This book is about Iranian Islamism on grass-roots level. It provides a vivid, near-life portrait of young activist men who uphold this movement through their zealous support of revolutionary ideals and the present regime. It is based on interviews with a group of volunteers in the Iranian home guard movement known as basij during a period of four years. By focusing on beliefs and rituals of individual persons, it gives a unique picture of the shifting motifs behind Islamist engagement in today's Iran. The book contextualises the interviewed individuals within the wider framework of...

The 19th century saw an enormous shift in the authority structure of Iranian and Iraqi Twelver Shiʿism, with the victory of a theological school (Usulism) that stressed the power of the clergy. This is well known. What is less well known is that there was a parallel development of authority in the Shaykhi school and its offshoot, the Babi sect. Here, especially in later forms of Babism, the Shiʿite claim to charismatic authority reached its limits in hyperbolic attestations of divinity. The present text is in two parts: a study of how Shaykhism bifurcated into a form close to...

C.J. Edmonds published articles in orientalist journals and co-authored with Taufiq Wahby A Kurdish-English dictionary (Oxford, 1966). He published his memoirs of Iraq, Kurds, Turks, and Arabs: politics, travel and research in North-Eastern Iraq, 1919-1925 (London - New York, 1957), but his Persian memoirs remained unpublished. It tells how, after studying oriental languages in Cambridge, he became Consular Officer in Bushire, participated in British campaigns in Mesopotamia during First World War. As a Political Officer in Luristan Edmonds was in charge of the oil fields' security...

A Memorial in the World offers a new appraisal of the reception and role of Constantine the Great and Ardashir I (the founder of the Sasanian Empire c.224-651), in their respective cultural spheres. Concentrating on marked parallels in the legendary material attached to both men it argues that the memories of both were reshaped by processes referencing the same deep literary heritage. What is more, as “founders” of imperial systems that identified with a particular religious community, the literature that developed around these late antique figures applied these ancient tropes in a...

In Saints hommes de Chiraz et du Fārs. Pouvoir, société et lieux de sacralité (Xe-XVe s.), Denise Aigle studies the spiritual role, but also the political one, played by the Sufi shaykhs. From the tenth century, Fārs was a a land of holiness with Shaykh Kabīr in Shiraz and Murshid al-Dīn Abū Isḥāq in Kāzarūn. This research is based on hagiographic sources, historical chronicles, literary sources and archival documents. The author shows how the pre-Islamic history of Fārs was integrated into spiritual Islam thanks to the mystical speculations of the Sufi shaykhs. The particular...