo-American secret services but the clerical nexus—prompted by Ayatollah Borujerdi, the highest religious authority in the country—which played the crucial role. This paper argues against reducing the overthrow of Mosaddeq's government to the events of 19 August, and views it as a protracted process. It further argues that assertions regarding the crucial and active role of Borujerdi are, on the basis of available evidence, untenable.

In this article it is maintained that the extant Zand ī Wahman Yasn is a work which was composed to be recited orally. In it mythological and historical material familiar to both storyteller and audience is woven into an integral text whose purpose is to interpret contemporary events. An analysis of each chapter shows how various rhetorical devices belonging to every level of language are used to underscore the contents and give cohesion to the text. These devices include alliteration and assonance, grammatical parallelism, and clusters of synonyms. Different types of dialogues and monologues are discussed and comparisons are made with other extant texts with apocalyptic themes.