Born and raised in the ancient city of Kashan, he was educated in Tehran and travelled widely. A gentle introvert by nature, he was accused of escapism when his reaction to the world around him was to go back to nature, mysticism and mythology, poetry and painting. This mystic of the twentieth century seeks a light that radiates from the individual soul and ultimately affects its relationship with others and the world around it. While Rumi, the mystic of the thirteenth century, dances, sings, and chants out loud that he comes from the world of spirit and is a stranger in the world of matter, Sepehri, quietly aware of humanity in a milieu alien to its physical, psychological, and spiritual needs, in poetry and painting, appeared to stroke human consciousness into a tranquility, almost a state of beatitude, which nevertheless is never quite free of the ongoing struggle for "awareness, understanding and illumination."Sepehri had a free and sometimes convoluted approach to the verities of life, insisting that the book of everyday "illusions" must be closed and ....".. one must rise""And walk along the stretch of time, ""Look at the flowers, hear the enigma.""One must run until the end of being ...""One must sit close to the unfolding, ""Some place between rapture and illumination."(Both Line and Space. Bk.8)In this fresh translation, Bahiyeh Afnan Shahid successfully conveys the meaning, feelings, and sensitivity of the Persian original allowing the reader to appreciate the pertinence of Sepehri to the twenty-first century.

    The questions about the revolution shape The Golden Cage while the answers shed light on Islamic Iran's current events and tell us why it strives for nuclear energy, chants "Death to Israel," and claims to be the most powerful force in the Middle East and Muslim world.History perhaps is best described through life stories we each can hold dearly. The Golden Cage is one such story about three brothers the author knew through their sister, Pari, a childhood friend. Each brother subscribes to a different political ideology that tears Iran and their lives apart. As Pari observes, her brothers live deluded lives in golden cages of ideology. These words mark the beginning of this story, illuminating the multifaceted, oppressive Iran of today and years past.

    Here is a delicious book of poems, redolent of saffron and stained with pomegranate in its vision of Iran and of the immigrant life in California. Wolpe s poems are at once humorous, sad, and sexy, which is to say that they are capriciously human, human even in that they dream of wings and are always threatening to take flight.Tony Barnstone, Award winning poet and translator, author of The Golem of Los Angeles"

    Most of all, it is a festival for families. Children and adults alike can share in preparing special meals, decorating the house, and performing the many ceremonies that welcome the New Year. This book is a guide to customs thousands of years old yet as vital as ever--enjoyable for families no matter where they live or what their beliefs. Happy Nowruz offers twenty-five fun, easy, and innovative Nowruz recipes, with lots of photos to show you what to do. This is an ideal guide for parents, teachers, and kids--age six and older--to know more about the origins of Nowruz and to get everyone involved in preparing for the arrival of spring by: baking Haji Firuz cookies germinating seeds in eggshells coloring eggs making a Nowruz garland jumping over fires setting the Haft-sinn (seven-s) holiday table planting narcissus and hyacinth bulbs selecting and buying goldfish banging spoons for trick-or-treating cooking the Nowruz dinner enjoying the Outdoor Thirteen picnic Each book is shrinkwrapped with a stainless steel cookie cutter in the shape of the herald of the New Year--Haji Firuz--for making and decorating Haji Firuz Gingerbread Cookies. THE NOWRUZ TRADITION Preface 9 An Ancient Tradition 11 Celebrate Spring 13 The Arrival of Haji Firuz 14 Preparing for Nowruz 17 Activities to Welcome Nowruz 19 Preparing Sprouts 21 Eggshell Sprouts 23 Egg Decorating 25 Coloring Eggs 27 A Nowruz Garland 28 Wild Fire Eve 31 The Banging of Spoons 33 Feasting and Fun 35 Nowruz Holiday Table 36 Seven Items 39 Other Elements of the Nowruz Table 41 Gathering to Welcome Nowruz 43 Old Signs of Spring 45 The Transit of Years 47 My Nowruz Menu 48 Nowruz Sweets 49 A Round of New Year's Visits 51 The Outdoor Thirteen Picnic 53 NOWRUZ RECIPES When Children Cook 55 Flabread 57 Flatbread Pizza 59 Cheese, Fresh Herb, Fruit, and Nut Sandwich 61 Fresh Herb Kuku with Barberries 63 Noodle Soup 65 Yogurt and Cucumber Dip 67 Red Rice with Green Beans 69 Green Rice 71 Fish Strips 73 Haji Firuz Gingerbread Cookies 75 Nowruz Cupcakes 77 Cream Puff 79 Cinnamon Date Bun 81 Chewy Raisin Cookies 83 Walnut Kiss Cookies 85 Almond Candy Cookies 87 Rice Cookies 89 Sweet Almond Berries 91 Four-Leaf Clover Cookies 93 Honey Almond Candy Crunch 95 Baklava 97 Puff Pastry Tongues 99 Pomegranate Popsicles 101 Crunch Cream Ice Cream Sandwich 103 Sour Cherry Cooler 105 THE CALENDAR APPENDIX A New Year Is Born 108 The Iranian Year - Counting the Days 109 Naming the Months 111 A Legacy of the Chinese Zodiac 113 The Animal Cycle of Years 114 Useful Kitchen Tools 116 Haji Firuz Cookie Cutter Template 117 Credits & Acknowledgments 119

    She focuses on three key countries in the gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, whose Shia Islamic groups are the offspring of various Iraqi movements that have surfaced over recent decades. Lou?r explains how these groups first penetrated local societies by espousing the networks of Shiite clergymen. She then describes the role of factional quarrels and the Iranian revolution of 1979 in defining the present landscape of Shiite Islamic activism in the Gulf monarchies. The reshaping of geopolitics after the Gulf War and the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 had a profound impact on transnational Shiite networks. New political opportunities encouraged these groups to concentrate on national issues, such as becoming fierce opponents of the Saudi monarchy. Yet the question still remains: How deeply have these new beliefs taken root in Islamic society? Are Shiites Saudi or Bahraini patriots? Lou?r's book also considers the transformation of Shia movements in relation to central religious authority. While they strive to formulate independent political agendas, Shia networks remain linked to religious authorities ( "marja'") who reside either in Iraq or Iran. This connection becomes all the more problematic should the "marja'" also be the head of a state, as with Iran's Ali Khamenei. In conclusion, Lou?r argues that the Shia will one day achieve political autonomy, especially as the "marja'," in order to retain transnational religious authority, begin to meddle less and less in the political affairs of other countries.

    Political upheavals and a tradition of neglecting the history of past regimes have resulted in a cultural memory loss, erasing the contributions of a generation of individuals. Eminent Persians seeks to rectify that loss. Milani's groundbreaking portrait of modern Iran reveals the country's rich history through the lives of the men and women who forged it. Consisting of 150 profiles of the most important innovators in Iran between World War II and the Islamic Revolution, the book includes politicians, entrepreneurs, poets, artists, and thinkers who brought Iran into the modern era with brilliant success and sometimes terrible consequences. The biographies and essays weave a richly textured tapestry of lives, ideas, and events that reveals the true story of these decades in the life of a nation.The two volumes are divided into sections on politics, economics, and culture, each accompanied by an introductory essay that places the individual stories in their broader historical context. Drawn from interviews, extensive archival material, and private correspondence, Eminent Persians is a treasure trove of original documents, many appearing in print for the first time. Detailed sketches of personalities and personal foibles offer a compelling and highly readable account of this remarkable period of history on a human scale.

    These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships. Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include: * customs, values, and traditions * historical, religious, and political background * life at home * leisure, social, and cultural life * eating and drinking * do's, don'ts, and taboos * business practices * communication, spoken and unspoken

    Here Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi takes us on an enlightening journey, showing that the revolution unintentionally opened up the public sphere to competing interpretations of Islam. Far from being the exclusive preserve of high-ranking seminarians as before, in contemporary Iran lay theologians, intellectuals, lawyers and social activists are active and influential interlocutors in debates on the meaning of Islam. A key figure is philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, a leading force behind Iran’s pro-democracy movement and vocal critic of the state. Through a close reading of Soroush’s writings, and by tracing the links between Muslim intellectual critique and the realpolitik of postrevolutionary power struggles, Ghamari-Tabrizi offers nothing less than a pathbreaking reassessment of the Iranian revolution. With powerful insights, Islam and Dissent is essential for an understanding of the Muslim world today, as of the new relationships between religion, politics and democracy visible across the globe.

    This prevented Iranian filmmakers from making use of the desiring gaze, a staple cinematic system of looking. In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema. Mottahedeh asserts that, in response to the prohibitions against the desiring look, a new narrative cinema emerged as the displaced allegory of the constraints on the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry. Allegorical commentary was not developed in the explicit content of cinematic narratives but through formal innovations. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film. As Mottahedeh points out, the discipline of film studies has traditionally seen film as a medium that communicates globally because of its dependence on a (Hollywood) visual language assumed to be universal and legible across national boundaries. Displaced Allegories demonstrates that visual language is not necessarily universal; it is sometimes deeply informed by national culture and politics.

    Born in Tehran in 1974, she has exhibited widely in Europe and the US, and her work has been collected by museums worldwide.She came to the limelight in the late 90s with her Untitled Qajar series, in which she examines the paradoxical position of women in Iran. Women in traditional clothing pose with items such as a bicycle – permitted a hundred years ago, and now forbidden to women.Ghadirian’s oeuvre is a spirited wink at authority. With witty parodies of domesticity, she neatly sidesteps both restrictions and expectations.Rose Issa is a curator and writer who has championed visual art and film from the Arab world and Iran for nearly thirty years. Her gallery, Rose Issa Projects, showcases the best in upcoming and established artists from the Arab world and Iran, www.roseissa.com.Shadi Ghadirian was born in 1974 in Tehran, Iran and graduated with a BA in Photography from the Azad University, Tehran in 1988.

    Home to the most sublime architecture in the world, and a breeding ground for poets, Empires, mystics and saints, it has an enduring and invincible fascination. David Blow enriches our understanding with his knowledgeable selection of the best of three thousand years of descriptive writing. "A history of Persia through the eyes of the outside world... An intriguing view of a culture that has lasted in one form or anther for almost three thousand years." Book News

    Although many great literary treasures of the Islamic world are already available in English translation, those of the Ismailis are only slowly being made accessible to scholars and readers at large. This substantial anthology makes a vital and welcome contribution to that process of wider dissemination. It brings together for the first time extracts from a range of significant Ismaili texts in both poetry and prose, here translated into English by some of the foremost scholars in the field. The texts included belong to a long span of Ismaili history, which extends from the Fatimid era to the beginning of the twentieth century. The translations in question have been rendered from their originals in Arabic, Persian and the different languages of Badakhshan and South Asia. With substantial sections devoted to such broad topics as faith and thought, history and biography, ethics, the Imamate, Ta'wil (or esoteric exegesis and textual interpretation), the anthology offers continuously enriching glimpses into the depths, diversity and distinctiveness of one of the great traditions of Islamic thought and creativity, which still remains relatively undiscovered by the West.

    It has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman Turkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia and been a source of inspiration for Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and Jorge Luis Borges among others.  Yet Persian literature has never received the attention it truly deserves. General Introduction to Persian Literature answers this need and offers a new, comprehensive and detailed history of its subject. This 18-volume, authoritative survey reflects the stature and significance of Persian literature as the single most important accomplishment of the Iranian experience.  It includes extensive, revealing examples with contributions by prominent scholars who bring a fresh critical approach to bear on this important topic. The first volume offers an indispensable entrée to Persian literature’s long and rich history, examining themes and subjects that are common to many fields of Persian literary study.  This invaluable introduction to the subject heralds a definitive and ground-breaking new series.

    These sectarians originated certain doctrines and religious practices that influenced a number of later Shiite religious and political movements. Their millenarian expectations and willingness to use force against perceived enemies gave them a sense of solidarity and coherence that could be effectively mobilized in revolutionary or conflict situations. They should be viewed primarily within the context of world millenarian sectarian movements.