Islam without Fuqahāʾ: Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and His Perso-Islamic Solution to the Caliphate's Crisis of Legitimacy (70–142 AH/690–760 CE)

This paper seeks to advance the existing scholarship on Persian secretary and belles-lettrist, ?Abd Allāh Ibn al-Muqaffa? (d. 139/757) and his Risāla fī ’l-?a?āba (Epistle Concerning the Entourage). It argues that the Risāla, addressed to the second Abbasid caliph al-Man?ūr, set out to tackle the political ills of the caliphate, especially the crisis of political legitimacy. As the first documented articulation of the Islamic polity, the Risāla made a series of recommendations, including a proposal for legal codification that attempted to reinvent the caliphate by reuniting the institution's political and legal authority at the expense of private jurists (fuqahā?). The paper illustrates how Ibn Muqaffa?’s solution relied on a creative integration of Iranian and Islamic ideas of statecraft and legitimate rule. Ironically, this creative integration may have played a part in the Risāla’s failure to garner necessary support to effect change.     

From Etelāʿāti to Eslāhtalabi: Saʿid Hajjarian,Political Theology and the Politics of Reform in Post-Revolutionary Iran

This article examines the importance of the political thought and praxis of politico, ‘reformist’ strategist and intellectual, Sa?id Hajjarian, and his rethinking of the post-revolutionary Iranian state’s sources and bases of legitimacy in the 1990s and 2000s. It also provides an exposition and assessment of a number of his recommendations for the realisation of ‘political development’ (towse?eh-ye siyāsi) in the post-revolutionary order and their contribution to the discourse of eslāhāt during the presidency of Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). Moreover, it attempts to situate Hajjarian within a broader spectrum of reformist political opinion and its proponents within the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political class.     

Whatever Happened to The Little Black Fish?

This essay uses retranslation studies to trace the defanging and domestication of Samad Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish, a children’s story once hailed as a major revolutionary and literary text. Behrangi’s book is the only modern Iranian prose work to have been translated multiple times both before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The study compares the texts from several of these retranslations, by considering whether they have been domesticated for their English readers, as well as their context, by looking at the cultural impact of such factors as the Islamic Revolution and US?Iran relations. It looks at how various translators and publishers have interpreted the story and how their perspectives reflect Iranian history, the influence of Middle East studies, and the interests of the Iranian diaspora. The result sheds light on translation norms, as well as on the circulation and interpretation of Iranian literature in the global context.     

Contested Cartographies: Empire and Sovereignty on a Map of Sistān,Iran (1883)

ABSTRACT

The papers of Malkam Khān (1833–1908), Iranian ambassador in London from 1872 to 1889, a staunch supporter of Iranian state modernization and a scholar, include an often-overlooked map of the Iran–Afghanistan border dating to 1883. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi compiled this exceptional piece of nineteenth-century Iranian cartography. The map is an illustration of how quickly the Qajar administration was able to emulate European cartographical discourses to protect its own interests in the context of the so-called ‘Great Game’, that is, the often confrontational Russo–British relations over the control of Central Asia and Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. In this article we show that Iranian officials had developed a much more substantial articulation between cartography and statecraft than is conveyed by the stereotypes in nineteenth-century Western literature, when the capacity of local players to use counter-mapping to their own advantage was often underestimated by European agents. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi’s map of Sistān exemplifies how the apparently all-powerful Western science that seemingly supported nineteenth-century imperial expansion was rarely left unchallenged locally. The genealogy and circulation of the map also reflects how overly simplistic the postulation of a polarization of ‘Western’ knowledge and ‘Eastern’ attempts at safeguarding local sovereignty can be.     

The Dialogical Tradition of Iranian Modernity: Monazereh,Simultaneity, and the Making of Modern Iran

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theater of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monazereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal¹1 The notion of liminality has been theorized in different capacities. The anthropologist Victor Turner first used the idea of liminality in his study of tribal and religious rituals during which an initiate experiences a liminal stage when he belongs neither to the old order nor yet accepted into his new designation. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1969). Turner’s insight has been expanded to investigate the general question of status in society. See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynam, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 27–51. Bynam applies Turner’s notion of liminality to the lives of Medieval female saints, arguing that Turner’s liminal passage applies more readily to the male initiate but does not in most cases reflect the experience of female initiates in Medieval times. Jungian psychology has shifted the focus from liminality as a stage in social movement to a step in an individual’s progress in the process of individuation. Jeffrey Miller, The Transcendent Function (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 104. See also: Peter Homans, Jung in Context: Modernity and the Making of a Psychology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Others have used liminality to describe cultural and political change, have prescribed its application to historical analysis, or have made reference to “permanent liminality” to describe the condition in which a society is frozen in the final stage of a ritual passage. Respectively, Agnes Horvath, Bjorn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra, “Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change.” International Political Anthropology (2009); Agnes Horvath, Modernism and Charisma (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013); and Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 23. Finally, the notion of liminality has been applied to the analysis of mimetic behaviour and to the emergence of tricksters as charismatic leaders, given the association of the figure of the trickster with imitation. Respectively, Agnes Horvarth, Modernism and Charisma (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013), 55; and Arpad Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 155. This latter sense seems to apply to the history of Iranian modernity, for the anxiety of imitation was indeed one of its central concerns, and influential figures such as Mirza Malkum Khan (1833–1908) were sometimes perceived (though this was not universally the case) as saviours or tricksters alternatively by different people. On this issue, Fereydun Adamiyat notes how different people had different views of Malkum. The “despotic prince Zill al-Sultan” considered him to be of equal status to Plato and Aristotle. Aqa Ibrahim Badayi’ Nigar thought he was devoid of “the fineries of knowledge and literature (latīfah-i dānish va adab). Minister of Sciences and chief minister Mukhbirul Saltanah Hidayat thought “whatever Malkum wrote has been said in other ways in [Sa’di’s] Gulistan and Bustan.” Fekr-e Azadi (Tehran: Sukhan, 1340/1961), 99. Mehdi Quli Khan Hedayat’s view of Malkum Khan was summed up in these words: “This Malkum knew some things in magic and trickstery and finally did some dishonorable things and gave the dar al-fonun a bad reputation,” Khaterat va Khatarat (Tehran: Zavvar, 1389/2010), 58. Having said that, my use of the notion of liminality, though informed by the theoretical perspectives cited above, diverges from them in one important aspect: liminality as perceived by contemporary theory seems to be based on a pre-/post- understanding of non-liminal statuses accompanied by a desire on the part of the subject to emerge from the liminal state. This approach does not explain liminality as a site for the synthesis of coexisting identities. The munāzirah is precisely the account of such a process. In the context of Iranian modernity, the discourse of tradition was not perceived as prior to the discourse of modernity, as we shall amply see. In fact, European civilizational progress was deemed to have resulted from the successful implementation of Islamic principles. Therefore, while the history of Iranian modernity can still be analyzed as a liminal stage where a weakened old order meets the promise of a new order, it must be understood in terms of the encounter of simultaneous and parallel discourses. It is in this sense that liminality is employed in this study.View all notes identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogues rather than dialectics. The monazereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.     

The Poetics of Devotion in ʿĀʾisha al‐Bāʿūniyya's Praise of God and Muḥammad

Recently, there has been an effort within Islamic Studies to reassess the common belief that the so‐called ‘post‐classical’ era of Islamic history was characterized by intellectual stagnation and decline. The Mamluk era is one such period that has suffered from a dearth of scholarly attention resulting from outdated stereotypes. This article contributes to scholarship on this era through examining some poems by a late Mamluk poet, ?ā?isha al‐Bā?ūniyya (d. 1517). While much scholarship on al‐Bā?ūniyya focuses on her lyrical mystical verse, the poems studied here incorporate selective allusions to key Islamic sources in order to narrate a history of divine favor as the speaker imagines it. This innovative history expresses a poetics of devotion that focalizes Mu?ammad and the poet's own peers. The poems intertextually anchor this narrative in key Islamic sources, reflecting al‐Bā?ūniyya's extensive scholarly training. They constitute an unusual example of a female poet writing beyond the genres with which women's premodern poetry is conventionally associated. This poetry also represents a post‐classical contribution to Islamic literary and religious history. However, the criterion of originality should ultimately be reconsidered in evaluations of scholarly merit, and scholarship should pay more attention to continuities and intertextuality in texts.     

European Union Constructive Engagement with Iran (2000–2004): An Exercise in Conditional Human Rights Diplomacy

In 2002, the European Union (EU) announced that it would enter a Trade and Cooperation Agreement with Iran. The deepening of economic and diplomatic relations between the EU and Iran was, however, linked by the Commission to progress in four areas: human rights, non-proliferation, terrorism and the Middle East Peace Process. This article argues that the current focus on efforts to find a solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions has overshadowed the dynamics of EU human rights diplomacy towards that country. Unlike diplomatic pressure on the non-proliferation issue, the EU-Iran Human Rights Dialogue did not only enjoy great support by politicians and human rights activists, but did indeed result in changes in legislation and policies aimed at the protection of human rights. Europe's multi-track strategy allowed Iranian activists and members of the legal profession to approach the notion of human rights from within the Shi'a notion of justice and rationality and thus managed to assert Islamic roots for human rights and uncovered the very secular realities of human rights violations in the Islamic Republic. The Dialogue was launched at a critical juncture in Iran's reformist movement and helped likeminded politicians, particularly the executive and parliament, to gain momentum domestically and credibility internationally. While efforts at reform were and still are often impeded by the country's competing centers of power, this article argues that efforts to promote and protect human rights in Iran must not be sacrificed for concerns over the nuclear issue.     

Ulama in Islamic Law‐Making and Adjudication in Contemporary Egypt

The article examines the legislative and judicial tasks of Islamic jurists and how they carried it out in constitutional or general legal structure. While the Pakistani experiment was inspired by the Iranian model of jurists' involvement in legislatures, Egypt took a different path by not recognizing any official role for Islamic jurists with ambiguous recognition of Islamic jurisprudence. The legislative role could take the form of incorporating Islamic jurists into the legislature, establishing a committee partially made up of Islamic jurists, or handing over some legislative task to an Islamic jurisprudential institution. Despite the fact that Islamization was intended to respond to the people's requests, it employed autocratic and authoritarian mechanisms. The project attempted to replace the typical class of socially recognized jurists with appointed committees entrusted with Islamic codification. The experiment was challenged for its operation and its Islamicity but never introduced Shari'a courts or Islamic clerical legislation.     

“Shop-lease Contract with Sar-qofli” in the Post-Iranian Revolution Era: Deletion of “Haqq-e kasb o pisheh o tejārat” from the Law of Lessor–Lessee Relationships

In contemporary Iran, many shops are under the “shop-lease contract with sar-qofli.” In this contract, sar-qofli, a strong usufructuary right supported by intangible assets such as the shop's reputation, is given to the tenant. The “shop-lease contract with sar-qofli” originated from a traditional merchants' custom in Iran's business quarters. After the 1979 Revolution, the Law of Lessor–Lessee Relationships, which provides a legal framework for the practice of “shop-lease contract with sar-qofli,” was completely revised, since Islamic jurists regarded haqq-e kasb o pisheh o tejārat as problematic. Haqq-e kasb o pisheh o tejārat, the legal designation of sar-qofli, was based on a heterogeneous value concept introduced into the Iranian legal system from abroad during World War II. As a result of this revision, another alternative for asset management was granted to shop owners. Nevertheless, “shop-lease contract with sar-qofli” remains the most widely employed form of lease in Iran's property lease market.     

The Limits of Sasanian History: Between Iranian,Islamic and Late Antique Studies

This essay discusses the position of Sasanian Studies from its inception in the late nineteenth century, to its reinvigoration at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The work also discusses the development of the field of Sasanian history and civilization vis-à-vis the three fields of Iranian, Islamic and Late Antique Studies. It is posited that Sasanians have benefited from cross-disciplinary and new historical frameworks that go beyond the traditional field of Iranian Studies, which was never as interested in the history of the period.     

The Great Shoe Store Robbery1

This article contributes to the significant debate on the effects of the Australian criminal justice system on Aborigines and in particular Aboriginal youth. This debate fed into nation-wide concern over an ever increasing number of Aboriginal deaths in custody, recently culminating in the Federal Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Through the use of case studies and other ethnographic data drawn from investigations in the country town of Port Augusta, South Australia, the author illustrates how the agents of the legal and welfare systems in this state operate to present a view of Aboriginal juvenile crime as a normal response to these children's social environment and social conditioning. This process in turn, it is argued, reinforces and legitimates Aboriginal juvenile crime and contributes to its continuance, and the subsequent over-representation of Aboriginal youths at all stages of the juvenile justice system. Yet it is forcefully pointed out that Aboriginal children are not passive victims of the legal and welfare systems. Rather, they form their own interpretations of these systems and their ‘criminal’ activities are often attempts at defiance and capturing some form of control of their own lives in the face of a legal/welfare system seeking to impose control over them. Unfortunately, it is these very activities which return Aboriginal children to the legal and welfare systems they act against.     

The Immemorial Iranian Nation? School Textbooks and Historical Memory in Post‐Revolutionary Iran

Abstract. This paper is concerned with the fortunes of the pre‐revolutionary, Pahlavi nationalist narrative in post‐revolutionary Iran. The study analyses and compares pre‐ and post‐revolutionary school textbooks with the aim of demonstrating that, for all its revolutionary and Islamic‐universalist hyperbole, the Islamic Republic of Iran remained committed to the Pahlavi dynasty's conception of the ‘immemorial Iranian nation’ (or the ‘Aryan hypothesis’) as it was first articulated by European scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Post‐revolutionary Iran clung to the European/Pahlavi master narrative of Iranian history, its very basic ‘story line’. It was, therefore, subject to the same evolution, the same dialectic of remembering and forgetting, the same successive deformations, and the vulnerability to the very same manipulation and appropriation. This study, then, attempts to establish that the Islamic Republic's apparent shift from ‘Iran Time’ to ‘Islam Time’, though it reaches far beyond Iranian borders, nevertheless remains wedded to, and embedded in, the dominant European, secular traditions of the Pahlavi era. Islamic consciousness in Iran does not in any way constitute the basis for an alternative myth to the national myth. Rather, it adds Islamic terminology to the very same myth. Political Islam thus remains within the confines of Iranian nationalism. It is articulated in the framework of the symbols of Iranian nationalism, endowing them with a meaning that is supposedly religious.     

The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

The female body as the bearer of national identity in Iran: a critical discourse analysis of the representation of women's bodies in official online outlets

Abstract

The female body has been in the foreground of nation-building in Iran especially since the 1930s projects of modernization, when unveiling women and adaptation to Western clothing became a crucial factor of bolstering modern Iranian national identity as opposed to a religion-based national identity. After the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic dress code became compulsory and female imagery depicting modesty and piety became a source of national identity. Although the representation of women's bodies in nationalist discourses has been subject of different studies, women's representation in official online outlets is still understudied. This article discusses how women's bodily appearance and representation in official online outlets feed into the nationalist discourses in Iran. Three key cases between 2014 and 2017 are addressed: (i) actress Leila Hatami kissing a man at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival; (ii) the public debate on women's entrance to sports stadiums in 2014–2015; (iii) the public revelation of actress Taraneh Alidoosti's tattooed forearm in 2016. Data were collected from multiple Iranian official online platforms and a critical discourse analysis was undertaken to analyse different forms of discursive articulation regarding women's bodies and national identity. Drawing on feminist literature inspired by the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, the article discusses the ways in which women's bodies are discursively constructed to illustrate a uniform Islamic nationalistic discourse.     

Italian universities,Fascism and the promotion of corporative studies

This article deals with a specific aspect of the development of corporativism as ‘unofficial’ doctrine of Fascist Italy: its presence in Italian universities. It argues that corporatist schools followed the fortune of the ideals they were called to represent, which were definitely eclipsed by the mid-1930s, when the economic crisis called for more direct and effective forms of state intervention in economic life. In the universities, the rise of corporativism as a specific field of study, and the broader project of creating an ideologically educated future ruling class, challenged the domination exercised by the powerful faculties of law in particular, which traditionally were the key paths for access to the legal profession and the civil service. The resistance of the conservative university establishment meant that the plans to promote corporatist curricula had failed well before the fall of the regime, but many of those appointed to teach Corporative Studies under Fascism maintained their academic positions in Italy's ‘de-Fascistized’ post-war law faculties, and made innovative contributions to Italian social and economic thought.     

Jāmī's Salāmān va Absāl: Political Statements and Mystical Advice Addressed to the Āq Qoyūnlū Court of Sultān Ya‘qūb (d. 896/1490)

This article explores Salāmān va Absāl, one of seven poems which comprise Jāmī's collection of long masnavīs, known collectively as the Haft aurang. The work, which gained some renown outside Iran due to the English version of Edward FitzGerald, has nevertheless received little attention in modern scholarship. The few investigations of Salāmān va Absāl, moreover, have dwelled on its narrative, which tells the story of the carnal attraction of a prince for his wet-nurse, and never situated the work in its historical context or examined its political content. In addition, the allegorical symbolism of the tale, especially its depiction of key stages of the Sufi path, such as the act of repentance, has not been discussed in terms of representing a work of mystical advice. With these concerns in mind, the present article discusses the possibility that the political elements in Salāmān va Absāl complement the advice it gives on becoming a Sufi. Seen from this perspective, it would appear that Salāmān va Absāl correlates the notion of the just ruler to the Sufi concept of the “Perfect Man” to the extent that Jāmī presents the Sufi-king as the ideal medieval Islamic ruler. By implication, the work advises its royal patron, Sultān Ya‘qūb, to repent and embark upon the Sufi path, doing so, Jāmī intimates, would lead Ya‘qūb to realize his rank as God's “true” vicegerent.     

The Politics of Zoroastrian Philanthropy and the Case of Qasr-e Firuzeh

In Iran and India religious philanthropy has been a feature of Zoroastrian piety as well as providing the means by which both communities have prospered throughout their respective histories. In Iran an elaborate structure for the regulation of charitable donations was already in place during the Sasanian period and laid the foundation for the laws governing pious foundations, awqāf, after the Islamic conquest. The increased interaction between Iranian Zoroastrians and Parsis from the mid-nineteenth century onwards led to the expansion of the Tehran Zoroastrian community and the rise of a wealthy merchant class which in turn enabled philanthropic activity to flourish. This development will be discussed here with reference to a particular vaqf, that of the first ārāmgāh or Zoroastrian cemetery to be established in Tehran in the early twentieth century. The case of Qasr-e Firuzeh spans three successive governments in Iran and gives an insight into the management of a charitable endowment within different political contexts.     

Mesopotamian or Iranian? A New Investigation on the Origin of the Goddess Anāhitā

Ar?dvī Sūrā Anāhitā, a popular Zoroastrian yazatā, is celebrated in Ya?t 5 (ābān Ya?t). Anāhitā is mostly believed to be an Indo-Iranian or Iranian deity who has absorbed influences from the creed and iconography of Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess, in the course of history. The type and the degree of such influences are still under debate. The paper places this goddess into the context of ancient Western Asia. Findings are presented in two sections: in the first section, the Indo-Iranian, Iranian and western Iranian origins of Anāhitā are questioned, and in the following section two points are clarified: first, the Mesopotamian origin for Anāhitā is more consistent with historical and archaeological evidence, and second, Anāhitā is the same as Annunit/Annunitum, Sippar—Amnamum’s goddess of war and victory and the avatar of Antu, who was added to the list of his royal patron deities as a result of political and military developments early in the reign of Artaxerxes II.