We used to feel we knew what it meant to say "Iran." We could imagine that cat-shaped territory and visualize a single culture more or less contained by its boundaries. Whatever its fabled diversity, we could imagine a national character shaped by its geography and see its literature as a reasonably direct, unmediated transcription of the national character, a spiritual secretion emerging spontaneously, organically from the national soil. But what do we do with the culture that has been refracted through the events of 1979? Now we are faced with a subject which refuses to be defined by the map—a country whose writers are in large numbers (even more than in the shah's time) living overseas, whose patterns of life at home are molded by a peculiarly distorted version of a popular culture which we have never really had to study as a serious political phenomenon.

It has long been held that the eighteenth century was a pivotal one in the history of Imami Shi'i thought and jurisprudence in Iraq and Iran. At the beginning of this era, it is said, the previously dominant Usuli school declined, and the conservative Akhbari school came to the fore. This intellectual revolution coincided with the fall of the Safavid dynasty in Iran and the disestablishment of Shi'ism under the Afghans and then Nadir Shah. Standard accounts would have us believe that Akhbarism became dominant. Then late in the century, as the Qajars came to power, the Usuli school staged a comeback in the shrine cities of Iraq and subsequently in Iran.

This version of events, deriving from published nineteenth-century Usuli works, contains elements of truth. But an examination of manuscript sources from the period and of later biographical dictionaries suggests that the standard view needs revision.

Nineteenth-century Iran witnessed the advent of a new socioreligious institution. While the theory of a divinely appointed Imam (Imām al-Manṣūb) increasingly became eschatological in nature, a highly centralized religious position came into being whose source of power was not to be found in the classical Shi'i doctrine. The position of marjaᶜ-i taqlīd is a product of several religious developments that characterized the nineteenth-century Shi'i community. The prevalence of the Uṣūlī school and the formulation of two important doctrines, i.e., aᶜlamiyyat (more knowledgeability) and vilāyat-i faqīh (the governance of the jurist) are held as three major juridical impetuses underlying the birth of the institution of marjaᶜiyyat-i taqlīd. Therefore, we will first deal with the Uṣūlī process, then the doctrines of aᶜlamiyyat and vilāyat-i faqīh, then with the qualifications of a marjᶜ, and the question of who the first marjaᶜ of the Twelver-Shi'i community was, and finally the place of marjaᶜ-i taqlīd in the political life of Shi'i Iran.

Triumphant or turbulent, cultures are at once symbolized by and constituted from their arts and sciences. Literature celebrates, as law canonizes, the grand ideals of a living culture. Traditional or transitional, societies and their institutional structures of authority find elaborate expressions in the literature they produce.

This volume of Iranian Studies is devoted to an examination of the modern Iranian writer and contemporary Persian literature in their dialectical, interaction with a transitional Iranian culture and society. Its focus is on a revolutionary literature within a revolutionary social context. The term "revolutionary" is used here in its fundamental cultural sense, embracing both the social and the political.

This paper is devoted to a sociological examination of the problem of "commitment" in modern Persian literature. To reach for the political nature of the problem, it traces the formation of the intelligentsia in modern Iranian society.

The Writers Association of Iran, called Kanun-e Nevisandegan-e Iran in Persian, was founded in 1968 and was in many ways a unique experience in Iranian intellectual history. Its fortunes, consisting of periods of feverish activity and lifeless dormancy, epitomize the pattern of intellectual life in Iran, reflecting its problems and promises, its intellectual validity and artistic vitality, its ideals, achievements, and failures. While it did not succeed in its historical fight against censorship, it nevertheless played a major role in the course of the Iranian Revolution. While it could not transcend the factionalism that has historically plagued the Iranian elite, it nevertheless made an indelible impact on the intellectual community and on Iranian society at large. Between us and an objective account of this important intellectual institution stands the barrier of the Iranian Revolution itself.

On his return to Qom on March 7, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini announced during a remarkable speech the intention to create a ministry having as its main task amr bi'l ma'ruf wa nahi ‘an al-munkar, or to promote the good and forbid the bad. What is so astounding about this is the fact that a government institution charged with this task has long since ceased to exist. Moreover, the charge of amr bi'l ma'ruf has been historically associated with an official known as muhtasib. In view of the planned resurrection of this office, a historical analysis of the functions of the muhtasib and his office, the hisba or ihtisab, would seem to be in order.

Before describing the historical development of the function of muhtasib, two questions are posed. The first is: Does a direct relationship exist between pre-Muslim officials such as the Byzantine agoranomos and the Muslim muhtasib?

From December 1930, when the first Iranian feature film was made to the 1980s, the connections between Persian literature and the Iranian cinema have been intimate, varied, and significant. In fact, an examination of the Iranian cinema in terms of the roles literature plays in it demonstrates that the cinema constitutes an important aspect of the sociology of the Iranian writer, especially from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.

This essay surveys the role of literature and Iranian writers in the Iranian cinema and then focuses on a prominent example of the relationship between literature and movies, the popular 1971 film called Dash Akol, for the purpose of indicating differences in the aims and effects of the two art forms.

This essay has two purposes. One is to compare the agrarian mode of production in Iran during the 7th through 12th centuries with the mode of production in European feudalism, searching for clues as to why Europe--but not Iran--developed a capitalist mode of production. The second, accompanying purpose is to evaluate the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, a theory developed mainly within the Marxist tradition, in the context of medieval Iran.

A few Persian writers of the 1960s and 1970s dealt with the question of why non-European societies failed to experience a transition to capitalism, but their writings were not convincing. If the transformation from a feudal mode to a capitalist mode is due to feudal evolution, then a rigorous comparative approach is necessary in order to see why such an evolution took place in one society and not in another.

Back in the fall of 1980, Edward Keenan, then Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, asked whether I would organize an oral history project on Iran. A Soviet specialist, Keenan saw certain similarities between the Russian and the Iranian revolutions and considered the immigration to the West of hundreds of former Iranian officials to be an exceptional opportunity to collect and preserve valuable historical data.

In our subsequent discussions it became clear that an in-depth study of the internal workings of Iran's former regime was difficult, as few reliable primary sources are available for this purpose. Because of the autocratic nature of Iran's political system, government papers, documents, and reports were (and still are) infrequently prepared prior to major decisions and subsequent to important events. Moreover, the relevant documents that were produced have not been preserved systematically and, in cases where they do exist, are not generally available to researchers.

Bayal. Squat mud huts, twisting alleys. And the village center, a large pool of nothing but stagnant water. And by the pool, an earthen platform; this is the village teahouse. All the alleys lead to the pool. The area surrounding the pool is the public meeting place.

Censorship has been as much a part of Iran's literary history as betrayed love, bewitched lovers, and broken love affairs. In other words, it began long before the establishment of the "Imperial Printing Office" during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (ruled 1848-1896).

In earlier times some dissident writers were forced to lick off the ink from pages of their writings. Others had their mouths filled with gold or silver. Some were thrown in dungeons or seas. Others were exiled or executed.

Modern rulers have been no less adamant or imaginative in their methods of silencing opposition artists. "Mohammad 'Ali Shah had the two writers and orators, Malek-ol-Motakallamin and Sur-e Esrafil, hanged in the Bagh-e Shah Garrison, while he himself sat on the balcony facing the gallows and ate an entire plateful of rice and kabob as he watched." Farrokhi Yazdi (1889-1939) had his lips sewn together.

Most Iranian writers view Pahlavi rule over Iran (1921-1979) as a period of secular dictatorship. Many writers during the Pahlavi era responded to what they perceived to be an atmosphere politically repressive and restrictive on their artistic and social activities through the production of a significant amount of fiction, essays, and poetry which may, on the whole, be described as a literature of protest.

Hence, a major concern of Iranian writers since the first days of Reza Shah Pahlavi's rule has been how they could deal with government-imposed censorship of literary works and restrictions on social liberties.

Ahmad Shamlu is the primary, most prolific and most popular engagé Persian poet of post-Mosaddeq Iran. While critics in general view Shamlu's poetry as a mirror reflecting the stages of modernist Persian poetics from Nima Yushij (1895-1960) onward, Reza Baraheni has also described it as "a biography of our society." As a sociological study of this very important Iranian writer, this essay provides a chronology and analysis of Shamlu's relationship with his reading public and "the people," an overview of the nature of modernist engagé Persian poetry in general, and an assessment of the influence the "committed" poet has been able to exercise on Iranian society during the past three decades, in" particular.