Showing papers in "Journal of Persianate Studies in 2010"

Abstract: In April and May of 1932, Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Iran on an official visit. He had been invited to Iran as the official guest of Rezā Shah Pahlavi. Using an array of primary source material, this article examines the cultural, political, and ideological implications of this trip for the emerging discourse of nationalism in interwar Iran. The article argues that Tagore’s visit played an important part in promoting the new official nationalism of the Pahlavi state. The emerging interwar ideology of “Pahlavi nationalism” sought to dissociate Iran from the Abrahamic-Islamicate “civilizational ethos” that was now understood to have long dominated Iranian culture, and instead sought to associate Iranian nationalism’s claim of cultural authenticity to a newly emerging notion of “Indo-Iranian civilization” rooted in the pre-Islamic culture of Zoroastrianism and Aryanism. Tagore’s visit to Iran was seen as an opportunity for his Iranian hosts to present him to the Iranian public as a living personification of this newly conceived idea of national authenticity. The public ceremonies and pronouncements that accompanied Tagore during the four-week trip all reinforced this basic message. The paper therefore argues that the Tagore visit to Iran was closely tied to the Pahlavi state’s policy of cultural nationalism.

Abstract: During the reigns of the Safavid Shah ‘Abbās I and the Mughal Emperor Akbar, two chroniclers, one from each dynasty, included in their texts lists of “kingly virtues.” This paper explores the possible historiographical precedents for this section in the chronicles, and places particular emphasis on the “mirrors for princes” literature. The paper concludes with a suggestion that reading the narrative portions of the chronicles in light of the mirrors for princes literature helps us understand why chroniclers may have included certain information in those sections.

Abstract: In the period 1935-1940, the Iranian Language Academy (Farhangestān) proposed over 1,600 indigenous terms to replace words of Arabic or European origin. Seventy years later, an assessment of the effects or “success” of this activity may be attempted. The Farhangestān’s success cannot be measured easily, by counting the successful words. A study of it requires a strict definition of the term “success” and a detailed analysis of the origin, semantics, usage, stylistics, etc. of each word. The analysis proposed here, using sixty terms, yields a scale of increasing success along which the coined terms may be arranged. The article aims to show that any exact numbers indicating the Farhangestān’s word-replacing success are of limited value; and that it is more interesting to ask how the new terms have been established and how they have systematically changed, and often enriched, the vocabulary of Persian.

Abstract: A narrative of the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-09 is provided as seen through about forty picture post cards privately printed in the immediate aftermath of that event. Privately printed post cards have only recently received attention by postal historians and included in postal history exhibits. Iranian postal history itself has been flourishing in the past twenty years with the publication of numerous books on the subject and the display of several award winning exhibits at major shows.

Abstract: Mohammad Ali Khan, Zokā’ al-Molk, later Forughi, became Minister of Justice in December 1911 (until June 1912 and again from August 1914 to April 1915), following Moshir al-Dawla Pirniā and continuing the legal reform the latter had initiated in 1911. Forughi also served as Prime Minister of Iran several times, lastly in 1941-42 (1320), when he arranged the abdication of Reza Shah and the succession of his son, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, shortly before his death in November 1942. This lecture was given at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the new University of Tehran is an important historical document that throws considerable light on the early stage of the modernization of Iran’s legal system. We are therefore publishing it in a translation which preserves the lecture format with only slight abridgement. Forughi’s informed account of legal modernization is prefaced by acute observations on the intrusion of modernity into the culture of Iran in the early twentieth century. (The Editor)

Abstract: The article focuses on the central plaza of the city of Samarqand, the seat of Transoxiana under the Sogdians and again under the Timurids. The earliest edifice on the Rigestān square is an early fifteenth-century madrasa named after the Timurid prince-scholar Ulugh Beg. Although the capital was transferred to Bukhara after the final conquest of Samarqand by the Uzbeks in 1500, the Shaibanids and their successors, the Ashtarkhanids, continued to embellish Samarqand with more imperial constructions. The Rigestān thus received its final form with two additional madrasas, the Shirdār and the Talākāri, by 1660. The article aims at describing and evaluating these structures and their architectural details, vis-a-vis the latest scholarship on art history.