Shirin Neshat's determination to undermine Western assumptions about Middle Eastern women has resulted in an already substantial body of astounding and profound work. These images wrest emotional, aesthetic and political freedom from the dominant patriarchal culture, whether it be the Colonialist West or fundamentalist Iran. This volume offers a look at Neshat's latest film installation, and includes critical commentary on the work. The book also offers a concise overview of Neshat's career with images from her most important works, plus a biography and bibliography.

By carefully placing the canonical books of Esther, Nehemiah, and Ezra within the larger Persian history, Alloway creates a credible context in which these three truly uncommon tales may be appreciated in all their earthy authenticity.

In this volume three stories from Persian poem the Khamseh - "Khosrow and Shirin," "Layla and Majnum," and "The Seven Princesses" - have been told with abridgement in prose. They are augmented by color reproductions of Persian miniatures based on an early 16th manuscript dated 1524/25.

The Green Movement protests that erupted in Iran in 2009 amid allegations of election fraud shook the Islamic Republic to its core. For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open. Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran’s current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran’s theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a “brain drain” of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran’s repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts. In Parsa’s view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.

This book offers new insights into the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Challenging the dominant interpretation of Nezami’s poetry as the product of mysticism or Islam, this book explores Nezami’s literary techniques such as his pictorial allegory and his profound conceptualization of poetry, rhetoric, and eloquence. It employs several theoretical and methodological approaches to clarify the nature of his artistic approach to poetry. Chapters explore Nezami’s understanding of rhetoric and literature as Sakhon, his interest in literary genres, the diversity of themes explored in his Five Treasures, the sources of Nezami’s creativity, and his literary devices. Exploring themes such as love, religion, science, wine, gender, and philosophy, this study compares Nezami’s works to other giants of Persian poetry such as Ferdowsi, Jami, Rudaki, and others. The book argues that Nezami’s main concern was to weave poetry rather than to promote any specific ideology.

The work of Nizami Ganjavi, a classical poet of the twelfth century, is fueling new cultural debate in Iran in recent years. The dominant discourse encourages the reading of the texts in light of biographical or theological conventions and religious motives. These essays explore Nizami s influential role and his portrayal of issues related to love, women, and science, stressing his preoccupation with the art of speech as a major impetus behind his literary activity.

Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the re-introduction of Sharica law relating to gender and the family, women's rights in Iran suffered a major setback. However, as the implementers of the law have faced the social realities of women's lives and aspirations, positive changes have gradually come about. Here Ziba Mir-Hosseini takes us to the heart of the growing debates concerning the ways in which justice for women should be achieved. Through a series of lively interviews with clerics in the Iranian religious center of Qom, she seeks to understand the varying notions of gender that inform Islamic jurisprudence and to explore how clerics today perpetuate and modify these notions. Mir-Hosseini finds three main approaches to the issue: insistence on "traditional" patriarchal interpretations based on "complementarity" but "inequality" between women and men; attempts to introduce "balance" into traditional interpretations; or a radical rethinking of the jurisprudential constructions of gender. She introduces the debates among the commentators by examining key passages in both written and oral texts and by narrating her meetings and discussions with the authors. Unique in its approach and its subject matter, the book relates Mir-Hosseini's engagement, as a Muslim woman and a social anthropologist educated and working in the West, with Shii'i Muslim thinkers of various backgrounds and views. In the literature on women in Islam, there is no account of such a face-to-face encounter, either between religion and gender politics or between the two genders.

One of greatest Persian writers of both classical prose and poetry, Sa‘di was revered in his time as a man of great wisdom and passion. Sometimes said to have lived over one hundred years, the body of his work was written in the thirteenth century. Filled with extracts of the poet’s melodious and insightful writing, and critical analysis thereof, this revealing biography examines why he was so idolised until the 1950s, and why since then he has fallen into relative obscurity. Focussing on the themes of both physical and spiritual love stitched through Sa‘di’s writing, as well as the impact of his many years travelling, Katouzian sheds a unique insight on who he calls 'the poet of life, love and compassion'.

Recent events in the Middle East have propelled the once marginalized Kurdish community to the centre of regional and, indeed, world affairs. The growing significance of the Kurds in the politics of the Middle East has lead to greater interest amongst both academics and policy makers regarding the community’s culture, politics and history. This current volume seeks address this growing interest by presenting a selection of articles from leading experts on the history of the Kurds. These articles scrutinize a variety of subjects which provide important context to today’s Kurdish question. It includes contributions which contextualize the evolution of a distinctive Kurdish identity and culture. Furthermore, it includes works which seek to examine the impact of the gradual transformation of state power in the Middle East – more precisely the breakdown of imperial orders and the concurrent emergence of the modern nation-state – on the relationship between the Kurds and the central governments under which they lived during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In doing so, this volume will be of interest to all those wishing to gain a deeper historical understand of the present day Kurdish affairs. This book was published as a special issue of Iranian Studies.