In this book, Shaul Mishal and Ori Goldberg explore the ways in which Shiite leaderships in Iran and Lebanon approach themselves and their world. Contrary to the violent and radical image of ...religious leaderships in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanese Hizballah, the political vision and practice of these leaderships view the world as a middle ground, shying away from absolutist and extremist tendencies. The political leadership assumed by Shiite religious scholars in Iran and Lebanon has transformed Shiite Islam from a marginalized minority to a highly politicized avant garde of Muslim presence, revitalized the practice and causes of political Islam in its struggle for legitimacy and authority, and reshaped the politics of the Middle East and the globe in its image. Utilizing approaches from social theory, history, theology, and literary criticism, the book presents these leaderships as pragmatic, interpretative entities with the potential to form fruitful relationships between Shiite leadership and the non-Shiite world.
In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean. These three polities each encompassed a wide ...range of cultural and religious diversity, and interactions among the varied communities both within and across the empires contributed greatly to their flourishing. Yet present-day Anglophone scholarship and teaching with emphasis on the earlier periods of Islamic civilization tends to examine the empires in isolation and overlook their connected histories. This volume is a comprehensive sourcebook of newly translated texts from the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, accompanied by scholarly essays, that aims to provide a new model for the study and teaching of the early modern history of the Near East and India. In thematically organized sections, it presents texts that represent particular voices and experiences from each of the three empires. With a wide range of source material spanning literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and visual art, the volume sheds light on the many dimensions of the intertwined histories of these interconnected literate communities engaged in the religious, political, and cultural debates of their time. Texts investigate such varied topics as conversion in Safavid Iran; the politics of Ottoman imperial conquests; mystical piety at the Mughal court of India; occult sciences such as letter divination and astrology; and struggles for succession to the imperial throne. The readings include translator's notes, and each translation is preceded by a short essay providing the historiographical context for the source.
Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of ...Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.
Identities in Crisis in Iran describes how identity, especially when it is faced with fundamental tensions as in the case of Iran, is a phenomenon that is constantly developing via factors involving ...the private self and common social factors such as the conflict between the Persian culture and the Shi'a religion.
This book is about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its ascent to become one of the most formidable entities in Iran and the Middle East. It follows the organization from its birth ...in the midst of the 1979 revolution through the succeeding decades of the Islamic Republic’s maturation. The IRGC is a multifaceted military organization with a distinct raison d’être: the defense of Iran’s theocratic system. Pursuing that mission has allowed the IRGC to expand beyond the military sphere and become influential in the political, economic, strategic, sociocultural, and regional arenas. This book conceptualizes the IRGC as the product of three intersecting impulses and experiences: pro-clerical activism in Shiite Islam; devotion to the supreme leader; and the impact of conflict on organizational development and state formation. These concepts underpin this study, and are threaded through discussions on the IRGC’s religious and ideological foundations; its development during the Iran-Iraq war; its role in exporting the revolution; the place of religion in the IRGC’s politics and self-conception; the IRGC’s suppression of pro-democracy reformism in the 1990s; the impact of post-9/11 American foreign policy on the IRGC’s domestic and foreign influence; the organization’s retaliatory use of terrorism outside of Iran; and the religious and strategic motivations for its interventions in Syria and Iraq following the Arab Spring. By exploring this subject matter, this book is at once a comprehensive history of the IRGC, a thematic history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and an entryway into the complex world of war, politics, and identity in the Middle East.
This book examines the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran towards the states of the Persian Gulf from 1979 to 1998. It covers perceptions Iranians and Arabs have of each other, Islamic ...revolutionary ideology, the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf crisis, the election of President Khatami and finally the role of external powers, such as the United States. The author argues that over the twenty-year period, the policy has moved from being ideological to pragmatic; and that by tracing its history, we can better anticipate its future relationship.
A state of mixture Payne, Richard E
2015., 20150901, 2015, 2015-09-01, Letnik:
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Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, known as the Iranian Empire, that integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia ...to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions.The rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews, and others occupied legitimate places in Iranian political culture in positions subordinate to the imperial religion. Christians, for their part, positioned themselves in a political culture not of their own making, with recourse to their own ideological and institutional resources, ranging from the writing of saints' lives to the judicial arbitration of bishops. In placing the social history of East Syrian Christians at the center of the Iranian imperial story,A State of Mixturehelps explain the endurance of a culturally diverse empire across four centuries.
This volume is based on the assumption that Iran will soon obtain nuclear weapons, and Jacquelyn K. Davis and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr. develop alternative models for assessing the challenges of a ...nuclear Iran for U.S. security. Through three scenario models, the book explores the political, strategic, and operational challenges facing the United States in a post--Cold War world. The authors concentrate on the type of nuclear capability Iran might develop; the conditions under which Iran might resort to threatened or actual weapons use; the extent to which Iran's military strategy and declaratory policy might embolden Iran and its proxies to pursue more aggressive policies in the region and vis-à-vis the United States; and Iran's ability to transfer nuclear materials to others within and outside the region, possibly sparking a nuclear cascade. Drawing on recent post--Cold War deterrence theory, the authors consider Iran's nuclear ambitions as they relate to its foreign policy objectives, domestic politics, and role in the Islamic world, and they suggest specific approaches to improve U.S. defense and deterrence planning.
The Iranian Expanseexplores how kings in Persia and the ancient Iranian world utilized the built and natural environment to form and contest Iranian cultural memory, royal identity, and sacred ...cosmologies. Investigating over a thousand years of history, from the Achaemenid period to the arrival of Islam,The Iranian Expanseargues that Iranian identities were built and shaped not by royal discourse alone, but by strategic changes to Western Asia's cities, sanctuaries, palaces, and landscapes.The Iranian Expansecritically examines the construction of a new Iranian royal identity and empire, which subsumed and subordinated all previous traditions, including those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Anatolia. It then delves into the startling innovations that emerged after Alexander under the Seleucids, Arsacids, Kushans, Sasanians, and the Perso-Macedonian dynasties of Anatolia and the Caucasus, a previously understudied and misunderstood period. Matthew P. Canepa elucidates the many ruptures and renovations that produced a new royal culture that deeply influenced not only early Islam, but also the wider Persianate world of the Il-Khans, Safavids, Timurids, Ottomans, and Mughals.
In The Policy of Darius and Xerxes towards Thrace and Macedonia Miroslav Vasilev analyses in detail the policy of the Persian kings towards their European possessions in the years 514-465 BC.
