The break-up of colonial empires in Asia and Africa since World War II; the rise of sternly nationalistic regimes in many non-western countries; the great unpopularity of America's undertakings in Viet Nam; and persisting international tensions have all contributed to the difficulties faced by American social scientists engaged in research abroad. These difficulties have mounted so in recent years that the central problem for North American social scientists could soon become not what to study, but where to study; and one may expect the situation to grow worse, not better. In the Middle East, recent hostilities have made North American social scientists less than welcome in many countries; while “Operation Camelot” in Latin America --when Department of Defense funds were secretly employed to support allegedly “pure” research--did the cause of honest social science much harm.

The period of reasonably free and vigorous political party activity in Iran was remarkably brief when viewed in the perspective of the very long history of that ancient land. Beginning slowly after the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, party activity became steadily more intense until August 1953 when it was suddenly suppressed. But as brief as this period was, these twelve years witnessed patterns of political party development which deserve comparison with the experience of other developing states.

The term “developing” has been in vogue throughout the post-World War II era. But for all that the term remains a vague one. Why Iran with its recorded history of over twenty five hundred years should be classified as “developing” while the United States with a history of less than two hundred years should be classified as “developed” is not immediately obvious.

At present the Kurds occupy parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the USSR. As the map shows, the area in which the Kurds predominate is a long are extending roughly northwest to southeast in a band of varying width from central Turkey to western Iran in the Kermanshah and Shāhābād regions. In these last areas, the historic road from Baghdad to Hamadān and beyond divides the Kurds from their Iranian cousins, the Lurs.

Within this extensive, mountainous area the Kurds speak an Iranian language divided into two groups of dialects--northern Kurdish, or Kurmandji, and southern Kurdish, called Kurdi. The dividing line between these two groups of dialects run roughly from the southwest corner of Lake Rezaiyeh to the town of Rowanduz in northern Iraq. Linguists consider Kurdish to be a northwestern Iranian language and therefore quite distinct from Persian, a southwestern language.

It is axiomatic that, if a language does not have a word for a given concept, that particular concept does not exist for the people who speak that language. We must therefore begin consideration of the evolution of the Ṣafavid state by making the negative statement that, for the Ṣafavids the concept of the state in any Western sense did not exist. As Minorsky has said: “it is a moot question how the idea of the State, if ever distinctly realized, was expressed in Ṣafavid terminology.” The term dawlat, meaning “bliss, felicity”, was sometimes used in an abstract way to denote the aura of beneficence which surrounded the just ruler and sheltered his subjects. Thus the principal officers of the Ṣafavid state were termed arkān-i dawlat. that is, the pillars which supported this regal canopy. So too, especially from the time of shāh ᶜAbba I onwards, the vazīr was entitled iᶜtimād al-dawla, that is, its trusty support or prop.

Iran is rare among developing societies, in the intensity of its dilemma resulting from efforts to effect a symbiosis between two divergent traditions--cultural continuity and technological, i.e., Western, innovation. As the Shah himself sees it, “we are both adjusting the technology to our culture and our culture to the technology.” But the “adjustment” proceeds, at best, haltingly with the result that neither of the traditions is especially vital, nor entirely relevant to Iran's political goals.

In no area of contemporary Iranian life can this be more tellingly demonstrated than that of education. Where the political leadership has made a firm commitment to social, political, and economic change, the educational sector is frequently among the first to reflect this commitment. But the ambiguities, contradictions, and ambivalences of Iran's political elite is reflected in the course of Iran's educational system.

Oliver Wendell Holmes when he taught anatomy at the Harvard Medical School in the 19th century used to begin his lecture on the skull by picking up each bone and describing its position: “The frontal bone borders on the parietal bone, the parietal bone borders on the occipital bone,” and so on, until he came to the sphenoid bone, a bone composed of many pieces that seem to border on everything and assume all shapes. He is supposed to have picked up the sphenoid and said in annoyance, “Gentlemen, curse the sphenoid bone!” No such uncharitable words would come from the student of Iran, but how often the primitive state of his science, like the anatomy of an earlier century, makes Iran seem the most complex and indefinable of all the bones in the greater body politic of the world.

A high official of the Iranian government was recently visiting the United States when he offered to meet students and scholars of Iranian affairs in order to discuss questions of mutual interest related to Iran. It was hoped that such a meeting in an academic environment would bring about a greater understanding of the current government policies and thus bridge the generation and information gap existing at present.

Among the questions he was asked was the following. Why should Iran spend a larger percentage of its national budget on military expenditure (in relation to portions allocated to health, education, etc.) than most countries for which such data is available?

Among the twenty-seven such countries only Indonesia, Brazil, Spain, Portugal and Turkey showed a higher percentage of military expenditure for the years, 1952-1963.

The object of this article is to open up to speculation a historiographical problem which the serious student of Iranian urban history necessarily encounters. This is the problem of the motivation of the authors of medieval urban histories. In studying any single work or city, it may be possible to work around the problem; but as soon as a broader approach is attempted, encompassing several cities and numerous works, it looms as a major obstacle.

The root of the problem is essentially the very richness and volume of medieval urban historical writing itself, for that is what makes the comparative study of Iranian cities potentially so rewarding. There is hardly a single major city in the Persian speaking world that has not been the subject of at least one local history. Many of these works are extant, published or unpublished; but many, many more that at one time existed have disappeared.

Well, what could I do? My husband wouldn't keep me and the child both—a child who was not his own. The boy was my former husband's who had divorced me and never come to take him. If someone else were in my place, what would she do? Well, I had to live too. If this new husband divorces me what would I do? I had to get rid of the child.

A woman like me who doesn't know her way around wouldn't think of anything else. I didn't know any place or any way out of the thing. But it wasn't that I didn't know any place, really. I knew you could put the child in a nursery or stick him in some other place. But where would they take him? Where could I be sure they wouldn't keep me waiting and then not pay any attention to me and call me and the child a thousand names? Where? I couldn't have it end that way.

In this study the contribution of petroleum revenues, as a source of capital formation, for the economic development of the exporting countries is considered. Initally, the question of significance of capital as a necessary factor for economic development is investigated. The overall rate of development is greatly affected and limited by shortage of productive factors, and among the scarce factors associated with underdevelopment capital is a very important one. However, the effectiveness of capital itself is limited by the absorptive capacity of the given economy. The availability of noncapital factors and their relative elasticities not only determine the rate of development but generally in the short run set a limit to the amount of capital which can efficiently be invested. For the purpose of this study the assumption is that absorptive capacity in some of the petroleum exporting countries is not the limiting factor to economic development.

Pantheism is generally defined as “all is God and God is all (I) but it can therotically assume two different forms. First, it is said that the finite and temporal world is nothing in front of God, and it is swallowad up by the sole absolute Reality of God, or in the second instance, God is considered as dissolved in the world, poetically sung or scientifically demonstrated as a Whole, in which an immanent Life-Energy acts. In both cases, however, what most sharply distinguishes pantheism from non-pantheism (or theism) is the fact that God is always considered by pantheists as something impersonal; pantheists generally affirm the superiority of their view on theistic “inferior” forms of religion pointing out that (a) calling God a “person” restricts and diminishes His greatness, as it necessarily implies a body and a limitation, (b) pantheistic piety is not a feeling of devotion of an Ego to a Thou, but rather the sensation of being a part belonging to a Whole, a wave in the immense sea of Being.