This paper revisits the usual narrative of Dāʾūd al-Qayṣarī's life, bringing to light evidence of his stay in Ilkhanid Tabriz. Recent studies mention a connection with Ilkhanid Iran, where he would have met his master ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, but present no substantiated details as to when and where this happened and how these events fit in his life. A document held at the Bodleian, corroborated by evidence from other manuscripts, shows that the common narrative of Qayṣarī's life (in which links with Iran are almost entirely absent) is untenable, and presents evidence of Qayṣarī's presence in Ilkhanid Tabriz. These new elements invite us to revise our perception of Qayṣarī's oeuvre, in particular the idea that it was written under the auspices of the nascent Ottoman power, and further investigate the intellectual scene in Tabriz in the last years of the reign of Abu Saʿīd and of his vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn.

This article delves into the experience of urban modernity in Mohammad Reza’s Tehran, focusing particularly on the phenomenon of window-shopping as depicted in three films: Chaharrah-e Havades (The crossroad of events, Samuel Khachikian, 1955); Aghay-e Halu (Mr. Naive, Dariush Mehrjui, 1971); and Zir-e Pust-e Shab (Under the skin of night, Fereydun Gole, 1974). These films, set against the backdrop of Tehran’s urban metamorphosis, offer a narrative of the modern metropolis as a site of exhibition, where the gaze of characters from lower social or economic strata is ensnared by a plethora of visual spectacles. The critical portrayal of shop displays and the phenomenon of window-shopping in these films offer profound insights into the complex interplay of desires, promises, disappointments, and fears that the state’s modernization projects and urban consumer culture evoked.

This ethnographic study reassesses the role of opium in Iran’s economic landscape, challenging dominant narratives that frame opium users as unproductive and burdensome. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2018 in the Pars Special Economic Energy Zone (PSEEZ), the research examines how construction workers use opium to endure and enhance productivity under extreme environmental and economic pressures. It critiques a century-long anti-opium discourse—rooted in the Iranian Constitutional Movement (1905–1911) and perpetuated through shifting regimes of criminalization and medicalization—that consistently associates opium use with economic idleness. Through autoethnographic reflection and archival analysis, the article first outlines this dominant discourse, then constructs a counternarrative in which laborers deliberately integrate opium into their daily practices to sustain bodily performance and contribute to Iran’s petroindustrial expansion. Described as “narco-nomad science,” this practice enables the formation of resilient working bodies and repositions opium as an active agent within circuits of capitalist production. Drawing on actor-network theory and assemblage thinking, the study foregrounds the material agency of opium. It offers new analytical frameworks for understanding its role in labor, infrastructure, and the political economy of the PSEEZ.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Shiʿi theocratic state in Iran has occasionally prioritized state interests over traditional shariʿa rulings. This dynamic is best understood through the lens of the principle of maslahat (variously translated as “public good” or “the interests of the state), which has played a central role in guiding strategic state decisions. By invoking maslahat, the state has justified the modification or suspension of certain shariʿa prescriptions in pursuit of broader political and social objectives. These objectives, primarily safeguarding the Shiʿi theocratic order (hefz-e nezām) and protecting the religion from defamation (vahn-e din), were key tenets articulated by Ayatollah Khomeini and remain foundational to the state's governance. This pragmatic utilization of maslahat has enabled the Shiʿi theocratic state to adapt its legal framework to meet contemporary challenges while ostensibly adhering to shariʿa principles. Notable examples of this adaptability include reforms such as the equalization of blood money for religious minorities and the imposition of moratoriums on stoning executions. However, the inherently subjective nature of maslahat raises concerns about potential arbitrariness and misuse, prompting debates among Shiʿi jurists regarding its legitimacy and scope. This study offers a comprehensive analysis of maslahat within Iran's legal system, exploring its mechanisms, applications, and implications, and highlighting its complex role in both advancing and potentially challenging the principles of Islamic law.

Dust-winds across the southern Iran-Iraq borderlands in the past decade have played a crucial role in how the Iranian state invests in both maintaining its major oil sites, despite intensive sanctions, and organising cooperation with local farmers to block the transmission of dust across its sovereign territory. This paper extends the ethnographic exploration of economic sanctions to their environmental interventions, studying the everyday lives of people in Khuzestan province. Environmental historians have examined landscapes altered by military activities and sanctions, but an anthropological approach to the essential entanglement of meteorological upheaval and sanctions characterized by bad air is lacking. Drawing on critical theories of breathing, I trace the explosion of dust into Iranian geopolitics as a conundrum of how the power dynamics of sanctions and sovereignty intermingle with aerosols. Within the frame of state-sponsored projects, engineers, scientists, environmental activists, farmers, and traders cooperate and compete in atmospherically focused coalitions to stabilize soil and dust against their spread. As a voluminous entity that is dispersed across the bodies of breathers, these atmospherically focused coalitions give visibility to the sanctions and the gaps in the state’s sovereignty.

The epic folk story of Köroğlu, popular among various Turkic peoples, was also widespread among the Tajiks of the upper Oxus valleys of southern Tajikistan and adjoining Badakhshān of northern Afghanistan. The Tajik versions of the story, known as Gurughli or Gurghuli, while sharing parts of the plot and outline with Köroğlu, are distinctly shaped by Tajik culture and Iranian national traditions in both form and content. This study explores various aspects of this oral tradition, including bards and their performances, the structure, plot, and themes of their repertoires, and the documentation history. This study also assesses scholarly views on the origins and development of Tajik Gurughli. The article is supplemented by five sample texts, selected to represent major cycles of the genre.1

In November 1980, a twenty-nine-year-old contract worker in Hammond, Louisiana by the name of Stephen K. Clark was arrested and charged with criminal mischief for painting a thirty-foot mural of Mickey Mouse “making an obscene gesture to Iran” on the side of Sunflower supermarket. According to the store's manager, Clark had been hired to give the store a fresh coat of yellow paint before going wildly off script. The Hammond city prosecutor told the press that Clark would face jail time if convicted for his renegade painting, which, alongside the enormous image of Mickey, featured a word balloon proclaiming “We're fed up. Hey Iran!”1 This was no one-off use of Mickey's likeness to send a message to Iran. At the dawn of the 1980s, the image and sentiment Clark felt compelled to share had become curiously popular across the United States, appearing in surprising places all over the country.

This study advances neorealist theory by examining how systemic constraints shape state behavior through economic statecraft, focusing on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Iran’s strategic calculations. Employing methodological triangulation – network analysis, discourse examination, and institutional assessment – this research explores the strategic logic underpinning the China-Iran engagement. For Iran, the BRI emerges as a mechanism for institutional resilience and sanctions circumvention, though its integration remains constrained by systemic limitations and regional competition. For China, the BRI serves as a geopolitical infrastructure strategy to expand influence and secure resources, despite concerns over economic sustainability. By framing economic statecraft as a strategic response to systemic constraints, this study challenges conventional materialist and militaristic paradigms of international relations. It critically assesses the generalizability of BRI partnerships, illustrating how states, bound by structural limitations, use economic instruments to reshape their strategic environments. Ultimately, the research offers nuanced insight into emerging power dynamics in a multipolar world, extending beyond traditional power-centric models.

This article examines the challenges of subject formation within state-building efforts by analyzing Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā (Children’s Universe), a widely circulated Iranian children’s magazine during the post-revolutionary period. Through analyzing the magazine’s content from 1979 to 1989, when the Islamic Republic was consolidating its power and building institutions, this study reveals how the publication served as a key informal education platform, attempting to create politically conscious yet ideologically compliant young citizens. While the magazine aimed to cultivate revolutionary consciousness through anti-imperialist rhetoric and Islamic values, it simultaneously imposed rigid behavioral and ideological boundaries to produce what I term “docile revolutionary children.” The research demonstrates how political themes permeated every aspect of the magazine—from stories and poems to puzzles and contests—transforming it from an entertainment platform into a vehicle for political socialization. Through examination of revolutionary and wartime discourses, gender representation, and the promotion of social humility, this study argues that Keyhān-e Bachcheh-hā embodied a fundamental tension in the state’s vision of ideal citizenship: the simultaneous demand for revolutionary agency and absolute submission to clerical authority. This research contributes to our understanding of how post-revolutionary states employ cultural institutions to shape young citizens and the inherent contradictions in such efforts at political socialization.

This paper provides a sociolinguistic and grammatical synopsis of Bavadi Bakhtiari, spoken in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran. The results presented here are based on the collection of linguistic and cultural data through field research, including ethnographic research, recording of oral texts, elicitation of a language data questionnaire, and follow-up interviews with speakers of the language. In addition to providing a linguistic snapshot of the Bavadi variety of Bakhtiari in its social context, this study offers a novel contribution to the documentation of Iran’s linguistic heritage through the presentation and analysis of culturally important oral texts of various genres. While one text belongs to the controlled and formulaic genre of the folktale, two other texts are based on free conversation among groups of speakers.

The works of prominent contemporary Iranian composers Hossein Alīzādeh and Parvīz Meshkātīān demonstrate a novel approach to the text-music relationship, characterized by a new understanding of the interaction between music's internal syntax and structure and the external world. This innovative approach, which can be described as “musical realism,” strives to represent textual meanings through musical gestures, particularly within the tasnīf genre, a metrical, pre-composed song with a pre-determined way of accompaniment, which developed over the past century.1 This approach, emerging primarily in contemporary compositions, is exemplified by the above two composers, who illustrate textual meaning through the intricate utilization of innovative treatments of modes, rhythm, melody, and texture relying on the potentials of the core of Persian musical tradition, the radīf – a collection of traditional Iranian melodic figures passed down orally through generations and serving as the foundational framework for improvisation and composition.2 By examining select instances from these composers’ works, I highlight the growing emphasis on a realist music-text relationship and its interplay with both the inner structures of Persian classical music and the broader context of Iran's modern position in the world.

Environmental problems have become increasingly evident in post-revolutionary Iran. As a result, the field of environment has come to be a focus of research studies and technical management in the country. The recent proliferation of scientific analyses of the so-called environment indicates that the schemes of modern science are developing to combat the problems therein. Research findings also suggest, however, that environmental discourses and practices are not entirely reducible only to the terms of the natural sciences; distinctively, differing ideas of “nature” are drawn on to conceptualize differing schemes of environmental activities. This article explores how the materiality of national symbols brings to light particular social histories that reflect on and unfold through environmental discourses and practices encountered in Tehran.

Writing, as a beacon of democracy, is crucial to the ability of citizens to think critically and to exercise their agency in the twenty-first century. Yet the full epistemic and critical potentials of writing are realized only if writing is properly theorized and understood. Although it is commonly held to be a matter of skill or personal creativity, writing is alternatively conceptualized as process, genre, social practice and sociopolitical action. This paper examines discourses of writing and its pedagogy in Iran’s secondary education writing textbooks, known as Negāresh. Analysis of the writing tasks and activities of the textbooks attests to the dominance of discourses (skills, process, and creativity) that narrow the domain of writing to the writer and textual output. More socially oriented discourses of writing are not foregrounded. The findings carry implications for Persian writing pedagogy.

This article presents the first examination and analysis of a fabric fragment with hunting motif discovered in the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang in present-day northwest China, which has been carbon 14 dated to the Tang dynasty. This study assesses the value of this fragment by considering its artistic features and cultural significance. The fabric patterns are partially incomplete, a hexagonal structure is discernible, and it contains motifs of Central Asian figures hunting on horseback. The iconographic method was used to analyze the pattern, color, and composition of the fabric. It was concluded that the cultural background and aesthetic qualities of the fabric reflect the fusion of Persian, Islamic, and Chinese Tang dynasty cultures, reflecting the profound cultural exchanges between Iran and China. This research exemplifies the mutual cultural exchange between two civilizations, Iran and China, highlighting Iran’s important contribution to the world.

English words and phrases have been creatively adopted, adapted, and appropriated by Persian speakers, resulting in a Persianized form of English that is widely used in daily conversations in Iran. This article aims to identify and describe various English loanwords and phrases commonly integrated into everyday Persian discourse, reflecting Iran’s sociolinguistic globalization. The research is guided by two key questions: How do Iranians Persianize English words and phrases in daily conversations? And what broader patterns emerge in this Persianization process? To address these questions, a qualitative analysis was conducted to examine the prevalence and patterns of English loanwords in Iranian discourse. The findings suggest that Persianized English creates a hybrid mode of expression that blends Persian linguistic traditions with contemporary English influences, shaping identity and communication within Iranian society. The study concludes by recommending further research on the effects of Persianized English on public discourse, media, education, and the daily cultural practices of Iranians.

This compact book offers a closely researched account of the early years of the Qajar dynasty and state, whose political development was permanently marked by the territorial struggle with the Russian Empire in the South Caucasus in its first three decades. Behrooz's work builds on Muriel Atkin's classic Russia and Iran 1780–1928 (1980), and although unlike Atkin he does not make use of any sources in Russian, the range of Persian-language material he draws upon is much greater, and the two books complement each other well. The first two chapters effectively set the political scene, providing a review of the circumstances of Aqa Muhammad Khan's rise to power, his struggle with the Zand rulers of Shiraz, and the extensive preparations he made to secure the succession of his nephew, Baba Khan Jahanbani, the future Fath Ali Shah. These bore fruit when Aqa Muhammad Shah was murdered by his own servants in Shusha in 1797. Significantly, this took place during a campaign to subdue Qarabagh. The central figure of the book, and of the wars against Russia, is Fath Ali's son Abbas Mirza, but a particular strength of Behrooz's account is his close understanding of the family and intertribal relationships among the Qajar elite, as well as of the petty dynasties that ruled in Qarabagh, Iravan, Badkubeh (Baku), and Derbent in this period.

The death of Mahsa Jina Amini at the hands of the Iranian police in September 2022 triggered protests both within Iran and across the global Iranian diaspora. This article explores how representations of collective memory and identity were articulated by the Iranian diaspora in Sweden at that time, exploring the concepts of memory, nostalgia, and identity, among others, through a constructionist framework. Key findings show hope as a central theme in diasporic engagement with the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, expressed as a desire for revolution and potential return to a liberated and democratic Iran. This study underscores the complex, multifaceted nature of diasporic activism, shaped by contested memories, subject-positions derived from lived experience and political interests, and historic and ongoing ideological tensions.

This paper examines the criticism of Munīr Lāhorī (1610–44) regarding the early modern literary style of tāza-gū'ī (speaking anew) through his unedited commentaries on the qasidas of ʿUrfī Shīrāzī (1556–90). Munīr is critical of the Iranian poet's overly complex style, ungrounded in the literary tradition as he perceived it, and of developments in Mughal courts that began to favor Iranian literati over their Indian counterparts. His philological criticism of ʿUrfī's qasidas and the promulgation of tāza-gū'ī elucidates the methodologies of Safavid-Mughal literary criticism and illustrates how the prominence of Iranian figures in South Asian courts influenced the discourse on early modern Persian literary developments.