Reviews

Authority and Political Culture in Shi'ism, Said Amir Arjomand, ed., Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1988, 393 pp., index. $19.95, paperback. $49.50, cloth.

A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and her Poetry, Michael C. Hillmann, Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press and Mage Publishers, 1987, 181 pp.

The Timurid Architecture of Iran and Turan, Lisa Golombek and Donald Wilber, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988; Vol. 1: 510 pp. of text; Vol. 2: 16 color plates, 481 black‐and‐white photographs, 8 maps, 162 plans and sections. $130.

Timurid Architecture in Khurasan, Bernard O'Kane, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1987, 418 pp., numerous figures and plates. $49.95.

Iranian Immigrants in the United States: A Case Study of Dual Marginality, Abdolmaboud Ansari, Millwood, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1988, xii + 148 pp.

Aux Sources de la Nouvelle Persane, Christophe Balay and Michel Cuypers, Paris: Institut Français d'Iranologie de Teheran, 1983, 222 pp., bibiography, indexes of proper names, books and journals. 124 Fr. paperback.

Post‐Revolutionary Iran, Hooshang Amirahmadi and Manoucher Parvin, eds., Boulder: Westview Press, 1988, 262 pp. $39.50.

Islamic Art and Spirituality, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987, 213 pp., 10 monochrome plates. $75.00.

Nishapur: Some Early Islamic Buildings and Their Decoration, Charles J. Wilkinson, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986, 328 pp., num. ill., 29 col. pl. $75.00.

The Making of Iran's Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic, Mohsen M. Milani, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988, xiv + 361.

The Poet Sa'di: A Persian Humanist, John D. Yohannan, (Persian Studies Series, No. 11) Lanham, Md.: University Press of America; Bibliotheca Persica, 1987, 149 pp.

The Destiny of a King, Georges Dum´ezil (translated by Alf Hiltebeitel), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, 155 pp. $11.95.

Revolutionary Iran, R.K. Ramazani, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, xvi + 254 pp., appendix to p. 282, notes to p. 294, bibliography to p. 302, index to p. 311. $27.50.

A Bibliography of the Iran‐Iraq Borderland, Keith MacLachlan and Richard Schofield, Cambridge, U.K.: Middle East and North African Press, 1987, 383 pp.

Tales from Luristan (Matalya Lurissu): Tales, Fables and Folk Poetry from the Lur of Bala‐Gariva, Sekandar Amanolahi and W.M. Thackston, transcribed and translated with notes on the phonology, the grammar of Luri and Luri‐English vocabulary. Harvard Iranian Series, Vol. 4, 1986, XIII + 250 pp. $19.95 paperback.

Shi'ism and Social Protest, Juan R. I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie, eds., New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986, x + 321 pp.

My Memories of Baha'u'llah, Ustad Muhammad‐'Aliy‐i‐Salmani, the Barber, translated from the original Persian by Marzieh Gail, Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1982, 122 pp., appendices, short biographies of Baha'is mentioned in the text, as well as notes, selected bibliography and selected love poems of Ustad Muhammad‐'Aliy‐i‐Salmani.

Agricultural Change and Rural Society in Southern Iran, C. Salmanzadeh, Cambridgeshire, England: MENAS Press Ltd., 1980, 275 pp. £17.00 hardback, £10.50 paperback.

Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy‐State Relations in the Pahlavi Period, Shahrough Akhavi, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980, xx + 255 pp.

Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, Michael M.J. Fischer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1980, xviii + 314 pp.     

Public and Private Lives in Iran: An Introduction to the Archaeology of the 2003 Bam Earthquake

Bam, Iran, was destroyed by a powerful earthquake in December 2003. In what is perhaps Iran’s greatest tragedy in living memory, the majority of the mud brick houses and concrete buildings were completely flattened and more than half of the city’s population was killed. Five years after the disaster, a team of Iranian archaeologists and ethnographers excavated the remains of six houses destroyed in the earthquake. The excavated material culture demonstrates the stark contrasts between the residents’ public lives lived outside of their homes, and their private lives lived inside of their homes.     

The Last Episode of an Iranian Teacher’s Bag: Children’s Lives as the Smaller Copies of their Parents’ in Contemporary Iran

How can the desired culture of a dictatorial system be transmitted from one generation to another? The focus of dictators on children could be an answer. Factually in such a system, children are located in a value system which teaches them what to do or what not to do in purpose of being good for the political system since the very beginning of their lives. In Iran, the traditional educational system teaches children to act as adults; people who are able to discern which action is bad and which is good. The exceptions are usually the ones who deconstruct the cultural/political structure and begin to resist based on their agencies. In the present paper, we argue the process of education (formal and informal) in Iran based on two sets of material cultural remains. The first is the Qajar (nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photos of children) and the second is the school compositions of 19 students found in the bag of a teacher who died in the devastating earthquake of Bam in 2003, in South Eastern Iran. The bag was found during a contemporary archaeological project.     

From Ancient to Modern Urbanization: Intermediary Function of an Urban Society

A number of traits identify an urban society from a village. In the 1950s, V.G. Childe identified ten traits for an urban society, including permanent settlement in dense aggregations, centralization of surplus, monumental public buildings, social stratification, a ruling class, systems of recording and administration, exact and predictive sciences regulating the cycle of agriculture operation, conceptualized and sophisticated styles of art, long-distance trade and importing raw materials, and a social organization based upon residence rather than kinship. Although he identified these traits for ancient urban society, these also can be applied in modern times. The most important function of an urban society especially in southeast Iran is its intermediary function. This function can be seen both in ancient and modern times. The present paper aims to identify both urban societies in ancient and modern times, and to explain intermediary function of these societies, including Shahr-i-Sokhta during the third millennium BCE and Zahedan in modern time. In fact, this function may have caused the emergence and development of these urban societies during two different periods. It is also postulated that the decline of this function may have caused the collapse of both societies.     

Fuzzy-Sliding-Mode Supervisory Control of a Seismic Shake Table with Variable Payload for Robust and Precise Acceleration Tracking

Precise tracking of the earthquake acceleration profile in the presence of uncertainties is a challenge for the shake table control design. Design and implementation of a fuzzy-sliding-mode super- visory controller for an electric seismic shake table with variable payload is addressed in this paper. The proposed controller contains two layers including a proportional–integral loop and a fuzzy-sliding-mode supervisory controller. The controller is then implemented in the shake table and its performance is evaluated. The test results reveal successful performance of the proposed controller at robust tracking of some harmonic and seismic excitations in the presence of parametric uncertainties.     

Miocene scleractinian corals from a mixed siliciclastic–carbonate system: Bakhtiari succession,Zagros Basin (central-western Iran)

Colonial scleractinian corals were sampled from three levels within a Miocene marine unit of the Bakhtiari succession, Zagros Basin, central-western Iran. The first two coral-bearing intervals, A and B, contain small-scale scattered colonies and show a poor coral diversity, whereas the third, consisting of a strongly lithified limestone package, reflects a well-developed biostromal framework with higher coral skeletal volume within the Bakhtiari succession. The Bakhtiari succession coral assemblages are characterized by Porites sp. cf. P. maigensis, Porites sp. cf. P. mancietensis, Porites sp. cf. P. collegniana, Tarbellastraea reussiana, Favia sp., Montastrea sp. cf. P. tchihatcheffi, Favites sp. cf. P. neugeboreni, Favites sp. cf. P. neuvillei, Agathiphyllia sp. and Acropora sp. Sedimentological and palaeontological data indicate that the depositional environment is consistent with a mixed carbonate–siliciclastic ramp that was gently deepening basinwards from the shoreline. The hemispherical and massive growth forms of colonies and sparse branching forms dominated the well-illuminated euphotic zone. Abundant domestone and dense pillarstone coral growth fabrics interdigitating with coarse-grained terrigenous sediments developed in the shallow inner ramp environment. Branching forms and meandroid branching colonies together with some massive forms mostly inhabited the low-energy conditions of the lower euphotic to oligophotic zones of the middle ramp. In the middle parts of the mixed carbonate–siliciclastic ramp, sparse pillarstone together with domestone comprises a mixstone coral growth fabric. Fluctuations in nutrient and clastic sediment input, salinity and the growth of red algae likely terminated coral growth.     

What He Thought…What He Did: An Archaeological Study of the Persian Gulf Coasts Colonial Sites of Sheikh Khazal Khan in the Early Twentieth Century

Iranian colonial sites on Persian Gulf coasts include eighteenth-century Portuguese fortresses and graveyards on the islands of Hormoz and Qeshm and twentieth-century British colonial missions in southern Iran and Kuwait. Sheikh Khazal Khan, an Iranian Arab, who lived in the early twentieth century, ruled Khuzestan and counseled the governors of Kuwait. He also apparently worked as Great Britain’s political dependent in the region at least from 1890s. He constructed five palaces on the shores of southwestern Iran and two in Kuwait. The author excavated these sites in 2008. Khazal’s identity is a problematic subject in contemporary Iranian history. He is judged variously as a spy (for most Iranians) and as a hero (for Pan-Arabs). Introducing Khazal Khan’s Persian Gulf coastal architectural data, this essay explains the context in which these colonial architectural units were constructed. The patterns of this colonial process are used to interpret Khazal’s identity, based on the material culture of the era.