Bücher der Reihe Iranian Studies

This book provides a range of original translated documents from the late 19th and early 20th century on the development of the Bahäi/Babi communities.

This book addresses the challenges, complexities, and contradictions regarding historical and geographical diversity of Persian architecture, including issues lacking in the 20th century historiography of Iran and neighbouring countries.

This book shows that the IRGC is not a recently politicized institution as often assumed, but has been highly politicized since its inception. It examines the three decades following the revolution, uncovering the reasons behind the rise of the Revolutionary Guards.

Focusing on the transformation of the staged dancing body, its space of performance, and spectatorial cultural ideology, this book traces the dancing body in multiple milieus of performance, including the Pahlavi eräs national artistic scene and the popular café and cabaret stages, as well as the commercial cinematic screen and the post-revolutionary Islamized theatrical stage. It links the socio-political discourses on performance with the staged public dancer, in order to interrogate the formation of dominant categories of "modern," "high," and "artistic," and the subsequent "othering" of cultural realms that were discursively peripheralized from the "national" stage. Through the study of archival and ethnographic research as well as a diverse literature pertaining to music, theater, cinema, and popular culture, it combines a close reading of primary sources such as official documents, press materials, and program notes with visual analysis of filmic materials and imageries, as well as interviews with practitioners. It offers an original and informed exploration into the ways performing bodies and their public have been associated with binary notions of vice and virtue, morality and immorality, commitment and degeneration, chastity and eroticism, and veiled-ness and nakedness.

This book examines the historically overlooked motrebi milieu, with its marginalized characters, from luti to gardan koloft and mashti, as well as the tenacity of motreb who continued their careers against all odds. They then turn to losanjelesi, the most pervasive form of Iranian popular music.

The Historiography of Persian Architecture highlights the political, cultural, and intellectual contexts that lie behind the written history of Persian architecture in the twentieth century, presenting a series of investigations on issues related to historiography. This book addresses the challenges, complexities, and contradictions regarding historical and geographical diversity of Persian architecture, including issues lacking in the 20th century historiography of Iran and neighbouring countries. This book not only illustrates different trends in Persian architecture but also clarifies changing notions of research in this field. Aiming to introduce new tools of analysis, the book offers fresh insights into the discipline, supported by historical documents, archaeological data, treatises, and visual materials. It brings together well-established and emerging scholars from a broad range of academic spheres, in order to question and challenge pre-existing historiographical frameworks, particularly through specific case studies. Overall, it provides a valuable contribution to the study of Persian architecture, simultaneously revisiting past literature and advancing new approaches.

Revolutionary Guards in Iranian Politics offers a way out of this paradox by showing that the IRGC is not a recently politicized institution, but has instead been highly politicized since its inception. It identifies the ways in which the IRGC relates to national political dynamics, examines the factors contributing to this relationship, and its implications on Iranian politics from the revolution up to the present day. The book examines the three decades following the revolution, uncovering the reasons behind the rise of the Revolutionary Guards and tracking the organization¿s evolving relationship with politics. Establishing a theoretical framework from revolution and civil-military relations theories, this book provides new perspectives on the relationship between the IRGC and Iranian politics.

"Focusing on the Avestan and Pahlavi versions of the Sih-rozag."

This book explores the transformation of home culture and domestic architecture in twentieth century Iran. While highlighting the role of architects and urban planners since the turn of the century, the book also studies the interplay between foreign influences, gender roles, consumer culture, and women's education as they intersect with taste, fashion, and interior design.

This collection will explore the myriad encounters which have taken place between Iranians and Russian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will include some discussion of diplomacy and foreign policy but a central objective of the collection will be to widen the scholarly perspective to incorporate an understanding of other types of encounter, whether political, economic, social, cultural, or intellectual, and both friendly and hostile, especially as these developed beyond the official and elite levels. In particular it will attempt to understand the complexities of the impact on Iran of the Russian presence on its northern borders: the very expansion of Tsarist empire during the nineteenth century threatening Iran¿s independence yet bringing ideas of social-democracy to its doorstep, the Soviet Union in the twentieth century similarly contradictory in its effect, sustaining radical Iranian politics while advancing its own strategic interests.

Critical approaches to the study of topics related to Persian literature and Iranian culture have evolved in recent decades. The essays included in this volume collectively demonstrate the most recent creative approaches to the study of the Persian language, literature, and culture, and the way these methodologies have progressed academic debate. Topics covered include; culture, cognition, history, the social context of literary criticism, the problematics of literary modernity, and the issues of writing literary history. More specifically, authors explore the nuances of these topics; literature and life, poetry and nature, culture and literature, women and literature, freedom of literature, Persian language, power, and censorship, and issues related to translation and translating Persian literature in particular. In dealing with these seminal subjects, contributors acknowledge and contemplate the works of Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and other pioneering critics, analysing how these works have influenced the field of literary and cultural studies. Contributing a variety of theoretical and inter-disciplinary approaches to this field of study, this book is a valuable addition to the study of Persian poetry and prose, and to literary criticism more broadly.

Based around the three key themes - historiography, politics and economy, art and architecture - this collection examines the latest research on Safavid Iran. The book, dedicated to the renowned Safavid historian Roger Savory, will supplement and re-interpret the existing literature on the subject.

Culture and Cultural Politics Under Reza Shah presents a collection of innovative research on the interaction of culture and politics accompanying the vigorous modernization programme of the first Pahlavi ruler. Examining a broad spectrum of this multifaceted interaction it makes an important contribution to the cultural history of the 1920s and 1930s in Iran, when, under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi, dramatic changes took place inside Iranian society. With special reference to the practical implementation of specific reform endeavours, the various contributions critically analyze different facets of the relationship between cultural politics, individual reformers and the everyday life of modernist Iranians.Interpreting culture in its broadest sense, this book brings together contributions from different disciplines such as literary history, social history, ethnomusicology, art history, and Middle Eastern politics. In this way, it combines for the first time the cultural history of Iran¿s modernity with the politics of the Reza Shah period.Challenging a limited understanding of authoritarian rule under Reza Shah, this book is a useful contribution to existing literature for students and scholars of Middle Eastern History, Iranian History and Iranian Culture.

Despite changes in sovereignty and in religious thought, certain aspects of Iranian culture and identity have persisted since antiquity. This book examines the history of Iran from its ancient roots to the Islamic period, focusing on pre-Islamic Persian religions and literature and their influence upon later Muslim practices and precepts in Iran.

Examines the Islamic roots of the Baha'i faith through the Qur'anic studies of the Bab (Siyyad Ali Muhammad). This book focuses on both the development of the Babi movement and the continuities and discontinuities with Shi'i Islam.

Offers an analysis of the poetry and fiction of Afghanistan. This book demonstrates that, within the trajectory of the union between modern aesthetic imagination and politics, the modernist intervention enabled many contemporary poets and writers of fiction to resist the overt politicization of the literary field, without evading politics.

Iran has undergone considerable social and political upheaval since the revolution and this has been reflected in its cinema. Focusing on the practices of regulation, production and reception of films in Iran, this book explores the politics of Iranian cinema in its post-revolutionary context.