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Ervand Abrahamian
Baruch College, CUNY

Ervand Abrahamian (B.A., M.A., Oxford University; Ph.D. Columbia University), an Armenian born in Iran and raised in England, is well qualified by education and experience to teach world and Middle East history. He has published Iran Between Two Revolutions, The Iranian Mojahedin, Khomeinism, Tortured Confessions, and Inventing the Axis of Evil. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has taught at Princeton, New York University, and Oxford University. He is currently working on two books: one on The CIA Coup in Iran; and another, A History of Modern Iran, for Cambridge University Press.

The 1906 Revolution in 2006

What relevance does the Constitutional Revolution have for contemporary Iran? Iran of the early twentieth-first century has little resemblance to its predecessor of the early twentieth century. In the course of these hundred years, the country has experienced major transformations in almost every realm--whether we look at the political system, the mode of administration and the state machinery; or the social system, the class relations and the occupational composition; or the economic system, the mode of production and the main sources of wealth; or the ideological system, the official sources of legitimacy and authority; or, even more visible, in life styles, way of living, housing, transport, food, literary expression, public entertainment, and everyday consumer goods. A Rip Van Winkle who had gone to sleep in 1905 and woken up in 2005 would find himself in completely unrecognizable surroundings. To put it in stark terms, he would have gone to sleep in a country relying mainly on oxen and the wooden-plough. He would wake up a country boasting of nuclear technology and suffering from acute car pollution. Despite these dramatic transformations, contemporary Iranians--whether traditionalists or modernists, rightists or leftists, fundamentalist or populists, believers or non-believers, reformers or revolutionaries, nationalists or internationalists, conservatives or radicals, adherents of vox populi or vox dei, advocates of Velayat-e Faqih or the French Enlightenment, all invariably resort to the 1906 Revolution to justify their positions, arguments, and interpretations of modern history. This paper will explore the reasons why the Constitutional Revolution remains to this day such an attractive lodestar—both as a nostalgic event to look back upon as well as a strong magnet for focusing future hopes. In exploring this, the paper will try to through light on how the actual history of the revolution has been used and abused in contemporary Iran.

Janet Afary
Purdue University

Dr. Janet Afary is a native of Iran. She received her M.A. from the Department of Literature of Tehran University and her Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is an Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at Purdue University. Dr. Afary is author of The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (N. Y.: Columbia UP, 1996), which was also translated and published in Iran (Bisotoun, 2000) and co-author of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005). She was awarded year-long fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), and has received grants from the SOROS and IREX foundations. Dr. Afary has co-edited three volumes and published numerous articles, many of which have also been translated or reprinted in Iran, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Britain. She is currently President of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS-MESA, 2004-2005), and President of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS-MESA, 2004-2006). She was also past-president of the Coordinating Council for Women in History of the American Historical Association (CCWH-AHA).

The Heritage of the Constitutional Revolution and the Impediments to Democracy in Modern Iran

The year 2006 marks the centenary of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. Iran has come a long way since that first movement for democracy and national sovereignty. It has survived a century of Western intervention, revolution, and war to become a stronger and more unified nation. Life expectancy has increased to over 70 years, infant mortality has dropped to 26 per 1,000 live births, and fertility rates have decreased to 2.2. Iran’s young women comprise more than 60% of the students in colleges and universities, leading some institutions of higher learning to consider quotas for men. Yet, insofar as democratic norms are concerned, Iran’s progress has been limited and in some areas the nation has even reversed itself since that first revolution. This presentation looks at Iran’s long tradition of constitutional politics in an attempt to explain this anomaly and show why, at the turn of the twenty-first century, democratic constitutional reforms have become the most important political challenge in Iran.

Abbas Amanat
Yale University

Abbas Amanat received his B.A. from Tehran University in 1971 and D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1981. His principal publications include Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896 (1997) and Resurrection and Renewal: the Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850 (1989). He is the editor of Cities and Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran (1983), Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity (1995) and coeditor of Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from Ancient Middle East to Modern America (2002). He also edited The United States and the Middle East: Diplomatic and Economic Relations in Historical Perspective (2000) and co-edited The United States and the Middle East: Cultural Encounters (2002) and Apocalypse and Violence (2004). Currently he is writing In Search of Modern Iran: Authority, Nationhood and Culture (1501-2001), a survey of Iranian history (Yale, 2005); a biography of the Babi leader and poet Fatima Baraghani Qurrat al-'Ayn, Tahirah to appear in the Makers of the Islamic World series (2006) and a documentary history of Qajar Iran (in Persian). He is the Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale (Title VI National Resource Center) and recipient of Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant for Millennialism Project (1998-2001). He is a Consulting Editor and longtime contributor to Encyclopedia Iranica and his major entries include "Constitutional Revolution" (1994); "Great Britain in Qajar Persia" (2002); "Hajji Baba of Ispahan" (2003) "Historiography of Qajar Iran" and "Historiography of Pahlavi Iran" (2004). He is the General Editor of Persia Observed series (Mage Publishers) with new editions of E.G. Browne's Persian Revolution (1995) and C.J. Wills The Land of the Lion and the Sun (2004). He was the Editor-in-Chief of Iranian Studies, the journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies (1991-98). His graduate course offerings include Becoming the Middle East; Historiography and Methodology of the Modern Middle East; Political Theory and Practice in the Persian Historical Texts and Contexts; and Apocalypse in Modern Societies: Millennial Motifs and Movements.

Memory and amnesia in the historiography of the Constitutional Revolution

This paper addresses the historiography of the Constitutional Revolution and its aftermath (1905-1921). The subject deserves a critical reassessment for a number of important reasons. First, there is a critical mass of well-known primary sources and historical studies that create the dominant corpus of the Constitutional Revolution often to the detriment of lesser-known accounts. From Nazim al-lslam and Browne to Kasravi and Malkzadih and later Lambton and Adamiyyat we may trace textual influences and borrowings that helped shaping of what may be called the reformist narrative. They are imbedded in the notion of mashruta as oppose such narratives that emphasize mashru`a. Second, in the process of remembering the Revolution, some memoirists and historians preferred to suppress or ignore the multiple identities of some effective actors or marginalize them to the point of oblivion; an amnesia in which the self-censuring taqiyya-like attitude of the narrators is well evident. One important example is the editing out from the Constitutional historiography of the Babi affiliation of small but important elite that influenced the early revolutionary message and process. Another is the marginal place of the proto-socialist circles such as Markaz-i Ghaybi in Tabriz and its articulation of the inqilab and millat during the civil war of 1908-1909 and beyond. Third, there is a post-mortem historiographical break that differentiates between the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911 and even 1905-1909) and the post-revolutionary period (1911-1921 or 1925). The newly-published accounts contest such arbitrary break and offer instead alternative readings of the Jangal movement, the Coup of 1921 and the rise of the Pahlavi regime to power as inseparable outcomes of the Revolution. Finally, the literature of the Constitutional period anticipates, and helps to explain, the conspiratorial theories and xenophobic myopia that littered the popular histories of the later 20th century from Makki and Mahmud to Al-e Ahmad and others. This is in part because historians of later generations tried to trace back to the Constitutional Revolution the later Western agendas for influence and control (as in 1919 and 1953). The myth of failure of the Constitutional Revolution only helped augment the impact of foreign intervention and intrigue.

Cyrus Amir-Mokri
Independent Scholar

Cyrus Amir-Mokri is a partner with the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, resident in its New York office. He concentrates in complex commercial litigation and has had significant involvement in many of the firm’s recent high profile litigation matters. His practice focuses on the financial services industry and capital markets, and he regularly represents major international financial institutions.

Mr. Amir-Mokri was born in Tehran, Iran. He came to the United States permanently in 1981. In 1986, Mr. Amir-Mokri was graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. He served as co-editor-in-chief of the Harvard International Review.

Mr. Amir-Mokri earned a Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Chicago, where he was a recipient of a Mellon Foundation dissertation fellowship. His dissertation examines the ideology of Iran’s constitutional revolution and the legacy of that revolution in Iran’s political culture. At the University of Chicago, Mr. Amir-Mokri concentrated in the fields of modern and medieval Islamic history, diplomatic history, and Islamic thought. He has co-authored, with Marvin Zonis, “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” published in a volume entitled Politics and Government in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Ismael and Ismael.

In 1995, Mr. Amir-Mokri was graduated from the University of Chicago Law School. He served as a fellow at the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe at the Law School. His work at the Center focused on the impact of the rule of law and legal institutions on economic development and political participation. Mr. Amir-Mokri later served as law clerk to the Honorable Bruce M. Selya of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

In recent years, Mr. Amir-Mokri has devoted substantial time to matters affecting the Iranian-American community. As a two-term director of the Iranian-American Bar Association, he played a central role in supervising that association’s preparation of position papers on recent United States immigration policy and an independent report on the implementation of certain of those policies. Mr. Amir-Mokri also is a founding member of the Iranian-American Political Action Committee, which is devoted to encouraging Iranian-Americans to participate in the civic and political life of America.

The Distribution of Powers Provisions of Iran’s Constitutions of September, 1906 and October, 1907 as Sources of Political Crisis

This study examines the provisions of Iran’s Constitution of September 1906 (amended by the supplemental provisions adopted in October 1907) defining the scope and distribution of powers among the coordinate branches of government by considering how these provisions distributed power among the various branches and whether, as drafted, these provisions effectively could serve the purposes of a constitution, namely, to forestall political crises. The provisions of the 1906 constitution that receive particular focus include the mechanism for adoption and ratification of legislation (and the powers of the coordinate branches with respect to this issue), the establishment, appointment and jurisdiction of the judiciary (including designation of the judiciary as the formal arbiter of disputes between the executive and legislative branches), and the legislature’s power to offer binding interpretations of the constitution (and the impact of this provision on the position of the judiciary). This study compares the provisions of Iran’s 1906 constitution with those of other constitutions, such as the constitution of the United States.

The study concludes preliminarily that Iran’s 1906 constitution (as amended) created an imbalance of power in favor of the legislature on critical issues such as control over the enactment and interpretation of legislation. In contrast, other constitutions, such as that of the United States, provide for an executive veto of legislation and appoint the judiciary to be the ultimate interpreter of the constitution. Thus, Iran’s 1906 constitution failed in what American constitution-makers, for instance, deliberately sought to achieve, to wit, tempering the legislature’s power by assigning some legislative functions to the other branches.

The failure of the 1906 constitution to adopt functional checks and balances had the further consequence of making Iranian political institutions incapable of coping with political crises. Thus, the study concludes more broadly that the recurring political crises of 1907 and 1908, which pitted the executive branch (i.e., the monarchy) against the legislature and ultimately led to the civil war of 1909, were in part a manifestation of the flawed constitutional design. The study also suggests that broader historical judgments concerning the righteousness of the legislature and monarchy in Iran’s constitutional narrative should be reconsidered in the light of neutral criteria based on social and political goals of constitution-making.

Touraj Atabaki
International Institute of
Social History, The Netherlands

Prof Touraj Atabaki studied theoretical physics (BSc, MSc) and history at National University of Iran and University of London. Worked at Utrecht University, where he acquired MA and PhD. Holds the endowed chair of 'Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia' at the Department of History of the University of Amsterdam. He is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History.

He has been visiting fellow at the Academy of Sciences of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Russia and visiting senior research fellow, the Middle East Centre, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. Atabaki is member of editorial boards of: Journal of Iranian Studies, Journal of Azerbaijani Studies and Review of International Affairs.

Touraj Atabaki's main research interests are Historiography of everyday life and comparative subaltern history.

The Movement for Constitutionalism in Iran and its Trans-Caspian Dependencies

In the historiography of Iranian constitutionalism and the Constitutional Revolution, the reformist movement is being treated as a receptive movement crafted by the ideas originating chiefly from nineteenth century Western Europe or Russia, with no dependencies on Asia or the Middle East, excepting the Ottoman Empire. Even in the case of the Ottoman Empire, the study of the cross-border link has been limited to the non-reciprocal impact that the movement for change and reform in the Ottoman Empire had on late nineteenth century – early twentieth century Iran; with no reference to the possible impact that the Iranian constitutionalism might have had on the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. In the case of the Trans-Caspian connections the historiography of Iranian constitutionalism has been usually limited its reference to a few non-reciprocal links between Iran and the northern frontiers where mainly the Caucasus was in charge of producing revolutionary literature or dispatching revolutionary agents to the south in order to save the constitution from being slaughtered by the Qajar despotism.

In a corresponding fashion, in Soviet historiography, the study of the reformist movement of the early twentieth-century in the Caucasus and Central Asia, had been generally treated as an isolated, self-contained movement, confined within the geographic borders of Baku, Tbilisi and Bukhara, or at most within the southern region of the Tsarist Empire, Turkistan. The occasional reference to the cross-regional dimension of these reform movements, if ever, was merely to its association with the political reforms exercised during the same period by the Russians or Tatars in different parts of the Tsarist Empire. Here too, what has been largely overlooked is the bond between the reform movement in the Caucasus and Central Asia and the corresponding movements in the neighbouring countries, namely Iran, Afghanistan, India or the Ottoman Empire.

In the present study, I shall examine the impact, which the Iranian Constitutional Revolution had on the reformist movement of the early twentieth century in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Furthermore, I shall sketch the possible routes, which made such impact possible. My observation in this study is derived from highlighting historical examples at specific moment rather than adopting a checklist approach, covering as many spaces as possible over a certain period of time.

Shaul Bakhash
George Mason University

Shaul Bakhash specializes in the history of the modern Middle East with a special interest in the history of Iran. He received his B. A. and M. A. from Harvard University and his D. Phil from Oxford University. He is the author of Iran: Monarchy, Bureaucracy and Reform Under the Qajars, 1858-1896; The Politics of Oil and Revolution in Iran; and Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution. His articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and books, as well as in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. He worked for many years as a journalist in Iran, writing for Tehran-based Kayhan Newspapers as well as for the London Times, the Financial Times, and the Economist. Before coming to George Mason University, he taught at Princeton University. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and held fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and other research centers. He serves on the Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch/Middle East and the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy and the Middle East Journal.

IRAN'S REFORMERS:RETHINKING THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN ISLAM AND CIVIL SOCIETY

The reform movement that was launched with the election of Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997 was the result of complex factors; but it was also driven--made possible--by powerful ideas: ideas regarding the rule of law, individual rights, freedom of speech, association and assembly, accountable government, separation of religion and state and the centrality of civil society to a humane political system. This cluster of ideas was originally explored and developed by a small group of academics and writers, whom I will call public intellectuals, clustered around two or three journals of ideas. In time, these ideas gained much wider currency. This was partly the work of the public intellectuals themselves, partly the work of reformist newspapers that popularized these ideas in the daily and weekly press, and partly the work of reformist politicians who seized on these ideas for electoral and political purposes. The journalists and newspapers that helped popularize constitutional ideas during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 were, in a way, the forebears of the journalists and newspapers of this period in the history of the Islamic Republic.

These public intellectuals came from different backgrounds. A number were clerics, products of the seminaries, who sought to reconcile Islam with democratic principles. Some were government officials and civil servants, who were also active in politics and wrote for journals of opinion and the daily press. Finally, a number of them were influential journalists and newspaper columnists who gained wide readership and who helped make political ideas first articulated in intellectual journals the currency of common discourse. The contribution of these intellectuals to the political debate and to politics in Iran in the 1990s came in four principle areas. First, as already noted, they espoused a cluster of ideas, influenced by Habermas’s views on civil society and based on concepts of limited government and individual rights that, although not new, were of particular significance in the Iranian context. Second these intellectuals mounted a wholesale attack on the privileged position that the clergy had acquired under the Islamic Republic and began to question their claim to speak as sources not only of political, but even religious authority. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, they called into question the vast authority accorded to the faqih, the leader, under the constitution of the Islamic Republic. Third, they made possible in a manner not previously conceivable in the Islamic Republic the open examination and discussion of religion.

Among the strategies adopted by reformist thinkers were an attempt to define ‘separate spheres’ for religion and politics; to define religion as a matter of personal faith; to define Islam principally as a system of ethics rather than ritual and law; to undercut the authority of the clergy and to claim for the individual the right to Islam and its sacred sources; and to treat Islam as a contested ground of human knowledge and experience.

While the reform movement in Iran failed to consolidate itself and has recently suffered severe setbacks, the powerful ideas that launched Iran’s reformist experiment, are dormant, not dead; they constitute an idea of political order to which Iranians may choose to return.

Ali Gheissari
University of San Diego

Ali Gheissari is Professor of History at the University of San Diego, specializing in the Intellectual and Political History of Modern Iran. He studied at the Faculty of Law and Political Science, Tehran University, and at St Antony's College, Oxford. He has held visiting appointments at Tehran University, the Oriental Institute at Oxford, and UCLA, and is currently Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Selected publications include: Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty, with Vali Nasr (2006); Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (1998); Persian translation of Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Ethics, with Hamid Enayat (1991); “Poetry and Politics of Farrokhi Yazdi” in Iranian Studies (1993); “Truth and Method in Modern Iranian Historiography and Social Sciences” in Critique (1995); “Critique of Ideological Literature: A Review of Intellectual and Doctrinaire Writings in Iran” in Iran Nameh (1994); “Modernity and Nationalism in the Literature of the late-Qajar and early-Pahlavi Iran (1921-1941)” in Iran Nameh (2000); “Iran's Democracy Debate,” with Vali Nasr, in Middle East Policy (2004); “Despots of the World Unite! Satire in the Persian Constitutional Press: Introducing Majalleh-ye Estebdad, 1907-1908” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2005); “Merchants without Frontier: Trade, Travel, and a Revolution in late Qajar Iran,” in Roxane Farmanfarmaian (ed.), War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present (forthcoming, 2007). Currently he is working on two documentary volumes in Persian, entitled: Merchants in Tabriz and Rasht during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911): The Memoirs of Hajj Mohammad-Taqi Jourabchi; and a complete edition of Majalleh-ye Estebdad (Journal of Despotism), a political periodical during the 1907-1908 phase of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.

Constitutional Rights Reconsidered: Development of Civil Law and the Shaping of Iran’s Judiciary

Over the course of the past several decades the question of individual and constitutional rights has become prominent in Iranian political and legal debates. Iran is particularly significant in the Muslim world in which there has been a continuous discussion of rights, as the concept is understood in modern political and legal theory. This paper will examine the ongoing debate over the concept of rights in legal thought in Iran in the early twentieth century as reflected in different attempts to draft the Civil Law. It will be pointed out that the general framework of constitutional rights as outlined in the Constitution of 1906 prepared the ground for more particular legislation in civil law, which took place from the late 1920s onwards. Iranian legal reforms in the twentieth century would not have been possible without such constitutional framework. It has been argued that the Iranian Constitutional Laws of 1906-07 drew on both modern Western sources as well as Persian traditions –which consisted of the Shari'a laws and the corresponding local customs or Urf. From a political point of view this Constitution called for a transformation of absolutist state into a constitutional government, and thus a transformation of subjects into citizens with recognized rights and responsibilities. However, in the realm of legal theory there was a more explicit tension between different legal paradigms. Fresh ground was broken early in this debate by parliamentary proceedings during the first and second sessions of the Majles, followed by new legislation and commentaries by a generation of law experts during the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods. Although the Pahlavi state provided, as it were, a “window of opportunity” for legal reform and institution-building, in practice its autocratic style was a reversal of constitutional principles and procedures which contributed to the erosion of its legitimacy and led to the revolution of 1979 that in turn resulted in a new theocratic constitution. However, in Iran the Constitution of 1906 had an enduring legacy on legal thought, language, and institutions; a legacy which, in spite of its significance, has remained understudied. By drawing on a wide range of primary source material this paper will examine the legal dimension of the Constitutional Revolution with the concept of Rights at its core, and the subsequent efforts to craft a standard Civil Law and to design a central Judiciary.

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak
University of Maryland

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland. For nineteen years he was Professor of Persian language and literature and Iranian culture and civilization at the University of Washington. He has studied in Iran and the United States, receiving his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in 1979, and has taught English and comparative literature and translation studies, as well as classical and modern Persian literature at the University of Tehran, Rutgers University, Columbia University, and the University of Texas.

Professor Karimi-Hakkak is the author of Nineteen books and over one hundred major scholarly articles. He has contributed articles on Iran and Persian literature to many reference works, including The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Encyclopaedia Iranica, and The Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. His works have been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, and Persian. He has won numerous awards and honors, and has served as President of the International Society for Iranian Studies and several other professional academic organizations.

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is married and has two sons, Kusha Karimi and Kia Karimi.

The Constitutional Revolution as a Source of Aesthetic Inspiration

As an epoch-making political event, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-10911 gave rise to numerous new themes and topics for the literature of the period. In verse and prose, in fiction and drama, themes such as freedom, human rights, and basic concepts related to the rights and obligations of Iranian citizens became the stock-in-trade of many poets. My paper will address notions of topicality and relevance and the variety of ways in which Iran’s literary community of the early twentieth century conceptualized these, essentially as an esthetic response to the reality and the ideals of the constitutional movement and the revolution in which it was crystallized.

While the presentation will focus on a few texts by writers who had lived through the Revolution and its aftermath, namely Dehkhoda, Aref, Bahar, Jamazadeh, Lahuti and Eshqi, the aesthetic notions and text-context relations that inform them extends beyond that immediate context, well into the twentieth century. To this day, may Iranian poets, critics, and readers base their ideas about what literature ought to be and do, and about the relevancies that connect literature to sociopolitical events from the social context of the Constitutional Revolution and the ideas it advanced and represented.

Abbas Milani
Stanford University

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford and a co-director of the Iran democracy project at Hoover Institution. Until 1986 he taught at Tehran University's Faculty of Law and Political Science. He is the author of numerous works on Iran's encounter with modernity. His biography of the Shah is forthcoming.

Mohammad-Reza shah, Constitutionalism, and modernity: a Tortured History

Much has been written about the times and life of the shah. Those that are not hagiographic are obsessed with petropolitics, economic development or the political skirmishes of the time. Although modernity is surely the pivotal problem and the lingering temptation of Iran and the Shah's thirty-seven year rule has profound implications for the fate and form of modernity in Iran, there is a glaring lacuna in our understanding of his paradigm of modernity. Was he a friend or a foe of modernity? Did he have a cogent and consistent paradigm of modernity? Did that Paradigm change in the course of his thirty-seven year rule. The presentation will address these and related questions in the context of Iran’s history in the post-constitution decades, attempting ultimately to arrive at an assessment of the country’s constitutional movement as understood by Iran’s last monarch understood it.

Nahid Mozaffari
School of Visual Arts

Nahid Mozaffari received PhD from Harvard University in Modern Middle Eastern History. Focusing on the writings of Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, her PhD dissertation was a study of the struggle for cultural and political modernism in the context of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911). She continues to do research on the constitutional period in Iran, the comparative study of constitutional and modernist movements in India, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, and on the effects of British and French policies on developments in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nahid has taught the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, the history of British and French colonialism, and the history of Muslim immigration in Europe at New York University (Paris), the New School for Social Research (New York), and Cabot University (Rome). She compiled and edited Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, (Arcade Publishing April 2005). She is involved in numerous other projects to promote the translation and publication of Middle Eastern literature for the general public. Her other publications include “Politics of the Memoir” in Women’s Studies Quarterly (June, 2006) and various articles and translations for PEN which have appeared in Iranian Studies, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and the online journal wordswithoutborder.com.

Dehkhoda, Montesquieu, and the Crafting of Iranian Constitutionalism

The influence of the European Enlightenment and Russian Social Democracy on the Iranian Constitutional Revolution has been well recognized by historians. However, efforts to explore the precise trajectory of European ideas in their Iranian context and to map the discourse between western concepts and their Iranian interpretation / adaptation from text to text have been rare.

In his political and satirical writings in Sur Esrafil and Soroush Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, embarked on what he considered to be a primary task of the educated intellectual of the time: the elaboration of the meaning of constitutionalism (takmil-e ma’ni-ye mashrutiyat). Well versed in the discussions of constitutionalism in Europe, Dehkhoda and his colleagues understood that if the constitutional movement were to be viable in Iran, it needed an effective support base. The exact meaning of mashrutiyyat had to be crafted through interaction, dialogue, and adaptation to Iranian conditions and contexts.

How did Dehkhoda as a prime example of the men of the pen articulate new, alien (western) ideas to his various audiences? How did he combine the unfamiliar new constructs with the more familiar ways of thinking to communicate with large audiences? What role did language play in this communication?

The political philosophy which emerges from the pages of Sur Esrafil and Soroush bears interesting resemblances to Montesquieu’s discussions in L’esprit des lois, particularly in the areas of the philosophical definitions of natural law and cultural relativity, and in the critique of despotism and reactionary clergy. This is not surprising since Dehkhoda had translated L’esprit des lois when he was a student at the School of Political Science. But what is interesting is not so much the registration of particular elements of influence from west to east, but the manner in which the process of understanding, interpretation and translation into the Iranian historical and cultural context is conducted.

Dehkhoda attempted to arrive at an Iranian definition of constitutionalism by associating its core elements with concepts such as rights (hoghugh), prosperity (sa’adat), progress (taraghi), freedom (horriyat, azadi), equality (mossavat), dignity (sharaf), which he defined in new ways. This redefinition and encoding of unfamiliar concepts in culturally familiar terms was done successfully by using a variety of genres and modes of communication, from satire and street language, and frequent use of Persian proverbs to logical argumentation in both western and Islamic configurations. Particularly notable was Dehkhoda’s use of the carnivalesque in the Charand Parand column which suspends the application of normal rules and hierarchies, allowing for serious yet accessible critique. In this paper, I will explore the interplay between text and context in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanses and L’esprit des lois and Dehkhoda’s Sur Esrafil and Soroush articles.

Both were involved in the construction of modernist political projects in their respective societies which necessitated the articulation of their vision to an audience beyond intellectual and power elites.

Negin Nabavi
New York University

I completed my B.A., M. Phil and D. Phil degrees at Oxford University . My B.A. was in Persian and Arabic, concentrating on classical Persian and Arabic literatures, and my M. Phil was in modern Middle Eastern history and politics. By the time I began my research for a D.Phil, I had become more interested in the impact of ideas on political change, and I wrote my dissertation on the changing discourse of intellectuals in modern Iran . More specifically, I examined the writings of secular intellectuals in the journals which were published in Iran in the two decades that preceded the Iranian revolution of 1978-79, and argued that the intellectual setting in Iran was influenced much more by trends than by individuals with ideas. These trends were set not only in response to political developments within the country, but were determined or at least inspired by debates prevalent beyond the Iranian borders. This dissertation provided the basis for my recent book, Intellectuals and the State in Iran : Politics, Discourse and the Dilemma of Authenticity ( Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2003).

My current project can best be described as part intellectual and part, cultural history. Tentatively titled Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Twentieth Century Iran , it continues to focus on the press, although it examines the press as an agent of historical change rather than a mere source and record of what happened. There have been three points in the course of twentieth century Iran when short-lived moments of self-expression have led to the emergence of an evolving independent press- that is the constitutional period in the early part of the century, between 1906 and 1911, the years following the abdication of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1941, and the two years of press freedom following Mohammad Khatami's first electoral victory, between 1998 and 2000, when a relatively free press came into being. Even though each of these three instances proved short-lived and was brought to an end by force, they have had such resonance that they continue to live in collective memory. By comparing the debates that emerged in the pages of the press in each of these periods, and examining other features of these publications, this project seeks to explore the dynamics that an evolving press attempted to put into effect, and the role that it played in transforming politics and shaping the public sphere in each of these instances.

Modernity, the Press and the Shaping of Public Opinion in Constitutional Iran

In recent years, a growing number of historians and sociologists have begun to re-appraise the Iranian encounter with modernity in its early stages. These approaches have ranged from an examination of the ‘discourses of modernity’ as represented in the writings of a range of Iranian intellectuals and reformers, including writers, diplomats, merchants and travelers in the mid-19th century, to the more imaginative study of how concepts such as ‘nation’ and ‘homeland’ begin to be rethought and redefined from the late 18th century onwards. While such studies certainly make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the early attitudes towards modernity, they do not always impart the full picture. That is, they do not necessarily allow us an insight into the broader context where such reformulations were discussed, give us a sense of how pervasive they were, or more importantly, how the wider community may have perceived, understood and absorbed them.

This paper tries to address this lacuna by focusing on the public conversation that came about in the aftermath of the constitutional revolution, in particular between 1907 and 1908, a time which saw the flourishing of independent and critical newspapers. By examining the more popular and renowned newspapers published at this time and focusing on the social and political messages conveyed in their articles as well as the ‘open letters’ that appeared in their pages, this paper will explore the role that the press may have played in the process of negotiating and defining new concepts and in shaping public opinion in what was widely considered to be a new era.

Thomas M. Ricks
Independent Scholar

Dr. Thomas M. Ricks is an independent scholar having recently taught in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his Iranian Studies as a Peace Corps Volunteer (Iran III), 1964-66, and then completed his MA in Persian Studies and his PhD in Middle East history at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN). Dr. Ricks has taught at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN), Georgetown University (Wash., DC), Bir Zeit University (Occupied West Bank), and at Villanova University (Villanova, PA) where he also was the director of International Studies and Overseas Programs. He has published two works on Modern Persian Literature (Critical Perspectives on Modern Persian Literature and Iran: Contemporary Persian Literature), co-authored a textbook (Middle East: Past and Present), and a study of the 1st Palestinian intifada (An Oral History of the Intifada - in Arabic). He is completing a social and cultural history of 20th c. schools in Palestine (Voices from the Schoolyard: Memories of Palestine, School Days, and Mission Education), and an oral history of Alborz and Sage Colleges in Tehran, Iran.

American Presbyterian Missions in Revolutionary Tabriz, Iran - 1906-1911: The International Context of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution

The paper argues that the American Presbyterian missions in Iran were gradually transformed by the increasingly radical social movements within Iran. The radicalization of the missionaries was most pronounced in the city of Tabriz in Azerbaijan, Iran which had been a Presbyterian station since 1877. From 1905 to 1911, the Tabriz missionaries employed in all three branches of Presbyterian evangelical, medical and educational work grew restless and deeply concern with the mounting violence in the town and province. The death of Rev. Benjamin Labaree in 1904 in Salmas, Azerbaijan and the 1905-1908 threats to the Assyrian and Armenian Christian villagers and townspeople of Urmiah weighed heavily on the missionaries as portents of future troubles. But the 1908-09 siege of Tabriz by the Shah’s troops and the notorious brigand, Rahim Bey, was a watershed. Furthermore, by 1908, the Revolution had become more than a local and then regional affairs. The mashruteh had become an international event for both the missionaries and foreign delegations alike within Tabriz.

The international context of the Revolution, as far as the American Presbyterian missionaries were concerned, was evident in the early years of the Revolution. The Presbyterian parishioners scattered throughout the Midwest to New England states in the U.S. had already begun writing letters of concern to Mr. Robert Speer, Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and to the Department of State. The letters focused on worries about the safety of individual Armenian and Assyrian Christians, “their missions”, the wellbeing of the missionaries, and the livelihood of the schools, hospitals, and the College of Urmiah all of which the American parishes had supported financially. In the midst of the increasing effective siege of Tabriz, a non-missionary American teacher and recent Princeton University graduate at the Tabriz Memorial School for Boys, serving out a two-year commitment to the Board of Foreign Missions, decided to break ranks, as it were, with the missionaries who ran the Memorial School, and joined Sattar Khan’s revolutionaries in fighting the Shah’s troops. Howard C. Baskerville’s singular action, outwardly condemned by the missionaries but in fact supported by a majority of the Presbyterians, ended in his tragic death on April 20, 1909. Divided into pro- and anti-Baskerville parties, the American missionaries debated the wisdom of his actions for the next four decades while the US State Department saw in Baskerville’s death portents of an uncertain future in defining US foreign policies and interests in Iran. If the 1959 memorialization of the 50th anniversary of Baskerville’s death was any indicator, it was clear that Baskerville’s sacrifice still caused mixed reactions from Tabriz to Princeton, New Jersey. Overall, he remained an enigma to US policy makers, and virtually unknown to the American public, while to Iranians, he was a shaheed to Iran’s constitutional ideals and a model of progressive America. Baskerville, more than any other American missionary or diplomat, became a symbol par excellence of the international context of the Constitutional Revolution.

The paper is based on research in Iran, in Britain, and in the United States. Persian and eyewitness accounts, missionary diaries, Baskerville’s letters, and US State Department consular reports are the principal historical sources.

H. Lyman Stebbins
University of Chicago

Lyman Stebbins is a History Ph.D. dissertation candidate at the University of Chicago. He received a B. A. at the University of Dallas and an M. A. at the University of Chicago. His dissertation examines the British Consular service in Iran between 1889 and 1921 and how British imperialism functioned at the local level in Southern Iran, particularly along the Gulf littoral and in Sistan. At the University of Chicago he has studied Modern British History and Modern Islamic Middle Eastern History, with a special focus on Qajar Iran. In 2004, he was awarded a Persian Language Fellowship from the American Institute of Iranian Studies, which allowed him to study Persian and conduct research in Tehran for several months. In 2005 , thanks to grants from the Nicholson Center for British Studies and the History Department at the University of Chicago, he undertook research at the Public Records Office and the British Library in London. He is now writing his dissertation in Arlington, VA.

Britain and the Constitutional Revolution in Bushihr

Most accounts of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution focus on events in Tehran, Tabriz, and northern Iran, as well as in London and St. Petersburg. Little attention, however, has been paid to the revolutionary movement(s) in the South and the Persian Gulf littoral, nor to Britain’s reaction to changes that posed significant challenges to its regional interests. This paper, which forms part of a dissertation on British Consuls and Imperialism in Iran, is based on the records of the British Consulate-General at Bushihr. The incumbent of this post, Lt. Col. Percy Cox, was a very perceptive observer. His reports to the Legation in Tehran provide an interesting account of the revolutionary agitations in Bushihr, Fars, and the Gulf coast; the rise of the press, public opinion, political factions, and nationalism; as well as British attitudes toward these developments. Cox was also a significant actor in the drama. Although desirous of playing a neutral role between constitutionalists and monarchists, Cox ordered the occupation of Bushihr in April 1909 to protect British interests, which were threatened by the breakdown of public order and security accompanying the revolution. This paper will examine how Cox and other British consular officers viewed the Constitutional Movement; why they reacted to it as they did; and what were the consequences of this intervention both for Britain’s position in southern Iran and the Constitutional movement there.

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
University of Toronto

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi is Professor of History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and the chair of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto-Mississauga. Since 2002 he has served as the editor of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, a Duke University Press journal, and has served on the editorial board of Iranian Studies, the Journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies. His areas of specialization encompass Middle Eastern history, modernity, nationalism, gender studies, orientalism, and occidentalism. He is the author of two books, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Nationalist Historiography (2001) and Tajaddud-i Bumi (Vernacular Modernity) (2003). He has authored numerous articles: 'The Homeless Texts of Persianate Modernity', in Iran--Between Tradition and Modernity (2004), 'Eroticizing Europe, in Society and Culture in Qajar Iran' (2002); 'Women of the West Imagined, in Identity Politics and Women' (1994); 'From Patriotism to Matriotism: A Tropological Study of Iranian Nationalism, 1870-1909' in International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2002), 'Inventing Modernity, Borrowing Modernity' in Iran Nameh (2003). Born and raised in the 'navel of Tehran', Iran, Professor Tavakoli is the recipient of two Outstanding Teacher awards from Illinois State University (1996 and 2001); a Research Initiative Award (1992); and visiting fellowships at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford (1998), the Center for Historical Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, 1992-93); and Harvard University (1991-92). He has initiated numerous conferences and workshops on topical issues pertaining to the Middle East, and has encouraged the active involvement of student associations in the organization of scholarly events and community outreach programs. He holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in History from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in History from the University of Chicago.

Matriotic Nationalism and Constitutionalism

An increasing number of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Persian newspapers and journals characterized the Iranian homeland (vatan) as a dying 6000-year-old mother. Instead of the all powerful father-Shah who had to be obeyed courteously, the image of a dying mother-vatan created an urgent situation obligating her “children” to rush to save her life. Whereas the earlier characterization of the authorities as shepherds constituted them as superior, they were now held accountable for the motherland’s suffering and imminent death. The mothering of territorial Iran provided the imaginative space for the scripting and enacting of an innovative vernacular nationalism and political modernity. As a metonym, motherland interiorized the exterior affilial space of Iran-land. It conjoined the affilial birun (outer space) with the filial durum/andarun (inner space). Interiorization of Iran-land via the familial metaphor familiarized the men and women of the nation as national (vatani) brothers and sisters. By familializing the national-public sphere, the filiative spatial metaphor provided the discursive terrain for the alteration of gender relations and the emergence of a new political discourse and language. In a close historical exploration of key political concepts such as qanun, siyasat, millat, and dawlat I demonstrate how the resignification of these terms can be best understood by the paradigmatic shift from a partriotic to a matriotic notion of vatan (homeland).

Farzin Vahdat
Vassar College

Farzin Vahdat is a sociologist interested in notions of modernity and their applications to Iran, Islam and the Middle East. He is the author of God and Juggernaut: Iran's Intellectual Encounter with Modernity (Syracuse University Press, 2002). His articles have appeared in journals such as International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) and Critique. Some of his work has been translated into Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Persian. He has taught at Tufts University, Harvard University and Yale University. He is currently teaching at Vassar College.

Religious Dispute between Na’ini and Nuri on Constitutionalism and Modernity

According to article 35 of the Supplement to the Fundamental Law of 1907, sovereignty is divided between three entities, God, the people and the Shah. Significant portions of the contradictions in the Constitution of 1906 must be traced back to the ideological battle between the forces of constitutionalism and anti-constitutionalism which took place largely in the form of religious discourse immediately before and during the revolution. The central figures in the dispute were both high caliber theologians, Sheik Fazlollah Nuri and Mirza Mohammad Hussein Naini who lent their theological skills to the opposing sides of the divide on constitutionalism. In this paper I will discuss their theoretical dispute concerning the derivation of a respective pro and anti-modern position from the same source, that is, Islam. At first I will present an interpretive understanding of modernity in terms of empowerment of human beings at a large scale. The idea of human empowerment and its dissemination and universalization are very much the foundation of modern world. These notions are often expressed in terms of freedom and equality. However, as this paper argues by analyzing modernity as empowerment on mass scale we can gain a better understanding of deeper meanings and implications of freedom and equality. None the less, both Naini and Nuri expressed their ideas in terms of advocating and rejecting freedom and equality, but as I will try to demonstrate their ideas had deeper philosophical foundations that related to the notion of human empowerment or rejection of it, and thereby of promoting or opposing forces of modernity.

Farzin Vejdani
Yale University

Farzin Vejdani completed his BA in Political Science with a minor in Middle Eastern languages at McGill University (2001) and recently his MA in History from Yale University (2006). He is currently a PhD candidate in the History department at Yale University. The title of his doctoral dissertation is Resurrecting the Nation: the Development of Secularism in Iran 1906-1953. His research interests include twentieth century Indo-Iranian and Turco-Iranian intellectual and cultural relations, Iranian historiography, and the comparative study of cultural institutions in the Middle East. Farzin has conducted archival research in England, India, Lebanon, and Turkey. He is currently co-authoring a catalogue of the Persian letters of E.G. Browne.

Ottoman-Iranian relations during the Lesser Tyranny: A Case of Transnational Constitutional Cooperation?

Contemporary scholarship on the Iranian Constitutional Revolution has largely underestimated the significance of Ottoman-Iranian interactions. While there is a body of literature which examines the activities of Iranian exiles in the Ottoman Empire drawing mainly on Persian sources, and another set of literature which attempts to compare the Young Turk's revolution to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, less has been said about the ways in which events in Iran impacted Ottoman constitutionalists, and, how in turn, the constitutional movement in the Ottoman Empire affected the course of events in Iran. While taking into consideration the importance of constitutional discourse on both sides, this paper attempts to move beyond a discussion of the purely discursive features of Ottoman-Iranian relations during this period by examining Ottoman material, financial, military, and governmental support for Iranian constitutionalists. By using sources in the Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives (Basbakanlik Devlet Arsivleri) and the British Public Records Office, in addition to published Persian, Ottoman, Turkish and British sources, this paper focuses on three main theatres of interaction during the course of the Lesser Tyranny (istibdad-i saghir) of 1908-9: first, the dispatch of Committee for Union and Progress emissaries to Iran who later became mujahids fighting alongside constitutionalists in Iranian Azerbaijan; second, the plea of the Iranian Shi'a ulama in the Ottoman Empire to Sultan Abdul-Hamid II for support against Muhammad Ali Shah; and finally, the refuge (bast) of Iranian nationalists in Tehran and Tabriz during critical points of the Lesser Tyranny. This paper argues that despite imperial Russian and British pressures, there is indeed evidence of substantial Ottoman-Iranian constitutional cooperation.

Michael Zirinsky
Boise State University

Michael Zirinsky is professor of history at Boise State University. Educated in the public schools of New York, in the Presbyterian mission-run Community School of Tehran, at Oberlin College (A.B., Government, 1964), Oberlin, Ohio, at the American University (M.A., International Relations), Washington, D.C. and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Ph.D., modern history), since 1973 he has taught modern history at Boise State University, Boise, Idaho. Since the 1978-79 revolution his research has focused on western relations with Iran during the twentieth century, particularly the role of American missionaries, the American government and the British government in the emergence of modern Iran. His publications include "Blood, Power, and Hypocrisy: The Murder of Robert Imbrie and American Relations with Pahlavi Iran, 1924," (1986) ; "Imperial Power and Dictatorship: Britain and the Rise of Reza Shah, 1921-1926," (1992); "A Panacea for the Ills of the Country: American Presbyterian Education in Inter-War Iran," (1993); "Render Therefore unto Caesar That Which is Caesar's: American Preshbyterian Educators and Reza Shah," (1993); "American Presbyterian Missionaries at Urmia during the Great War," (2002); "Onward Christian Soldiers: Presbyterian Missionaries and the Ambiguous Origins of American Relations with Iran," (2002); "A Presbyterian Vocation to Reform Gender Relations in Iran: The Career of Annie Stocking Boyce," (2002); and "Riza Shah's 1927-28 Abrogation of Capitulations," (2003).

BRITAIN AND AMERICA IN IRAN, CIRCA 1890-1960:

CONTRADICTORY INTENTIONS, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

During the first half of the twentieth century, it seemed that Britain sought to make Iran its colony, while America * rather ineffectually * wanted to maintain Iranian integrity. After 1953, however, the US replaced the UK as the primary foreign power seeking to limit Iran’s independence.

Was this apparent American volte-face in fact a reversal of policy? Careful investigation of American and British sources makes clear that the Anglo-American relationship regarding Iran was neither the American opposition to British imperialism, implied both by America’s myth of its own eighteenth century “revolutionary” war against Britain and by Morgan Shuster’s Strangling of Persia, nor the close cooperation between English-speaking bourgeois powers implied both by Churchill’s rhetoric and by Marxist-Leninist ideology.

How are we to understand the actual policies of Britain and America in twentieth century Iran? What were London and Washington trying to achieve? Why did they sometimes seem to be at loggerheads and at other times to make common cause? And, especially in the context of this conference on the Iranian constitutional movement, how are we to understand the apparently contradictory policies of Britain and America, both championing democratic constitutional government, at home and intervening to thwart it in Iran?

Based on extensive research in diplomatic and missionary archives in Great Britain and the United States, this paper will investigate the evolution of Anglo-American relations regarding Iran, especially during the decades between the Constitutional Revolution and the 1950s.

Special Session

Shahrnush Parsipur
In Conversation with
Houra Yavari, Columbia University
and
Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona

The Feminist Press at the City University of New York has just released the English translation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s 1989 novel, Touba va Ma`na-ye Shab (Touba and the Meaning of Night). Set in the Constitutional period in Iran and spanning over several decades, the novel tells the story of a woman and a country on a century-long quest after spiritual bliss and political liberation. In this session, co-translator Kamran Talattof (with Havva Houshmand) and Houra Yavari, writer of the Afterword to the English translation engage the author in a conversation on the possibilities and limits of fictionalizing history, on the events of the Constitutional Revolution and the historical movement it spawned, and on other related topics. Comments and questions by the audience will follow conversations among the panelists.

Shahrnush Parsipur
Author

Shahrnush Parsipur started her literary career when she was fifteen, writing short stories and articles. She graduated from the University of Tehran with a degree in sociology. She is the author of eleven books of fiction and memoir. The publication of Touba and the Meaning of Night (1988) earned her immediate recognition. The book is translated into German, Italian and Swedish. Parsipur is the recipient of many international awards. In 2002 she was honored by the Encyclopaedia Iranica for her lifelong achievement in fiction writing. She was the first recipient of Brown University’s International Writers Project Fellowship in 2004.

Houra Yavari
Columbia University

Houra Yavari is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and an M.A. in Psychology from Tehran University, and an M. Ed. from the Bank Street College of Education, New York (1990). She has published extensively on topics in psychoanalysis and Persian literature, including Psychoanalysis and Literature: Two Texts, Two Selves, Two Worlds (Tehran, 1995); Modern Persian Fiction: History and Development, in the Encyclop?dia Iranica (1997); and Living in the Mirror: A Literary Perspective (Tehran, 2005).

Kamran Talattof
University of Arizona

Kamran Talattof (Ph. D., University of Michigan 1996) is associate professor of Persian language and literature and Iranian culture at the University of Arizona. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2000); Modern Persian: Spoken and Written with D. Stilo and J. Clinton (Yale University Press, 2005); Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry with A. Karimi-Hakkak (Brill, 2004); The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric with J. Clinton (Palgrave, 2000); and Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought with M. Moaddel (St. Martin Press, 2000). He is also the co-translator of Touba: The Meaning of the Night by Sh. Parsipur, with H. Houshmand (Feminist Press, 2006); Women Without Men by Sh. Parsipur, with J. Sharlet (Syracuse University Press, 1998). Many of his articles focus on issues of gender, ideology, culture, and language pedagogy. His current projects include the production of an intermediate level textbook: Modern Persian: Written Spoken, Volume 3 and a monograph on the Works of Shahrzad (Syracuse University Press, forthcoming).

Past Evenet

September 21-24, 2006