Abstract This article argues that the notion of Iranian culture employed in the public discourse of Zoroastrians allows them to tackle the dilemma of Shiʿi-dominated Iranianness without provoking Shiʿi authorities. The piece offers an analysis of ethnographic data, including detailed speech acts documented in Zoroastrians’ ritual spaces and cultural exhibitions. It explores the Zoroastrian configuration of an Iranian culture that summons and encodes pre-Islamic tropes and modern nationalist sentiments by constantly maneuvering around national, religious, and ethnic categories. This configuration's underpinning assumptions, narratives, and texts have powerful platforms in Iranian nationalist imagination. I propose that this arrangement attempts to carve out a space for Zoroastrians’ distinct identity by connecting the history of the Muslim Arab invasion of Persia to the Shiʿi hegemonic norms of Iranian culture today. It further invokes Zoroaster's indigeneity and teachings as the foundation of authentic Iranianness to establish Zoroastrians’ survival as a cultural system.
{"title":"Distinction and Survival: Zoroastrians, Religious Nationalism, and Cultural Ownership in Shiʿi Iran","authors":"Navid Fozi","doi":"10.1017/irn.2022.58","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.58","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article argues that the notion of Iranian culture employed in the public discourse of Zoroastrians allows them to tackle the dilemma of Shiʿi-dominated Iranianness without provoking Shiʿi authorities. The piece offers an analysis of ethnographic data, including detailed speech acts documented in Zoroastrians’ ritual spaces and cultural exhibitions. It explores the Zoroastrian configuration of an Iranian culture that summons and encodes pre-Islamic tropes and modern nationalist sentiments by constantly maneuvering around national, religious, and ethnic categories. This configuration's underpinning assumptions, narratives, and texts have powerful platforms in Iranian nationalist imagination. I propose that this arrangement attempts to carve out a space for Zoroastrians’ distinct identity by connecting the history of the Muslim Arab invasion of Persia to the Shiʿi hegemonic norms of Iranian culture today. It further invokes Zoroaster's indigeneity and teachings as the foundation of authentic Iranianness to establish Zoroastrians’ survival as a cultural system.","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86234575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract That Safavid Iran was scene to a boom in the occult sciences (ʿulum-i gharība) is now beginning to be acknowledged by specialists; what has yet to be appreciated is the extent to which that boom represented a smooth and conscious continuation of Mamluk, Aqquyunlu, Ottoman and especially Timurid Sunni precedent. In particular, lettrism (ʿilm-i ḥurūf), developed by the Pythagoreanizing, imamophile New Brethren of Purity as universal imperial science, was embraced by leading Safavid thinkers and doers as a primary Sunni means of Shiʿizing Iran. This occult continuity is epitomized by the oeuvre of Maḥmūd Dihdār Shīrāzī “ʿIyānī” (fl. 1576), the most prolific Persian author on lettrism of the sixteenth century and teacher to Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621) himself. His Unveiling Secrets (Kashf al-asrār)—a passionate prosimetric paean to Imam ʿAlī as cosmic principle in strictly Akbarian-Būnian terms, like Rajab al-Bursī’s (d. after 1410) work before it—is contextualized and translated here as a case in point.
{"title":"Occult Ecumenism: Maḥmūd Dihdār Shīrāzī's Unveiling Secrets as Exemplar of Timurid-Safavid Sunni-Shiʿi Science","authors":"Matthew Melvin-Koushki","doi":"10.1017/irn.2022.62","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.62","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract That Safavid Iran was scene to a boom in the occult sciences (ʿulum-i gharība) is now beginning to be acknowledged by specialists; what has yet to be appreciated is the extent to which that boom represented a smooth and conscious continuation of Mamluk, Aqquyunlu, Ottoman and especially Timurid Sunni precedent. In particular, lettrism (ʿilm-i ḥurūf), developed by the Pythagoreanizing, imamophile New Brethren of Purity as universal imperial science, was embraced by leading Safavid thinkers and doers as a primary Sunni means of Shiʿizing Iran. This occult continuity is epitomized by the oeuvre of Maḥmūd Dihdār Shīrāzī “ʿIyānī” (fl. 1576), the most prolific Persian author on lettrism of the sixteenth century and teacher to Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621) himself. His Unveiling Secrets (Kashf al-asrār)—a passionate prosimetric paean to Imam ʿAlī as cosmic principle in strictly Akbarian-Būnian terms, like Rajab al-Bursī’s (d. after 1410) work before it—is contextualized and translated here as a case in point.","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86905202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Unfinished History of the Iran–Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Annie Tracy Samuel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021). xvii + 302 pp. $99.99. ISBN 9781108777674 (hardcover)","authors":"Eric Lob","doi":"10.1017/irn.2022.61","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.61","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90289884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Authority in Islam is often understood to operate as a site of negotiation. Based on textual analysis and ethnographic research, this article examines three case studies of disparate Shi'i Sufi Orders where a willing deferral of certain types of authority exists. In the first case study, the Soltanalishahi Order refer their members to an outside mujtahid for all matters relating to the shariat, therein limiting the powers of their shaykhs and qotb. The second case study looks at debates concerning the nature of the qotb's authority within a single order, particularly as it pertains to the power of touch and transmissibility of blessing (barakat) from qotb to object to person, with the order's leadership refuting the idea of charismatic embodied authority despite some of their lay members’ beliefs. Finally, the third case study addresses a group who refute the need for any centralized leadership at all and instead recognize and read the works of multiple qotbs from disparate Iranian orders. By focusing on the deferral of authority, as a type of editing, as a type of shaping, I hope to show that the refuting of certain duties is just as formative as the amassing of powers.
{"title":"And the Master Answered?: Deferrals of Authority in Contemporary Sufism in Iran","authors":"S. Golestaneh","doi":"10.1017/irn.2022.63","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.63","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Authority in Islam is often understood to operate as a site of negotiation. Based on textual analysis and ethnographic research, this article examines three case studies of disparate Shi'i Sufi Orders where a willing deferral of certain types of authority exists. In the first case study, the Soltanalishahi Order refer their members to an outside mujtahid for all matters relating to the shariat, therein limiting the powers of their shaykhs and qotb. The second case study looks at debates concerning the nature of the qotb's authority within a single order, particularly as it pertains to the power of touch and transmissibility of blessing (barakat) from qotb to object to person, with the order's leadership refuting the idea of charismatic embodied authority despite some of their lay members’ beliefs. Finally, the third case study addresses a group who refute the need for any centralized leadership at all and instead recognize and read the works of multiple qotbs from disparate Iranian orders. By focusing on the deferral of authority, as a type of editing, as a type of shaping, I hope to show that the refuting of certain duties is just as formative as the amassing of powers.","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89372513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars analyzes the written and visual forms of cultural production that take Afghanistan as their object after the US-led intervention in 2001. Alla Ivanchikova describes Afghanistan, having been cast onto the world stage in the 2000s as a “bright object,” in line with the work of the object-oriented philosopher Levi R. Bryant. By contrast, Ivanchikova writes, Afghanistan was a “dim object” from 1989 to 2001, when it did not receive the attention of the international community after the Soviet withdrawal. By “dim object,” the author refers to the idea that Afghanistan “emitted no light, attracted no attention, and the eyes of the world were not on it” (1). Ivanchikova’s case studies involve fiction and nonfiction cultural production produced during the post-9/11 period, most of which was created for an Anglophone global audience to satisfy a high demand for knowledge about Afghanistan. Ivanchikova maintains that these two decades saw a proliferation of cultural texts that made Afghanistan visible to a global audience, which required a reckoning with its recent past and a discussion of humanitarianism, Afghan women, and transnational terrorism. Imagining Afghanistan attempts to uncover the place of Afghanistan in the global imaginary. The book gathers around six thematically organized chapters to illustrate three waves of cultural production. The first wave, around the start of the millennium, centered around the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, which, as Ivanchikova contends, highlighted Soviet barbarity and relied on British colonial imagery. The second wave of cultural production, toward the end of the same decade, moved beyond these representations and offered more nuanced and multidimensional representations of Afghanistan. The third wave, encompassing the second decade of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan in the 2010s, consists of cultural production that moved beyond clichés about the country and its people as timeless, backward, and in a state of isolation. Instead, it made visible its “transnational history and transcontinental connections” (4). Ivanchikova starts the first chapter by discussing Kandahar (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001), Homebody/Kabul (dir. Tony Kushner, 2002), and the French novel The Swallows of Kabul (Les Hirondelles de Kaboul; written by Yasmina Khadra, 2002; translated from the French by John Cullen, 2004). All were produced prior to 9/11 but were propelled into global attention to fill the void in knowledge of Afghanistan at the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom. Although they are selectively silent about Afghanistan’s socialist past, Ivanchikova argues, these three cultural texts show Afghanistan as an object of distant and long-lasting humanitarian crisis—with its people, especially women, in need of saving. These texts became part of a moral assemblage framing the United States’ military operation in Afghanistan as a humanitarian endeavor. Ivanchi
《想象中的阿富汗:9/11战争的全球小说和电影》分析了2001年以美国为首的干预行动后，以阿富汗为对象的文化作品的书面和视觉形式。在伊万奇科娃的描述中，阿富汗在21世纪初被推上了世界舞台，成为一个“明亮的物体”，这与面向对象的哲学家列维·r·布莱恩特(Levi R. Bryant)的作品是一致的。伊凡奇科娃写道，相比之下，阿富汗在1989年至2001年间是一个“模糊的对象”，苏联撤军后，它没有得到国际社会的关注。作者所说的“昏暗的物体”指的是阿富汗“没有发出光芒，没有引起注意，世界的目光也没有在它身上”(1)。伊万奇科娃的案例研究涉及9/11后时期生产的小说和非小说文化产品，其中大部分是为英语国家的全球观众创作的，以满足他们对阿富汗知识的高度需求。伊万奇科娃认为，这二十年来，阿富汗文化文本的激增使全球观众看到了阿富汗，这需要对其最近的过去进行反思，并讨论人道主义、阿富汗妇女和跨国恐怖主义。《想象阿富汗》试图揭示阿富汗在全球想象中的位置。这本书围绕六个主题组织的章节来说明三次文化生产浪潮。第一波浪潮发生在千禧年之初，以阿富汗的人道主义危机为中心，伊万奇科娃认为，这场危机凸显了苏联的野蛮行径，并依赖于英国的殖民形象。第二波文化生产，在同一十年末，超越了这些表现，提供了更细致和多维的阿富汗表现。第三次浪潮，包括2010年代美国领导的对阿富汗干预的第二个十年，由文化生产组成，这些文化生产超越了关于阿富汗及其人民永恒、落后和处于孤立状态的陈词滥调。相反，它让人们看到了它的“跨国历史和跨大陆联系”(4)。伊万奇科娃在第一章开始讨论坎大哈。Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001)， Homebody/喀布尔(导演)。托尼·库什纳，2002)，以及法国小说《喀布尔的燕子》(Les Hirondelles de Kaboul;雅斯米娜·卡德拉(Yasmina Khadra) 2002年著;约翰·卡伦(John Cullen)译自法语，2004年)。所有这些都是在9/11之前制作的，但在“持久自由行动”开始时，它们被推向全球关注，以填补人们对阿富汗了解的空白。伊凡奇科娃认为，尽管他们有选择地对阿富汗的社会主义历史保持沉默，但这三个文化文本表明，阿富汗是一个遥远而持久的人道主义危机的对象，其人民，尤其是妇女，需要拯救。这些文本成为将美国在阿富汗的军事行动定义为人道主义行动的道德集合的一部分。伊万奇科娃在她的书的第二章和第三章中扩展了对2001年后文化文本中反苏情绪的批判。在第二章中，伊万奇科娃对阿富汗裔美国作家哈立德·胡赛尼的长篇小说《追风筝的人》(2003)进行了详尽的分析。她坚持认为，《追风筝的人》以苏联为代表，扭曲了阿富汗的近代史
{"title":"Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars. Alla Ivanchikova (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2019). 259 pp. ISBN 9781557538468","authors":"Munazza Ebtikar","doi":"10.1017/irn.2022.59","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.59","url":null,"abstract":"Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars analyzes the written and visual forms of cultural production that take Afghanistan as their object after the US-led intervention in 2001. Alla Ivanchikova describes Afghanistan, having been cast onto the world stage in the 2000s as a “bright object,” in line with the work of the object-oriented philosopher Levi R. Bryant. By contrast, Ivanchikova writes, Afghanistan was a “dim object” from 1989 to 2001, when it did not receive the attention of the international community after the Soviet withdrawal. By “dim object,” the author refers to the idea that Afghanistan “emitted no light, attracted no attention, and the eyes of the world were not on it” (1). Ivanchikova’s case studies involve fiction and nonfiction cultural production produced during the post-9/11 period, most of which was created for an Anglophone global audience to satisfy a high demand for knowledge about Afghanistan. Ivanchikova maintains that these two decades saw a proliferation of cultural texts that made Afghanistan visible to a global audience, which required a reckoning with its recent past and a discussion of humanitarianism, Afghan women, and transnational terrorism. Imagining Afghanistan attempts to uncover the place of Afghanistan in the global imaginary. The book gathers around six thematically organized chapters to illustrate three waves of cultural production. The first wave, around the start of the millennium, centered around the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, which, as Ivanchikova contends, highlighted Soviet barbarity and relied on British colonial imagery. The second wave of cultural production, toward the end of the same decade, moved beyond these representations and offered more nuanced and multidimensional representations of Afghanistan. The third wave, encompassing the second decade of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan in the 2010s, consists of cultural production that moved beyond clichés about the country and its people as timeless, backward, and in a state of isolation. Instead, it made visible its “transnational history and transcontinental connections” (4). Ivanchikova starts the first chapter by discussing Kandahar (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001), Homebody/Kabul (dir. Tony Kushner, 2002), and the French novel The Swallows of Kabul (Les Hirondelles de Kaboul; written by Yasmina Khadra, 2002; translated from the French by John Cullen, 2004). All were produced prior to 9/11 but were propelled into global attention to fill the void in knowledge of Afghanistan at the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom. Although they are selectively silent about Afghanistan’s socialist past, Ivanchikova argues, these three cultural texts show Afghanistan as an object of distant and long-lasting humanitarian crisis—with its people, especially women, in need of saving. These texts became part of a moral assemblage framing the United States’ military operation in Afghanistan as a humanitarian endeavor. Ivanchi","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88036519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The early 1920s witnessed an upsurge in Soviet interest in Islam on an international scale. This interest was to a large extent guided by Great Game logic, at a time when the idea of Islamic jihad against the British was extremely popular all over the Middle East. Contrary to the common assumption that the Marxist rationale of the Bolsheviks excluded any possibility of integrating religion into Soviet policy, the highest authorities in Moscow adopted a rather opportunistic position with regard to Islam both at home and abroad. Drawing mainly on Russian archival sources, this study questions the origins and nature of the Islamic turn in Soviet discourse, diplomacy, and propaganda in Iran. The article concludes that although the Soviet rapprochement with some members of the Iranian clergy and the integration of religious elements into communist propaganda were carried out for the sake of short-term geopolitical goals, these maneuvers were much conditioned by Soviet domestic policy and post–World War I regional interdependencies.
{"title":"“Islam Says We Are All Equal”: The Islamic Turn in Soviet Propaganda in Iran, 1921–25","authors":"Alisa Shablovskaia","doi":"10.1017/irn.2021.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2021.25","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The early 1920s witnessed an upsurge in Soviet interest in Islam on an international scale. This interest was to a large extent guided by Great Game logic, at a time when the idea of Islamic jihad against the British was extremely popular all over the Middle East. Contrary to the common assumption that the Marxist rationale of the Bolsheviks excluded any possibility of integrating religion into Soviet policy, the highest authorities in Moscow adopted a rather opportunistic position with regard to Islam both at home and abroad. Drawing mainly on Russian archival sources, this study questions the origins and nature of the Islamic turn in Soviet discourse, diplomacy, and propaganda in Iran. The article concludes that although the Soviet rapprochement with some members of the Iranian clergy and the integration of religious elements into communist propaganda were carried out for the sake of short-term geopolitical goals, these maneuvers were much conditioned by Soviet domestic policy and post–World War I regional interdependencies.","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88538199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article explores the ideas of Iranian reformist scholar Sedigheh Vasmaghi and her contribution to religious reformist thought in Iran. As this article demonstrates, a significant aspect of Vasmaghi's work concerns how she understands the extent to which the legal aspects of the Qurʾān and the associated rulings found in fiqh literature are relevant to the conditions of the modern world. This article investigates Vasmaghi's ideas about the Qurʾān and her contextualist approach to interpretation, arguing that her views on Islam's socio-legal rulings are rooted in her approach to the Qurʾān. As the article will demonstrate, Vasmaghi's ideas add to the work of other prominent Iranian reformist scholars such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Muhammad Mujtahed Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar and Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, but her approach is also subject to criticism, in particular her manner of differentiating between the mutable and immutable aspects of religion.
{"title":"Sedigheh Vasmaghi: A new voice of Iranian religious reformism","authors":"Ali Akbar","doi":"10.1017/irn.2022.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the ideas of Iranian reformist scholar Sedigheh Vasmaghi and her contribution to religious reformist thought in Iran. As this article demonstrates, a significant aspect of Vasmaghi's work concerns how she understands the extent to which the legal aspects of the Qurʾān and the associated rulings found in fiqh literature are relevant to the conditions of the modern world. This article investigates Vasmaghi's ideas about the Qurʾān and her contextualist approach to interpretation, arguing that her views on Islam's socio-legal rulings are rooted in her approach to the Qurʾān. As the article will demonstrate, Vasmaghi's ideas add to the work of other prominent Iranian reformist scholars such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Muhammad Mujtahed Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar and Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, but her approach is also subject to criticism, in particular her manner of differentiating between the mutable and immutable aspects of religion.","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90052765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The publication of four Gujarati travelogues written by Parsis traveling to Iran in quick succession in the 1920s marked the intensification of a relationship that had hitherto been based mainly on philanthropy directed towards the Zoroastrians of Iran. The Pahlavi regime, with its assurances of religious tolerance and equity, prompted Parsis to consider deepening their connection with Iran through trade and business investments and also examine the possibility of return to their motherland. The encounters which constitute these travelogues could be framed as experiments which helped the Parsi community in India to construct a framework for developing this relationship. The Parsi travelogues, while attempting to recover a Zoroastrian past in Iran, also try to map the future for the community by addressing its present anxieties and aspirations.
{"title":"Back to the Motherland? Parsi Gujarati Travelogues of Iran in the Qajar-Pahlavi Interregnum, 1921–1925","authors":"M. Ranganathan","doi":"10.1017/irn.2022.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.17","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The publication of four Gujarati travelogues written by Parsis traveling to Iran in quick succession in the 1920s marked the intensification of a relationship that had hitherto been based mainly on philanthropy directed towards the Zoroastrians of Iran. The Pahlavi regime, with its assurances of religious tolerance and equity, prompted Parsis to consider deepening their connection with Iran through trade and business investments and also examine the possibility of return to their motherland. The encounters which constitute these travelogues could be framed as experiments which helped the Parsi community in India to construct a framework for developing this relationship. The Parsi travelogues, while attempting to recover a Zoroastrian past in Iran, also try to map the future for the community by addressing its present anxieties and aspirations.","PeriodicalId":46025,"journal":{"name":"Iranian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80173319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：