Religious Statecraft (Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics)
by Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar
Since the 1979 revolution, scholars and policy makers alike have tended to see Iranian political actors as religiously driven-dedicated to overturning the international order in line with a theologically prescribed outlook. In Religious Statecraft, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar argues that such views have the link between religious ideology and political order backwards. This provocative book examines the politics of Islam rather than political Islam-demonstrating that religious narratives can chan...
Missed Opportunity? Was Iran's Green Movement an Unconventional Warfare Option?
by United States Army Command and General S
The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia
This volume examines the major cultural, religious, political, and urban changes that took place in the Iranian world of Inner and Central Asia in the transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic periods. One of the major civilizations of the first millennium was that of the Iranian linguistic and cultural world, which stretched from today's Iraq to what is now the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. No other region of the world underwent such radical transformation, which fundamentally alter...
Slavery in the Middle East is a growing field of study, but the history of slavery in a key country, Iran, has never before been written. This history extends to Africa in the west and India in the east, to Russia and Turkmenistan in the north, and to the Arab states in the south. As the slave trade between Iran and these regions shifted over time, it transformed the nation and helped forge its unique culture and identity. Thus, a history of Iranian slavery is crucial to understanding the charac...
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A hugely ambitious, “delightfully readable, genuinely informative” portrait (The New York Times) of the two-centuries-long entwined histories of Iran and America—two powers who were once allies and now adversaries—by an admired historian and former journalist. In this rich, fascinating history, John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of the relations between these two nations back to the Persian Empire of the eighteenth century—the subject of great a...
Until the 1960s, little was known inside or outside Iran about the tribes living in the country. The anthropological research of Erika Friedl is now renowned for presenting comprehensive data collected over a 50-year period from her time among the Boir Ahmad tribal people living in the Zagros Mountains of Iran. In this new book, Friedl turns her attention to the subject of religion, which she had only touched upon in her previous work. About ninety percent of people in Iran and nearly everybod...
This is a new edition of the bestselling biography of the Iranian leader who influenced the current global Islamic revival.When the Ayatollah Khomeini burst onto the international scene in the late 1970s, radical Islam became a factor of political life that would change the world. And with the Iranian Revolution that Khomeini led in 1978/79, religion once more moved centre stage in world politics. Who was this frail octogenarian who became the inspiration for a new militant Islam? Khomeini was t...
Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed graphic memoir "of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran.... That Satrapi chose to tell her remarkable story as a gorgeous comic book makes it totally unique and indispensable" (Time). Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagu...
The Qajar Pact (International Library of Iranian Studies)
by Vanessa Martin
The Qajar Pact explores new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Iranian state and society, and is the first broad study of lower social groups in this period. Vanessa Martin argues that Qajar government was certainly despotic, but was also founded on a consensus based on the Islamic principles of consultation and negotiation. The author focuses on the role of the non-elite groups in urban society up to the years before the Constitutional Revolution.
Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East)
by Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh
Eighteen months after Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, hundreds of thousands of the country's women participated in the Iran-Iraq War (1980 - 88) in a variety of capacities. Iran was divided into women of conservative religious backgrounds who supported the revolution and accepted some of the theocratic regime's depictions of gender roles, and liberal women more active in civil society before the revolution who challenged the state's male-dominated gender bias. However, both groups were integr...
Persian Kingship and Architecture
by Sussan Babaie and Talinn Grigor
Since the Shah went into exile and the Islamic Republic was established in 1979 in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the very idea of monarchy in Iran has been contentious. Yet, as Persian Kingship and Architecture argues, the institution of kingship has historically played a pivotal role in articulating the abstract notion of 'Iran' since antiquity. These ideas surrounding kingship and nation have, in turn, served as a unifying cultural force despite shifting political and religious allegianc...
Brought up as a Christian, Marina Nemat's peaceful childhood in Tehran was shattered when the Iranian Revolution of 1979 ushered in a new era of Islamic rule. After complaining to her teachers about her Maths lessons being replaced by Koran study, Marina was arrested late one evening. She was taken to the notorious prison, Evin, where interrogation and torture were part of the daily routine. Aged sixteen, she was sentenced to death. Her prison guard snatched her from the firing squad bullets but...
Mustafa 'Ali's Fursat-Name (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, #135)
by Rana Von Mende
Safavid Persia in the Age of Empires (The Idea of Iran)
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi‘ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran’s modern identity. In this book, leading scholars of Iranian history, culture and politics examine the meaning of the idea of Iran in the Safavid perio...
Here is the fascinating and equally unforgettable sequel to Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's memoir-in-comic strips of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Persepolis ended on a cliffhanger in 1984, just as fourteen-year-old Marjane was leaving behind her home in Tehran, escaping fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in the West. Here we follow our young, intrepid heroine through the next eight years of her life: an eye-opening and sometimes lonely four years of high...
Stretching from the ancient Chinese capital of Xian across the expanses of Central Asia to Rome, the Silk Road was, for 1,500 years, a vibrant network of arteries that carried the lifeblood of nations across the world. Along a multitude of routes everything was exchanged: exotic goods, art, knowledge, religion, philosophy, disease and war. From the East came silk, precious stones, tea, jade, paper, porcelain, spices and cotton; from the West, horses, weapons, wool and linen, aromatics, entertain...
Alternative Iran offers a unique contribution to the field of contemporary art, investigating how Iranian artists engage with space and site amid the pressures of the art market and the state's regulatory regimes. Since the 1980s, political, economic, and intellectual forces have driven Iran's creative class toward increasingly original forms of artmaking not meant for official venues. Instead, these art forms appear in private homes with "trusted" audiences, derelict buildings, leftover urban z...
Following the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government set out to Islamize society. Muslim piety had to be visible, in personal appearance and in action. Iranians were told to pray, fast, and attend mosques to be true Muslims. The revolution turned questions of what it means to be a true Muslim into a matter of public debate, taken up widely outside the exclusive realm of male clerics and intellectuals. Say What Your Longing Heart Desires offers an elegant ethnography of these debates among a gr...
The Anabasis of Alexander (Loeb Classical Library, #269) (Loeb Classical Library *CONTINS TO [email protected])
by Arrian
Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander in seven books is the best account we have of Alexander's adult life. Indica, a description of India and of Nearchus's voyage therefrom, was to be a supplement. A student of Epictetus, Arrian took notes at his lectures and published them (in eight books of which we have four, The Discourses) and also the Encheiridion or Manual of Epictetus. Both works are available in the Loeb Epictetus edition. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Arrian is in two volumes.
The Monumental Reliefs of the Elamite Highlands (Mesopotamian Civilizations, #22)
by Javier Alvarez-Mon
The Monumental Reliefs of the Elamite Highlands documents and analyzes for the first time a corpus of eighteen monumental highland reliefs from the Elamite civilization in ancient Iran, which-hitherto preserved by their remote location and anonymous existence-have recently become imperiled by an influx of tourists and the development of the surrounding landscapes. With this book, Javier Alvarez-Mon aims to safeguard this important part of Iran's cultural heritage. The eighteen reliefs presented...