This is a comparative study of anger and narrative control in two tragic stories cast in an epic-heroic register, the “Tale of Rostam and Sohrab” of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and “The Knight's Tale” of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The narrators of both stories are heavily invested in upholding a certain normative interpretation of the events they recount, a fatalistic worldview that justifies itself through the necessarily agnostic optimism that these senseless catastrophes gain meaning when situated within a greater order that is beyond the capacity of man to comprehend. The emotional responses of outrage and grief therefore have no legitimate place in this worldview, and must be submitted to a process of rationalization and violent suppression in order to be kept in check. However, this same process also reveals the underlying aporias of its own normative logic, producing a subtextual counter-narrative that resists and undermines the dominant voice of the text. The resulting fragmentation and narrative collapse provides a fruitful opportunity to investigate how both texts respond to a crucial ontological topic in medieval literature and philosophy: what does it mean to be an autonomous subject within a divinely ordered universe, and how can one distinguish justice from tyranny in a world entirely governed by fate?

Anyone familiar with Iranian history would not have been surprised by the uneasy coalition of religious leaders, secular intellectuals, and bazaar merchants that spearheaded the antishah movement in Iran. Once each generation in this century such a coalition has attempted to gain political control of the nation. Each time, including this one, their efforts have met the determined resistance of one or more external powers. There appears to be a cruel geopolitical determinism at work. Iran, standing at the meeting point of competing imperial interests, is not allowed for long the luxury of chaotic development. Internal chaos threatens the delicate balance of external competitors—each fearing the other will take undue advantage of the situation. And since the kind of regime the coalition claims to seek, liberal and democratic, is certain to be at least initially unstable, it has been consistently the negative target of the external competitors.

The document presented in this article is a quasi-ethnographic account of the religious customs of the Magh (i.e. Arakanese), which was most probably collected on the basis of firsthand observations made in the region of Chittagong, in southeastern Bengal, sometime in the 1780s, or early 1790s. The commissioner of the document is John Murray-MacGregor (1745–1822), a Scottish officer of the British East India Company, who remained in Bengal for about three decades and brought back with him one of the largest private collections of Persian manuscripts, as well as some bilingual Sanskrit–Persian texts, and twenty-two bundles of Pali and Arakanese manuscripts collected in eastern Bengal.

The article aims to refute a long-standing thesis first put forth by Vladimir Minorsky about how the various copies of the dīvān of Shah Ismāʿīl might reflect shifts and changes in the religious and political landscape of early modern Iran. Contrary to the luminary Russian Orientalist’s claims, it demonstrates and contextualizes the observation that there were several textual traditions and that most of the copies continued to reflect messianism and “extremist” notions of religiosity well into late Ṣafavid times, appealing to a broad audience which was likely made up of Sufi adepts and nomadic Qizilbash, as well as a more refined echelon of courtly connoisseurs, residing in the borderland between the Ottoman lands and Iran. At the same time, it suggests that the main theme of Shah Ismāʿīl’s messianic poetry was sainthood and that in this sense Ṣafavid messianism was not a unique aberration but comparable and connected to such similar ideologies as are known from the Timurid, Ottoman or Mughal context.

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.

From the beginning of her career, Simin Behbahani stresses her intention to reflect contemporary concerns in her poetry. She has continued to use the traditional form of ghazal and to affirm the ghazal's capacity to reflect the contemporary environment. Behbahani tells us how she changed the structure of the ghazal to suit her poetic needs. This paper focuses on the poetic conversation as a feature of Behbahani's poetic style which leads her poetry firmly into present time. Early female poets in Iran made use of poetic conversation to bring attention to a changing social system and, especially, issues of concern to women. Behbahani refines and perfects the technique of poetic conversation. Her poetic conversations range from a single-voiced complaint to complex commentary involving more than one perspective. In particular, a character identified only as “you” at times represents society or a companion, and may even bring the poet face-to-face with herself. This character widens the scope of the poetic drama. Behbahani's poetic conversations convey a femininity that is complex and a sensibility that is modern.

In an article entitled “The Study of History in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” Professor A. Amanat analyzes the state of historical research and wonders whether the new interest in history will endure or whether it is a passing fad, a lingering after-effect of the 1979 revolution. He points out that “the frontiers of serious scholarship do not seem to have reached the domain of analysis. Neither the methodology, nor the scholarly attitude seem to be ready for the task.” In the eighteenth year of the Islamic revolution, it is perhaps worth taking another look at the state of historical research in Iran with an eye to detecting any changes in the observed trends pointed out by Amanat.

In the late-Pahlavi era, the study of history as an academic discipline was the least popular among the topics at the national universities. It was consistently the last choice for the entering class.

The Kurdish novel emerged in 1935 and, towards the end of the twentieth century, established itself as a literary genre with a significant quantity and quality. However, until the last decade of the previous century the Kurdish novel was entirely dominated by Kurdish men and there is no single novel written by a Kurdish woman. During recent years, however, Kurdish women novelists have contributed to the development of this genre. This article aims to assess Kurdish women's novel-writing and, through analyzing and discussing their style and themes, tries to find out their main characteristic generic features. An attempt is made to see if there are thematic and stylistic differences between Kurdish novels written by the women and their male counterparts.

Despite the great number of studies conducted by Western scholars exploring kinship terminologies in different languages, there seems to have been little attempt at dealing with kin words in Iranian languages like Kurdish. More specifically, Kalhori, as a southern dialect of Kurdish, has rarely been subject to studies of this nature. Underlining the significance of such studies in the wider linguistic and anthropological contexts, this study attempts to explore kin words Kalhori speakers use to refer to or address their relatives. We also make an attempt to investigate the possibility of presenting a formal explanation of the terms by placing them in a componential analysis framework.

Episodic approaches may point in the direction of general trends by examining the ideological presuppositions of dominant literary discourses. However, they necessarily reduce the aesthetic complexity of literary movements and fail to critically consider poets whose vision may not directly speak to common literary trends. Poets such as Bizhan Jalāli (d. 1999) have been rendered standalone figures whose visions of poetic modernism are understood only in the context of their “non-adherence” to the dominant literary discourse of their time or are overlooked altogether. This essay examines how the literary life and reception of Bizhan Jalāli intersect with the intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings of committed circles in the 1960s and 1970s. The twists and turns of Jalāli’s poetics do not speak directly but rather laterally to committed articulations of modernism. The article returns Jalāli to his literary milieu by analyzing the way his work has been received by poets, anthologists and critics. As the contours of literary commitment drastically change in the 1980s and 1990s, another image of Jalāli emerges: once marginalized for his “non-commitment,” he is championed as an “apolitical” poet.

“The politic” and “the religious” have had many relations with each other in Iranian history and in some cases “the religious” has been defined in a situation beyond the extent of the political power. A case in point is the right of taking sanctuary in Shi‘ite shrines. Throughout Iran’s history, subjects could take refuge in Shi‘ite shrines and some other places related to religious and non-religious authorities. Persecution was delayed or the individual was forgiven, though sometimes they were sentenced when exiting the shrine. By referring to religious texts that have reinforced that tradition, this article seeks to trace continuities between early Islam and modern Iran. It focuses on sanctuary taking and sit-ins at shrines and tombs, and on the interplay between those actions and political power, and discusses the changing mobility and dynamisms of those actions at different periods of Iranian history.

After the Second World War and simultaneously with the independence movement in India many other movements for national independence and removal of colonial rule erupted in other Asian and African countries where news from India was of great importance and interest. This paper will focus on the coverage of India's independence movement by Iranian newspapers which were the main source of such news for the Iranians. The paper will examine a variety of Iranian newspapers across the political spectrum for the accuracy of their reports and the quality of their analysis of the developments in India. In spite of their technical shortcomings and their limited knowledge of India, the articles carried by the Iranian newspapers demonstrate the Iranian public's interest in India's movement for freedom from colonial rule, which they regarded as a source of hope and a model to be followed by other Asian countries suffering from foreign domination.