As is still the case in many parts of Iran, the distribution of languages and dialects in Ilam Province, western Iran, is unevenly documented. There have been several studies on specific language varieties spoken throughout the province but, in large part because of conflicting perspectives on the relationship between language and ethnicity, the situation for the region as a whole has until now remained unclear. The present study first of all brings together existing sociolinguistic and demographic data on language distribution and highlight areas of uncertainty. The main part of the study provides an overview of local perceptions of language distribution and language use based on field research and interviews conducted in each of the province's ten regions (shahrestān) and their twenty-five districts (bakhsh). Here, respondents' assessments of the geographic extent of the province's four main languages—Kurdish, Luri, Laki and Arabic—as well as more minor languages spoken by immigrants from elsewhere in Iran are summarized. For Kurdish in particular, which is the major of the four languages, the article shows the perceived geographic distribution of each major dialect and its affiliation within one of two major Kurdish dialect groups: Ilāmi (or “Feyli”) and Kalhōri. This analysis is followed by a brief discussion of multilingualism. The results of the study are brought together in a map of the province's languages.

Iranians were aware of Sasanian history through traditional historical writings, but they knew nothing about Achaemenid history. Following European travelers to Persia from the fifteenth century, who were well prepared by reading the classical and biblical texts, Persepolis and Pasargadae were rediscovered and Achaemenid history re-established in the nineteenth century. The rise of Reza Khan to power and his grand emphasis on nationalism and ancient Iran that characterized his reign also left a deeper impact on Achaemenid studies in this period. In this paper the re-establishment of Achaemenid history and its development in nineteenth and twentieth centuries are discussed and reviewed.

On 27 June 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, ‘drugs are prohibited” and their trafficking, consumption and “promotion” were against the rules of Islam and could not take place in the Islamic Republic. This ruling, although informal in nature, sanctioned a swift re-direction of Iran's previous approach to narcotic drugs, both in terms of production and consumption. As had happened in 1955, Iran seemed ready to go back to a policy of total prohibition and eradication of opiates, this time under the banner of Islam rather than that of the international drug control regime. Drugs and the politics surrounding them have been a crucial, yet neglected, aspect of the history of modern Iran that have changed the nature of the state bolstering its capacity of social intervention, while hindering its legitimacy, in the Pahlavi, as in the republican, era. By moving on “from the analysis of the state to a concern with the actualities of social subordination”, this article attempts to interpret how social subordination and state coercion were practiced and defied in the making of punishment and welfare in the social body of Iran.

This article is an exploration of the interconnected legal ties between Christians and Zoroastrians in the early Islamic era. Drawing from the writings of the Christian authors Ishobokt, Simeon, and Henanisho, Payne describes how East Syrian bishops appropriated laws of marriage, inheritance, and property from Iranian jurisprudential traditions as a means of transferring wealth intergenerationally and extending their judicial authority. Payne thus explores the ways in which the Christians of Iran were influenced by the Iranian legal system and culture and in the seventh century CE.

Against the background of language policy research on Iran, and drawing on insights from recent scholarship on the role of translation in language policy, this article calls into question the claim that “Persianization” of non-Persian peoples is the main element of language policy in Iran. In so doing, the article examines closely the role of translation as enacted in two legal instruments: the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Law of Parliamentary Elections. The study illustrates that although official communication between Iranian authorities and citizens is a prototypical example of monolingualism and non-translation, voluntary translation happens between Persian and non-Persian speaking individuals, acting as a viable and cost-effective bottom-up alternative for the inclusion of non-Persian speaking peoples, far more effective than an impractical, top-down language policy reform implicitly found in the “Persianization” claim.

This article discusses the reasons why Ferdowsi does not begin the Shahnameh with the episode of Zoroaster, which he quotes from the version of Daqiqi, but rather with an account of the creation of the world that, in contrast to Islamic historians writing before Ferdowsi, does not attempt to accommodate a Qur'anic view of creation and human history, but neither does he give a cosmology dominated or well informed by Zoroastrian theology. Similarly, Ferdowsi tends to present pre-Islamic Iran as having a consistent religious history, and perhaps avoids beginning with Goshtāsp's conversion to the religion of Zoroaster, as he makes Daqiqi appear to do, in order to minimize the role of religious conflict in Iranian history, again diverging from historians of the Islamic period writing before him. The article also explores the role of God in the Shahnameh and the absence of theodicy.

In view of the recent expansion of Indo-Persian studies, the neglect of the Sino-Persian nexus is a missed opportunity to place Iranian history on a larger Asian stage. While Iranian contact with China has continued episodically from antiquity to modernity, scholars have so far focused almost exclusively on the pre-modern phases of exchange. As a contribution to developing the field of Sino-Persian studies, this article situates two twentieth century Iranian travelers to China against the changing background of Chinese–Iranian exchange from the medieval to modern period. In so doing, it demonstrates the infrastructural and conceptual apparatus that enabled the modern Iranian encounter with China while asking how, if at all, twentieth century intellectuals were able to draw on a longer history of interaction to find meanings for Sino-Persian exchange.

In 1978 the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism changed forever the terms of the debate about the nature of western scholarship on the non-western world. Profoundly unsettling, Said's work had a transformational impact on many academic disciplines in western Europe, the Americas and across Asia. Although drawing on older ideas and research, including critiques of western scholarship formulated in the Soviet Union, Said's book, along with Said's own public persona, came to represent and symbolize a broader rejection of existing power-political relationships between the imperial metropoles and the colonial world. In Orientalism, Said was principally concerned with deconstructing a discourse, seeking to analyze the specific character of a particular ideological mission, the elaboration of Anglo-French Orientalism, through which European intellectuals made an essential contribution to the extension of western hegemonic power over the East. Taking case studies drawn from Iran and the wider Persophone region, the question is posed whether a similar intellectual construction may be discerned within nineteenth century Russian, or post-1917 Soviet, discourses on the Orient. Were tsarist Russian scholars and administrators concerned with the Persophone world Orientalists in the Saidian sense? What was the significance of the rupture of 1917 in Russian discourses on the Orient? Did Soviet Iranology continue or break with traditional imperial Orientology? What was the relationship between knowledge of the East and power over it for imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union? Most controversially, did imperial Russian or Soviet Iranology display the same predisposition as Anglo-French discourses to essentialize Orient and Occident, to impose profound ontological oppositions between them and to conclude with the inherent superiority of the latter?

Among other Middle Eastern countries, Iran and Turkey stand out as the two neighboring countries with many linguistic and cultural similarities. The question that comes to the fore is: to what extent do these two countries know each other? This article attempts to provide a picture of the state of Iranian Studies in Turkey with specific attention to three monographs originally written as PhD dissertations in various Turkish universities over the last three decades. Produced from within three different social science and humanities divisions, i.e. Political Science, Persian Literature and History, these are three of the very few scholarly monographs produced on Iran in Turkey. Based on a close reading of these studies, it seems possible to observe that they are mostly ill-balanced by methodological, ethnocentric as well as Turkish nationalist biases.

The Škand Gumānīg Wizār (ŠGW) contains Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature's most extensive polemic against Judaism. This article explores the ŠGW's polemic in light of recent scholarship demonstrating the connection between Babylonian rabbinic Judaism and Zoroastrianism in late antique Iran. Taking this connection as a starting point, the article considers the ŠGW's critique of three angelic citations that are all closely paralleled by passages in the Babylonian Talmud. After demonstrating that the ŠGW citations depict angels as weaker and more oppressed than the rabbinic parallels, the article sets these portrayals of weakened angels in the context of the widespread belief among Jews in this period in Metatron, an angelic coequal to the divine. The article argues that the ŠGW's depictions of downtrodden angels are not borrowed from rabbinic polemics, found in the Talmud, against this theology, but is an independent reaction to the same belief in Metatron's co-regency, a belief that sources testify was still common in the early Islamic period. The ŠGW's motivating theological imperative to portray Judaism as radically monotheistic, and thus the binary opposite of Zoroastrianism, underlies the text's descriptions of angelic suffering and degradation.

This study investigates university coaches' knowledge about their legal duties toward their athletes, as well as the connection between the level of their legal knowledge and their educational, social and economic background. The results are presented according to three major dimensions: deficiencies in the coaches' training system, in their knowledge concerning their legal responsibility and the coaches' social recognition regarding their profession. The findings indicate that the coaches' training in Iran has a lot of weaknesses, including the neglect of legal issues, the consequence of which is that the Iranian university coaches do not have sufficient knowledge about the legal issues in general and they are not aware of their duty toward their athletes in particular. In Iran coaching is not considered as a prestigious occupation; in terms of social status coaches belong to the lower middle class.

The demonic plays an integral role in the Shahnameh, manifesting itself in countless forms. Early kings and heroes fight demons at every turn, and in one of the most memorable tales in the poem—the story of Zahhāk—Iran itself falls under the rule of demonic forces. But demons are not always physical creatures; we also encounter them as immaterial forces of temptation, distraction, and fate. One of the most fascinating aspects of this multifarious presentation of the demonic is the way it intersects the poem's portrayal of what it means to be human. This article focuses on that intersection, highlighting encounters between human beings and the demonic and arguing that they not only complicate notions of humanity, but also construct and reinforce categories of masculinity and femininity. A close examination of two phenomena at the heart of human–demon contact—serpents and sorcery—reveals how evil is embodied and enacted in highly gendered ways. Male and female characters in the Shahnameh diverge in their abilities to combat the demonic and are lured into wickedness by different means. What emerges from the interplay between human beings and demons and between the categories of masculinity, femininity, and the demonic is a multifaceted and sophisticated portrayal of evil that informs even the simplest and most straightforward tales in Ferdowsi's work.

One of the most exquisite illustrated books produced under the patronage of Shahrukh is a copy of Majmaʿ al-Tawarikh which was widely dispersed during the twentieth century. The dispersal of the manuscript has strongly influenced and limited its scholarly examination. The present research has traced the folios of this manuscript in numerous collections. By means of comparison with other dated codices, the illustrations of the dispersed manuscript can be classified into three distinctly different groups. This article gives an explanation of why these three styles appear side by side in the manuscript. Thereafter, it focuses on the problem of the authenticity of some of the illustrations of the manuscript.

This paper deals with the origins of Iranian studies in the principal centers of Oriental studies in Russia, located in Kazan, St. Petersburg and Moscow from the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. It concerns the international political situation and major social changes which created a demand in the Russian intellectual market for both academic and practical experts on the entire Muslim world. The paper also describes how, thanks to the efforts of German scholars who were invited to these centers, the different fields of modern Iranian studies, including the academic traditions, achievements and key publications were initially formed and then were developed by their Russian colleagues.

The Iranian Green Movement emerged after the presidential election in June 2009. The paper tracks down its foundational origins through the concept of ‘fragmented collective action’, that points to the dispersion of a social movement's political energies and the fragmentation of its constitutive groups. It also addresses the significance of informal mobilizing networks and the widespread use of modern virtual space to bring together an intersubjectively constructed collective identity which was shaped by the movement’s interactions with political forces and with its interlocutors. Finally, the paper argues that the collective identity shaped the movement's strategies over the course of its evolution.

This article explores the process leading to the Afghan government's decision to implement a prohibition and eradication of opium in the northeastern province of Badakhshan. It explores why Daud chose Badakhshan, the impact of the opium ban on the people of Badakhshan and the future of opium production and trade, as well as the evolution of drug control in Afghanistan under the Musahiban dynasty. Ultimately, the ban was launched because it allowed Daud to garner international praise and financial support, while enforcing eradication in an area inhabited by ethnic minorities ensured that the Afghan government's coercive strategy would not generate resistance from rural Pashtun tribes historically opposed to these types of state intervention.

This article provides an overview of the ethics of war and peace in the most important and normatively influential work of epic literature known in the eastern lands of Islam, namely the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (d. 1020 CE). As one of the greatest sources of the Iranian cultural identity for over a millennium, Shahnameh (lit. The book of kings) defines normative ideals in the ethics of war and peace within narratives that connect the ancient history of Iran to its mythical eras and in effect to both the medieval time of the epic's authorship and modern Iranian identity. By identifying limits, standards and legitimacy for war and peace in Shahnameh, this article aims to facilitate an Iranian contribution to the global literature and practice on peacemaking that has deep roots in the Islamo-Persian tradition.