This book, first published in 1994, analyses the entire length of Iran’s international boundaries. It reviews the establishment, evolution and continuing contentions over Iranian frontier zones and boundary lines, from the creation of the Iranian nation state out of the diverse and dispersed areas of the Persian empire – a process that has given rise to many contemporary problems that spill over into dispute and conflict.

This book is about Iranian boundaries at a time when crisis of various nature are occurring around Iran, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, with immediate effect on the Iranian borderlands and substantial effect of Iran's relations with her neighbours. Furthermore, issues like the legal regime of the Caspian Sea and the UAE claims on the Iranian-owned and Iranian-held islands of Tunbs and Abu Musa in the Persian Gulf create a situation in Iran's neighbourhood, which influence her foreign relations and engage the country in matters of international importance. Occurrence of all these issues on and around the boundaries of Iran and a thorough study of the unexplored foundation and evolution of these issues within the framework of the study of the Iranian boundaries make this book timely, special, original, and important.

While much has been written about the impact of the 1979 Islamic revolution on life in Iran, discussions about the everyday life of Iranian women have been glaringly missing. Women in Place offers a gripping inquiry into gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran. Author Nazanin Shahrokni takes us onto gender-segregated buses, inside a women-only park, and outside the closed doors of stadiums where women are banned from attending men’s soccer matches. The Islamic character of the state, she demonstrates, has had to coexist, fuse, and compete with technocratic imperatives, pragmatic considerations regarding the viability of the state, international influences, and global trends. Through a retelling of the past four decades of state policy regulating gender boundaries, Women in Place challenges notions of the Iranian state as overly unitary, ideological, and isolated from social forces and pushes us to contemplate the changing place of women in a social order shaped by capitalism, state-sanctioned Islamism, and debates about women’s rights. Shahrokni throws into sharp relief the ways in which the state strives to constantly regulate and contain women’s bodies and movements within the boundaries of the “proper” but simultaneously invests in and claims credit for their expanded access to public spaces.

These essays examine Iran’s place in the world--its relations and cultural interactions with its immediate neighbors and with empires and superpowers from the beginning of the Safavid period in 1501 to the present day. The book provides important historical background on recent political and social developments in Iran and on its contemporary foreign relations. The topics explored include Iranian influence abroad on political organization, religion, literature, art, and diplomacy, as well as Iran's absorption of foreign influences in these areas. A special focus is the prevailing political culture of Iran throughout its early modern and contemporary periods. The authors combine approaches from history, political science, anthropology, international relations, and culturalstudies. Some essays address Iran’s interactions with various Arab and Turkic ethnicities in the region stretching from India to Egypt. Others examine its relations with the West during the Qajar and Pahlavi eras, women's issues, culture inside Iran during the Islamic Republic, and the Shi`ite theocracy of Iran as compared with other Muslim states.

Iran is the only Middle Eastern state to have preserved its national identity through the upheavals of Arab, Turkish and Mongol invasions. It is heir to the richest culture in the Middle East: a culture that extends far beyond the state’s political boundaries. This book, first published in 1987, traces elements of continuity in Iranian society from pre-Islamic times to the turmoil of the Islamic Republic. The author discusses the persistence of religion as a dominant force in Iran’s politics and society; the attraction of unorthodox doctrines such as Mazdakism, Baha’ism, and revolutionary Shi’ism; the tradition of strong, charismatic leadership; and the constant problem of ruling peoples of diverse tribal, religious and linguistic affiliations. He finds explanations for recent political changes in conditions peculiarly Iranian and examines the emerging post-revolutionary society along with some of its new institutions, including the revolutionary guards, the assembly, the neighbourhood committees, and the Friday prayer leaders.

In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

This book charts the history of Iran's sexual revolution from the nineteenth century to today. The resilience of the Iranian people forms the basis of this sexual revolution, one that is promoting reforms in marriage and family laws, and demanding more egalitarian gender and sexual relations.

The first history of slavery in this key Middle Eastern country and how it shaped the nation’s unique character. 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 character of the modern nation. Drawing on extensive archival research in Iran, Tanzania, England, and France, as well as fieldwork and interviews in Iran, Behnaz A. Mirzai offers the first history of slavery in modern Iran from the early nineteenth century to emancipation in the mid-twentieth century. She investigates how foreign military incursion, frontier insecurity, political instability, and economic crisis altered the patterns of enslavement, as well as the ethnicity of the slaves themselves. Mirzai’s interdisciplinary analysis illuminates the complex issues surrounding the history of the slave trade and the process of emancipation in Iran, while also giving voice to social groups that have never been studied: enslaved Africans and Iranians. Her research builds a clear case that the trade in slaves was inexorably linked to the authority of the state. During periods of greater decentralization, slave trading increased, while periods of greater governmental autonomy saw more freedom and peace. “This is a major contribution to the study of enslavement in Iran, which will doubtlessly become a must-read for any future studies of Middle Eastern and Islamic enslavement and abolition, as well as for any work on Iranian history in general.” —Ehud R. Toledano, Tel Aviv University, author of As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East “While this book will be revelatory to scholars of Iran, it also promises to engage with theoretical trends in the study of slavery elsewhere. It frames many research questions broadly to engage with scholars of slavery in other Muslim lands, as well as slavery elsewhere.” —Kamran Scot Aghaie, University of Texas at Austin, coeditor of Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity

Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.

This book focuses on the history of Christianity in Persia and the present-day relationship that Muslims in Iran have taken toward people of other faith traditions. The book provides a comprehensive and readable introduction to a fascinating history with important contemporary ramifications for interfaith and intercultural studies.