In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive party, with tents set up in the desert, and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs. Robert Templer writes about this celebration–and…
Karl Marx famously argued that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Fahmida Riaz’s Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, a historical novel set in 5th-century Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian Sasanian empire at its zenith, shows that this struggle existed long before its appearance in The Communist Manifesto. The…
Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran’s modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, through the 1956 coup against Mossadegh and the…
It normally makes a great difference to art “history” if a given object is authentic or fabricated. And yet, the fabrication of any given object, to say nothing of a class of objects, carries within its own history: one not always of fraud, but also of gatekeeping on the one hand and exploitation on the…
With the US-Israeli war against Iran into its second month, the publication of Homa Katouzian’s history of the 1979 Iranian revolution couldn’t be timelier. The outcome of the current war may decide the fate of that revolution and the Islamic regime that resulted from it. Katouzian’s conclusion mentions the June 2025 joint US-Israeli attacks targeting…
In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her,…
A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I asked him what it was like. “Like something out of Buñuel”, he replied. Iran’s ruler had invited to him to the infamous coming out party because he…
Books can be the subjects of podcasts, podcasts can spawn books, but only rarely does a podcast itself rise to be a possible stand-in for a book. Paul Cooper’s recent two-part podcast “The Mongols: Terror of the Steppe” is one of these.
Bartle Bull’s objective in the very readable Land Between the Rivers is to demonstrate that the modern country of Iraq is not a mere colonial creation but rather has a historical reality going back millennia.
Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians describes a famous explorer forced to perform as “the lion of the hour” in the drawing room of a great country estate. For this earnest scientist and adventurer, it’s a painful humiliation for him to don white tie and attempt polite conversation with idle aristocrats who have no clue where…
Identical and inseparable twin sisters, Roya and Tala live in Tehran. When they fall pregnant around the same time, they dream of going through the same motherhood milestones together and raising their kids together, yet a freak accident destroys these dreams in a matter of moments. This is the backdrop of Nahid Rachlin’s latest novel,…
We know a lot about Isfahan in the 17th century. Poets and court chroniclers praised its beauty and recorded its expansion under the great monarch, Shah Abbas (1588-1629). European travelers like John Chardin and Pietro della Valle left us picturesque descriptions of its monuments and people. Artists painstakingly recorded the city-scape. Scholars have long studied…
The history of Iran’s rich musical culture presents a paradox. On the one hand, there is a distinctive Persian style of music, different from its Arab, Turkish, Central and South Asian neighbors. It has its own modes, its own vocal styles, its favorite instruments, its own performance genres. On the other hand, for many centuries…
Divided into two parts set in Iran and the US respectively, Dare the Sea is a new collection of stories from Iranian-American writer Ali Hosseini. The stories, some of which had previously appeared in Guernica, Antioch Review and Story Quarterly, explore Iran’s landscape, culture and how cataclysmic, socio-political changes have shaped the identity and sense…
The twenty-three women photographers featured in Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh’s Breathing Space: Iranian Women Photographers shed light on the state of contemporary photography from Iran. Etehadieh is the founder of Silk Road Gallery, Iran’s first gallery devoted exclusively to photography. Many of the photographers featured in this book have previously exhibited their works at her gallery…