From Evangelizing to Modernizing Iranians: The American Presbyterian Mission and its Iranian Students1

This article examines the American Presbyterian education project in Iran from the early nineteenth century to 1940. While most literature on the subject concerns Iranian state-missionary relations and Presbyterian boys' schools in Iran, this article seeks to address the interactions between American Presbyterians, the Iranian state, and students and families of Iranian girls' schools. A study of the Presbyterians' flagship girls' school in Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh and its sixty-six-year history reveals missionary intentions, tactics, and accomplishments, as well as the adaptations and accommodations pressed upon them by the Iranians they served. Despite the school's promotion of modern American norms and Christian teachings, the young graduates of Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh developed a strong sense of loyalty to both Iran and Islam, thus turning an evangelist mission into an important feature of the construction of Iranian nationalism and modernity.     

Fictive Layering and Inversion in the Paintings of Ali-Akbar Sadeghi

In Iran surrealism is spoken of by artists and critics as a living element in art, long after its popularity in Europe and North America has waned. This article explores key features of the work of one of the most prolific contemporary Iranian artists, Ali-Akbar Sadeghi. While Sadeghi says that he thinks of himself as a “surrealist,” his work is distinguished from many self-professed surrealists in Iran: whereas the latter are concerned with representing metaphysical, even mystical, meanings, Sadeghi sees his art as a kind of intellectual exercise, presenting a dramatic theater in which the viewer engages in epistemological interrogation. Though Sadeghi's paintings are full of apparent references to surrealist themes and tropes from the past, here it is argued that his work is not so much a storehouse of surrealist content as a series of puzzles for the viewer to solve.     

Transformations of the Indo-Iranian Snake-man: Myth,Language, Ethnoarcheology,and Iranian Identity

This article sets forth a history (with literary-textual focus) of the Iranian mythological Snake-man, from the earliest Vedic and Avestan evidence, down to Ferdowsi. The continuous development of the myth in Iran is accompanied by changes in the monster's name, which show linguistic reassociations, while a constant in all of this is the figure's representation as an inimical outsider. The Vedic name of the brute's fortification, the background of which in etymology and realia will be shown to be the pre-Aryan Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex, finds a clear but hitherto unobserved correlation in Pahlavi. This illuminates the Indo-Iranian antiquity of the myth in terms of prehistoric inter-ethnic rivalries.     

From the Land of the Pure,in Search of the Lost Origin: An Interview with Bahram Beyzaie on Siyavush-Khani (Siyavush Recitation) and its Mythological and Literary Roots

The interview was conducted in 1997 after the publication of Beyzaie's extraordinary engagement with the legend of Siyavush in Siyavush-Khani (Siyavush Recitation). Beyzaie's experiments with Shahnameh legends are not adaptations in the strict sense of the term. This is primarily because their stories are often different from what appears in the Shahnameh, mix the narratives with other mythical sources and place them in contemporary templates with an inter-paradigmatic gaze that reflects on the meaning and the history of the present. The interview is significant in that, as it has been conducted by a leading playwright and scholar of Iranian performing arts, it enables the reader to have firsthand experience of working in Iran as a playwright and reveals some of the methods Beyzaie uses to handle his subjects.     

“The Painter in Two Frames”: An Archaeological Investigation of Kamal-ol Molk’s Agency in the Field of Art and Politics

An agent’s actions in different fields and its changes can leave material traces. Therefore, archaeology in its broadest methodological meaning surveys material culture and seeks to investigate an agent’s action in a process. Our archaeological excavation in Neshat Garden led to the discovery of material traces of lifestyle changes of a well-known agent from the late Qajar/early Pahlavi era. Mohammad-e Qafari, nicknamed Kamal-ol Molk, was a famous painter of the Qajar court. He left the court in middle age and entered politics as an agent of opposition. Kamal’s journey to Europe was a turning point that extended to the end of his life. At the same time, Iran’s sociopolitical context experienced significant evolution, including the Mashroute Movement and the rise of Pahlavi dynasty to power. Such mutations made Kamal-ol Molk abandon/change his activities in the field of art, sponsored by the power structure, to engage in political activity. His exile/compulsory migration to a faraway village in northeastern Iran is the outcome of his political activities. The present research is based on archaeological surveys and excavations in two sites: Kamal-ol Molk’s house and Neshat Garden. The archaeological investigation of Kamal’s life in context, his paintings, letters, and photos as a long-term process reveals an artist who was also political. His agency in politics was so effective that in order for the “holy honorable party” to survive, he sometimes ordered assassinations.     

The heritage ‘NGO’: a case study on the role of grass roots heritage societies in Iran and their perception of cultural heritage

This paper examines the activities of a group of heritage enthusiasts in Iran. Grass roots heritage activism is a relatively recent phenomenon that appeared in Iran since the late 1990s. They are increasingly operating collectively as cultural or heritage NGOs. They have diverse socio-economic origins and political views. However, as this paper argues, they share a common ground in their activities; one that maintains an ambivalent and critical relationship with the state and official definitions of heritage and identity. Referring to interview and other data collected during fieldwork in Iran, this paper traces and analyses the contours of that common ground and argues that there is a nascent heritage movement in the country. The impact and contribution of these emerging and self-reflective heritage movements to Iranian identity, which is reflected in their embracing of diversity and the notion of historical continuity, reveal the dynamism and complexity of the cultural and political landscape of contemporary Iranian society. They also reveal the importance of generating further scholarship in the field of Iranian cultural heritage. In conceptualising the characteristics of a nascent heritage movement in Iran, the paper makes a new contribution to the approach of existing scholarship in the broader field of heritage studies.     

A Report on a Party and the Guests

“People of protest,” it may be the best name for the men encountering the dictatorship of Qajar dynasty and Reza Shah—The first king of Pahlavi Dynasty (1921–1939) in Iran— the men who paid an expensive price for being protesters: being vanished in the history. In the summer of 2011, we conducted excavation at Neshat Garden and at the house of Kamal ol Molk—the famous painter of Qajarid Iran— two sites dating from the previous century. The interviews indicated the Garden was used for the parties in which numerous guests were invited, but the finds of the archeological investigation represent also a hidden function for the site as well. Studying the agency of garden owners, local villagers and Kamal as well as the remained letters and documents showed the possibility of presence of a political opposition group in the region in 1920s. This essay sheds more light on a process in which the Iranian intellectuals have had to change their ironic protests to armed opposition in 1920s–1940s. Though, the excavation at Neshat Garden offers an illustration of this process of transformation of the nature of political opposition.     

Turn your trash into… Rubbish,art and politics. Richard Wentworth's geographical imagination

This paper analyses the photographs and installations of artist Richard Wentworth in order to examine his urban imagination and the cultural politics of rubbish that underlie it. In doing so this paper contributes more broadly to understandings of rubbish and material culture, and to geography's attention to artistic understandings and inhabitations of urban spaces. Central to this analysis are the geographies of Wentworth's work, its production, consumption and circulation. The paper attends to three nested sets of practices: the ‘everyday’ practices of people which draw Wentworth's eye, the potential of creative cultural practices for developing critiques of space and place, and the practices of the artist. As a result the paper pushes forward debates around the relationship between geography and art, reflecting on the analytical value of art practice to contemporary social-cultural geographies.     

Memoir as Iranian exile cultural production: A case study of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series

In this essay, Iranian exile cultural production is examined via a cultural studies approach, applying Hamid Naficy's work on the concept of liminality and its productive potential to analyze the Iranian women's memoir phenomenon of the past eleven years. Focus is placed primarily upon Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis, which is analyzed as part of this larger memoir phenomenon. I will argue that Persepolis is a prime example of exile cultural production—as a site for experimentation within various genres (here, that of the memoir and graphic novel), and also for identity negotiation, self-reflection, and cultural translation—thanks to the liminality and hybridity of an artist and author who feels she is “in-between.”     

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.     

Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada: Balancing Religious and Cultural Identities

Canada, now the number-one destination for Iranian migrants, is home to one of the world's most dynamic Zoroastrian communities, in which Iranians are increasingly represented and are playing ever more visible roles in maintaining and transforming the tradition. While exile has in some ways reunited Iranian and Parsi (South Asian) Zoroastrians after more than 1,000 years of separation, cultural and in some cases religious differences mean that they continue largely to live in separate spheres even while sharing their places of worship. Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada participate in some social settings as Iranians, in others as Zoroastrians, and in still others as Canadians, but to a large extent they remain a community unto themselves separate from these other three. Even so, their generally progressive interpretations of Zoroastrianism are having an influence on Parsi communities worldwide as well as on Zoroastrians in Iran, and being often recognized as “original Iranians” they are playing important roles in promoting awareness of Iranian culture within the broader community.     

The Formative Years of Anglo‐Iranian Relations (1907–1953): Colonial Scramble for Iran and Its Political Legacy

As the title largely illustrates, this study seeks to investigate, from a diplomatic‐history and geostrategic perspective, the key developments in Anglo‐Iranian relations during what may best be dubbed their “formative years,” ranging from 1907 to 1953. Having thus provided a glimpse into pre‐twentieth‐century Persian–British relations, it moves to analyze the division of Persia into two spheres of influence between Great Britain and Tsarist Russia in 1907, the Anglo‐Iranian agreement of 1919, the English control of Iranian oil during the first half of the twentieth century and the nationalist struggle against it, and finally the 1953 coup d'état orchestrated by the United Kingdom and the United States against the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, which managed to topple him and bring Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to power. While the article focuses mainly on the complex history of Anglo‐Iranian relationship, it strives to shed light on the implications of such a history for future bilateral relations, its impact on the contemporary Iranian perception of the British, and finally the cultural‐political legacy it has left behind in Iran. The study follows a chronological order and draws on a range of English and Persian sources in trying to fulfill its task.     

Iran as a ‘pariah’ nuclear aspirant

This article demonstrates that Iran conforms to Richard K. Betts' model of a ‘pariah’ nuclear aspirant, as its nuclear program is driven by a potent combination of security, normative and domestic political motivations. The regime's commitment to its nuclear program is influenced by Iran's long-standing sense of vulnerability to both regional and international adversaries, and an enduring sense of national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, in parallel with a powerful belief in the superiority of Persian civilisation. This has resulted in the development of a narrative of ‘hyper-independence’ in Iran's foreign policy that simultaneously rejects political, cultural or economic dependence and emphasises ‘self-reliance’. The presumed security benefits that a nuclear weapons option provides are seen as ensuring Iranian ‘self-reliance’ and ‘independence’. This suggests that current strategies that focus exclusively on Iran's security motivations or on a heightened regime of sanctions are fundamentally flawed, as they fail to recognise the mutually reinforcing dynamic between Iran's security and normative/status-derived nuclear motivations.     

The Study of Ancient Iran in the Twentieth Century

The following article discusses the development of ancient Iranian studies, namely the important philological, archaeological, religious, and historical discoveries in the twentieth century and how they have changed our views of ancient Iran and its impact on modern Iranian identity. The essay also previews the use and abuse of ancient Iranian studies by the state and their focus on the newly discovered Achaemenid Empire at the cost of Arsacid and Sasanian dynasties.     

Vehicle Writings in an Iranian Context: The Interplay of Habitus and Field

The main objective of this paper is to problematize writings on vehicles in an Iranian context. Previous studies have indicated that vehicle stickers can be employed to express emotions and social status, political views, ideology and identity, and religious beliefs. However, very little has been done on this discursive practice in Iran. This study is the result of the content analysis of 122 vehicle writings collected from April 2011 to March 2012. This paper will draw on six of the most frequent themes: religion, humor, playing pessimism, didactic expressions, ethnic-geographic identification, and love. Employing Bourdieu's conceptual frameworks of “habitus,” “field,” and “doxa,” and Heath and Street's social practice perspective on literacy, it will be argued that vehicle writings in this study can be regarded as situated literacy practices reflecting the dominant undisputed discourses in the context, but at the same time displaying the dynamic interplay of power relations, the relationship of cultural structures and individual customized versions of those structures in vehicle writings.     

Reading Iran: American Academics and the Last Shah

Despite the nature of American influence in postwar Iran, and despite the fact that Iranian studies has grown into a flourishing field in the United States, scholars have not explored the field's origins during the Cold War era. This article begins with the life of T. Cuyler Young to trace the critical genealogy within the field as it developed, in cooperation between American and Iranian scholars, during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. It proceeds to analyze two cohorts of American scholars whose political inclinations ranged from liberal reformism to revolutionary Marxism. As revolutionary momentum swelled in Iran in the late 1970s, critical scholars broke through superpower dogmas and envisioned a post-shah Iran. However, Cold War teleologies prevented them from fully grasping Iranian realities, particularly Khomeini's vision for Iran. This article argues that the modern field of Iranian studies in the United States was shaped by multiple generations of critical voices, all of which were informed by historically situated encounters with Iran and expressed through a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives.     

Iranian Studies in the United Kingdom in the Twentieth Century

This essay provides a general introductory survey of Iranian and Iran-related studies in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century (including languages, literature, and the arts), with a very brief preliminary foray into earlier Iran-related scholarship and wide-ranging imaginations of Iran in Britain and Ireland, as well as some concluding remarks on contemporary knowledge production about Britain in Iran. Among other themes covered in the essay are the varied contributions of non-Britons and non-Irish to Iran-related scholarship and imaginations in the United Kingdom, underscoring the overall transnational production, dissemination, reception, and utilization of knowledge (history, geography, archaeology, cultures, ethnography and anthropology, art and architecture, Iran-related Persian-language literatures and poetry, etc.). In particular, the essay highlights the contributions made by individuals from, and institutions in, the Indian subcontinent to “British” scholarship and knowledge about Iran.     

Iranian Women's Perspectives on Violence against Women in Iran and the UK

This study explores the perspectives of female Iranian students living in both Iran and the UK concerning violence against women. A qualitative approach, in the form of in-depth interviews, was carried out with 21 participants. Drawing on Stark's concept of “liberty crime” the research found that the participants, regardless of their country of residence, perceived violence against women (VAW) as denying the opportunity for equal personhood by stripping away the victim's sense of self. However, the scope of what was considered to be liberty crime was affected by the individual participants’ religious beliefs and their degree of acceptance of the Iranian state's gender ideology. The research highlighted the extent to which different forms of VAW are interlinked and combine in order to control and subjugate women irrespective of their country of residence.     

Nuclear Iran is Not an Option: A new negotiating strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons

The negotiations between Iran and the P5+1¹ over Tehran's nuclear enrichment activities have not only failed to reach an agreement but have brought Iran much closer to the threshold of mastering the technology to produce nuclear weapons. There are many factors that precipitated this breakdown, including the West's inability to understand and deal with the Iranian psychological disposition, the failure to present to Iran the severity of the punitive measures that could be inflicted as a consequence of their defiance, and the US administration's misleading policy that gave Iran the room to maneuver. There is an urgent need to adopt a distinctively new strategy toward Iran consisting of three tracks of separate but interconnected negotiations: The first should focus on the current negotiations on Iran's enrichment program and the economic incentive package; the second should concentrate on regional security and the consequences of continued Iranian defiance; and the third track should address Iran's and the United States' grievances against each other. The United States must initiate all three tracks without which future talks will be as elusive as the previous negotiations, except this time the West and Israel will be facing the unsettling prospect of a nuclear Iran.