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"Amir Abbas Hoveyda was a central figure in the historic struggle between modernity and tradition in Iran-a struggle pitting Western cosmopolitanism against Persian isolationism, secularism against religious fundamentalism and ultimately civil society and democracy against authoritarianism...In telling the story of Hoveyda's life, the author has not only laid bare the development of Iranian society during a pivotal period (1919-1978) but has also unearthed important new materials on U.S.-Iranian relations..." -- p. [4]
"Amir Abbas Hoveyda was a central figure in the historic struggle between modernity and tradition in Iran-a struggle pitting Western cosmopolitanism against Persian isolationism, secularism against religious fundamentalism and ultimately civil society and democracy against authoritarianism ... In telling the story of Hoveyda's life, the author has not only laid bare the development of Iranian society during a pivotal period (1919-1978) but has also unearthed important new materials on U.S.-Iranian relations ..."--Page [4].
An Iranian scholar chronicles the life and legacy of the last Shah of Iran, including his role in the creation of the modern Islamic republic.
In the essays collected here, Abbas Milani uses an impressive array of cross-disciplinary Western and Iranian theories and texts to investigate the crucial question of modernity in Iran today. He offers a wealth of new insights into the thousand-year-old conflict in Iran between the search for modernity and the forces of religious obscurantism. The essays trace the roots of Shiite Islamic fundamentalism and offer illuminating accounts of the work of Iranian intellectuals -- both men and women -- and their artistic movements as they struggle to find a new path toward a genuine modernity in Iran that is congruent with Iran's rich cultural heritage. This book challenges the hitherto accepted theory that modernity and its related concepts of democracy and freedom are Western in essence. It also demonstrates that Iran and the West have more that brings them together than separates them in their search for such modern ideals as rationalism, the rule of law, and democracy.
As the 25th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution approached, Abbas Milani realized that very little, if any, attention had been given to the entire prerevolutionary generation. 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.
The Middle East has been the arena of three cataclysmic events since 1979 - the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. All of these have brought about major changes in the inter-regional politics and relations between Middle East countries and the outside world. This book seeks to analyze the impact of these events on Iranian-Arab relations. The authors examine Iran's relations with the Arab states of the Gulf in detail and sheds light on the changing patterns of Iranian-Egyptian and Lebanese relations.
But such characteristics, which exist in other Muslim countries - especially in the Arab world - fail to clarify the particularities of the Iranian revolution.".
"Sphinxes are legion in Egypt--what is so special about this one?... We shall take a stroll around the monument itself, scrutinizing its special features and analyzing the changes it experienced throughout its history. The evidence linked to the statue will enable us to trace its evolution... down to the worship it received in the first centuries of our own era, when Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans mingled together in devotion to this colossus, illustrious witness to a past that was already more than two millennia old."--from the IntroductionThe Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the few monuments from ancient Egypt familiar to nearly everyone. In a land where the colossal is part of the landscape, it still stands out, the largest known statue in Egypt. Originally constructed as the image of King Chephren, builder of the second of the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx later acquired new fame in the guise of the sun god Harmakhis. Major construction efforts in the New Kingdom and Roman Period transformed the monument and its environs into an impressive place of pilgrimage, visited until the end of pagan antiquity.Christiane Zivie-Coche, a distinguished Egyptologist, surveys the long history of the Great Sphinx and discusses its original appearance, its functions and religious significance, its relation to the many other Egyptian sphinxes, and the various discoveries connected with it. From votive objects deposited by the faithful and inscriptions that testify to details of worship, she reconstructs the cult of Harmakhis (in Egyptian, Har-em-akhet, or "Horus-in-the-horizon"), which arose around the monument in the second millennium. "We are faced," she writes, "with a religious phenomenon that is entirely original, though not unique: a theological reinterpretation turned an existing statue into the image of the god who had been invented on its basis."The coming of Christianity ended the Great Sphinx's religious role. The ever-present sand buried it, thus sparing it the fate that overtook the nearby pyramids, which were stripped of their stone by medieval builders. The monument remained untouched, covered by its desert blanket, until the first excavations. Zivie-Coche details the archaeological activity aimed at clearing the Sphinx and, later, at preserving it from the corrosive effects of a rising water table.
The adventures of Samak, a trickster-warrior hero of Persia’s thousand-year-old oral storytelling tradition, are beloved in Iran. Samak is an ayyar, a warrior who comes from the common people and embodies the ideals of loyalty, selflessness, and honor—a figure that recalls samurai, ronin, and knights yet is distinctive to Persian legend. His exploits—set against an epic background of palace intrigue, battlefield heroics, and star-crossed romance between a noble prince and princess—are as deeply rooted in Persian culture as are the stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur in the West. However, this majestic tale has remained little known outside Iran. Translated from the original Persian by Freydoon Rassouli and adapted by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, this timeless masterwork can now be enjoyed by English-speaking readers. A thrilling and suspenseful saga, Samak the Ayyar also offers a vivid portrait of Persia a thousand years ago. Within an epic quest narrative teeming with action and supernatural forces, it sheds light on the lives of ordinary people and their social worlds. This is the first complete English-language version of a treasure of world culture. The translation is grounded in the twelfth-century Persian text while paying homage to the dynamic culture of storytelling from which it arose.
The burden of this book is twofold. The first half is charged with identifying and critiquing the many prejudices and misconceptions that inform popular – and even scholarly – perceptions of Islam and Iran, those rooted in neo-conservative hostility no less than those arising out of pro-regime apologetics or (what we will argue are) misleading "post-modern" methodologies. This is a key component of our overall investigation, both because the illusions occluding our view of the Islamic Republic are (we assert) piled so high and deep, and because setting the record straight on many a contentious issue is the most appropriate context for elucidating the positive positions of the revolutionary clerics. These last represent, perhaps more than anything else, the premier critics of Western civilization in our day, and their ideologies may therefore be best comprehended when placed in dialogue with, and in polemic against, the worldviews of that civilization (which in their own turn are often most profoundly understood when offset by their present-day Islamist nemeses). As noted above, it is not all contention: unexpected meeting points and congruities emerge, as well, when the activist Shi'ite clerics are placed in the same virtual room with their occidental counterweights. The second half of the book deploys a large number of rarely tapped primary sources, both ancient and contemporary, in order to tease out the attitudes of the class of Muslim scholars recently and currently at the helm of the Iranian state in a variety of significant fields, including the role of religion in society, the relationship between democracy and theocracy, the modern Western Weltanschauung, the Sunni-Shi'i schism, and much more. Though the author parses, and provides background and context for, the myriad citations from these influential Muslim thinkers, the ultimate objective is to allow them to speak for themselves.