Modern scholarship associates the period in which the Safavid dynasty ruled in Iran (1501-1722) with two major developments in the Persianate. One is sectarian rupture between Iran under the Shi‘i Safavids, and other Persianate regions - including Turan (Central Asia) - under Sunni dynasties. The other is a roughly contemporaneous (late sixteenth-eighteenth century) movement in Persian poetry, which has long been designated in modern scholarship as sabk-i Hindī (the Indian style); I refer to this movement as the poesis of freshness. Through the assumption that India is outside the proper or natural home of Persian poetry, modern scholarship has tended to characterize the Indian style in terms of decline. The accounts of both sectarian rupture and the Indian style rely on assumptions about difference on the basis of anachronistic categories including sect, nation, and ethnicity. This dissertation shifts focus from modern assumptions about difference, to ways in which participants in the poesis of freshness made sense of kas̱rat (multiplicity), understood to indicate creation as that in which difference and determinacy inhere. What were ways of gleaning the presence of vaḥdat (unity) – including, but beyond, divine unity – in multiplicity, and of engaging with multiplicity so as to bring about unity? Given the association of verbal expression (lafẓ) with multiplicity, I understand poesis as one means of effecting the imaginative transformation of multiplicity and the cultivation of unity. A major emphasis in modern critiques of the so-called Indian style is that it was unnecessarily difficult to the point of meaninglessness. However, I argue that emphases in the poesis of freshness that may be related to difficulty – subtlety, intricacy, ambiguous polysemy, and the generation of new metaphorical equations – are meaningful, including as ways of honing verbal form to write multiplicity against itself and bring about unity. This dissertation has two parts: the first is centered on Persian poetry, and the second, on taẕkiras (biographical dictionaries of poets). While setting their works in conversation with others, I focus on Shawkat Bukhari (d. 1695 or 1696)’s poetic collection, and Maliha Samarqandi (d. after 1692)’s taẕkira, which includes a laudatory entry on Shawkat. Shawkat and Maliha both came from Turan (Bukhara and Samarqand respectively) and spent a significant amount of time in Iran, where they met; their transregional lives lend support to recent critiques of the narrative of sectarian rupture between Turan and Iran. Moreover, they do both describe and enact ways of encompassing and bringing together religiously-marked forms of differences (including the polarity between Sunnism and Shi‘ism). However, I demonstrate the need to interpret discussions of religiously marked differences through the matrix of the relationship between multiplicity and unity. Attention to unity and multiplicity in Shawkat and Maliha’s works makes it possible to intervene in modern assumptions about sectarian rupture and Indian poetic decadence without reifying their principal analytical terms. In doing so, it points to a more pressing concern: how to engage with creation – including language itself – without taking its forms of difference or determinacy as fixed or final, instead bringing out unity’s subtle and destabilizing presence in multiplicity.

No description available.

This study has a twofold purpose: to demonstrate the causes of and various responses (British domestic, Iranian, Arabian, American, and Soviet) to the British decision to withdraw and to illustrate the regional political consequences of that withdrawal. The British Labour Government decision resulted primarily from an economic crisis. The various responses to the decision seem to have been motivated by national self-interest. Some of the Gulf states-- Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait--predicted that the consequences of the withdrawal would be desirable while others--Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates-- predicted that the consequences would not be beneficial. In some ways, both sides were correct in their predictions.

Le piano, instrument de musique occidental, détient une position historique unique dans la musique persane. La musique d’Iran est constituée à partir d’un repértoire canonique classique qui fait état de caractéristiques transmises de génération en génération, avec quelques innovations apportées au fil du temps. Lorsque des échelles musicales ont été portées sur un piano à Téhéran dans les années 1870, les membres de la cour impériale étaient le seul public témoin de l’évènement. À l’époque, Sorourolmolk, musician du palais Qajar sous le règne de Nāsseredin Shah Qajar (1848-1896), a tenté de changer l’accordage du piano et de jouer les airs traditionnels persans, inspirés par les techniques du santur et du tār. Ainsi, la pratique du piano en Iran a immédiatement été associée à la musique qui existait déjà depuis des générations. On parlera alors de “piano persan.” Plus tard, l’élite instruite de la société et les étudiants de la première école de musique militaire à Téhéran (Sho’beh-ye Music-e Dārolfonoun) ont été parmi les premiers “praticiens” du piano Persan. Cette thèse étudie l’art du piano persan à Téhéran depuis son introduction dans les années 1880 jusqu’à la revolution de 1979. Durant cette période, la pratique du piano persan a progressivement mûri, culminant dans les compositions et interprétations de Moshir Homāyoun-e Shahrdār (1886-1969), Mortezā Mahjoubi (1900-1965), et Javād Ma’roufi (1915-1993). Mahjoubi est considéré comme le plus eminent compositeur et interprète qui a instauré le piano traditionnel persan (Piano-ye Sonnati) comme une forme d’art distinctive. Les éléments les plus remarquables du piano persan traditionnel, les techniques de jeu, et les systèmes de réglage en microtones, de même que les innovations apportées à la pratique canonique par Ma’roufi, constituent les axes principaux de cette recherche. En outre, avec l’essor de la musique classique occidentale, la pratique du piano persan qui était presque entièrement fondée sur des techniques instrumentales ainsi que sur des formules et mélodies persanes autochtones n’a pas été maintenue au sein du Téhéran du XXe siècle. Le piano classique occidental coexista alors avec le style persan. Ce mémoire s’attache donc à étudier la place du piano classique occidental dans la société persane en présentant les contributeurs majeures en ce demaine, ce qui comprend aussi le style de Emanuel Melik-Aslāniān (1915- 2003). Cette recherche met aussi un accent particulier sur les claviéristes femmes, leur enseignement, leur style de jeu et leur performances publiques de la période de Qajar à celle de Pahlavi. Aujourd’hui, on constate de plus en plus de tentatives prometteuses pour revitalizer l’art du piano persan. Cela est particulièrement vrai pour le style de Mahjoubi dont l’héritage remarquable marque l’histoire d’évolution de la pratique du piano persan. Actuellement, la meilleure élève de Mahjoubi, Madame Fakhri Malekpour, enseigne le style traditionnel du piano persan en cours privés à Téhéran. L’effort fait pour éveiller l’interêt et former une nouvelle génération de pianistes pourrait faire en sorte qu’à l’avenir, cette forme unique d’art de piano sera plus connue et advantage pratiquée aux côtés des autres styles pianistiques. / Piano, a western musical instrument has a unique historical position in Persian music. Iran has its own music as part of its culture, a classical canon with an enduring repertoire and characteristic techniques handed down from generation to generation with some improvements made along the way. When the first keys were played on a piano in Tehran in the 1870s, the members of the imperial court were the exclusive audience. At the time, Sorourolmolk, the master musician of the Qajar palace during the reign of Nāsseredin Shah Qajar (1848-1896), attempted to change the tuning of piano and play traditional Persian tunes in a way inspired by santur and tār techniques. Thus, the practice of piano in Iran was immediately associated with the music that had already existed for generations. This would eventually become known as “Persian piano.” Later, the educated elite of the society, and students of the first military music school in Tehran (Sho’beh-ye Music-e Dārolfonoun) were among the first practitioners of Persian piano. This dissertation studies the art of Persian piano in Tehran from its introduction in 1880s until the Revolution of 1979. During this period, Persian piano practice gradually matured, culminating in the compositions and performances of Moshir Homāyoun-e Shahrdār (1886-1969), Mortezā Mahjoubi (1900-1965), and Javād Ma’roufi (1915-1993). Of this group, Mahjoubi is considered the most prominent composer and performer, and is the one credited with establishing Persian piano as a distinctive art form. This study looks at his work, and also focuses a spotlight on Ma’roufi’s style and contributions to Persian piano. With regard to the most notable elements in traditional Persian piano, the dissertation offers a thorough analysis of the techniques and tuning systems linked to the Persian microtone, and explores innovations in the canonic practice of traditional Persian piano. With the rapid expansion of western classical music in Iran in the twentieth century, the practice of Persian piano based almost entirely on indigenous Persian instrumental techniques, forms, and melodies, no longer held an exclusive place in piano performance. Accordingly the dissertation moves on to the practice of piano in Iran in the twentieth century and finds that Western classical piano co-existed with the Persian style. The study delves into the establishment of the western classical piano in Persian society and presents the major contributors in this field including Emanuel Melik-Aslāniān (1915- 2003). The dissertation places particular emphasis on female keyboard players, their musical education, style of play, and public performances from the Qajar period through the Pahlavi era. Today, promising attempts to revitalize the art of Persian piano are on the rise. This is especially true for Mahjoubi’s style whose outstanding legacy marks a milestone in the evolution of Persian piano practice. Presently, Mahjoubi’s best student, Fakhri Malekpour, is teaching the traditional style of Persian piano in private lessons in Tehran. The effort to awaken interest, and to train a new generation of practitioners just might mean that this unique form of piano art will become more well known and practiced alongside other pianistic trends on into the future.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the foreign policy outcomes of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to understand the extent to which a Regional Intergovernmental Organization (RGO) consisting of developing nations is able to promote regional cooperation. Much of the literature on integration and the formation of Intergovernmental Organizations was developed with regard to western nations. These approaches are examined for their contributions to foreign policy behavior analysis and with respect to understanding why small and developing nations join such organizations. Final analysis of the outcomes using two scales to measure the organization's ability to promote regional cooperation reveal that the level of success was moderate and the level of political action undertaken by the GCC was generally moderate to low. Leadership is supportive of the organization but both external and internal factors contribute to the modest levels achieved so far. Issues of national sovereignty and a decade of regional conflicts affected the ability of the organization to achieve greater levels or regional cooperation.

This thesis treats of the use and meaning of the Greek concept of eleutheria (freedom) and the cognate term autonomia (autonomy) in the early Hellenistic Period (c.337-262 BC) with a specific focus on the role these concepts played in the creation and formalisation of a working relationship between city and king. It consists of six chapters divided equally into three parts with each part exploring one of the three major research questions of this thesis. Part One, Narratives, treats of the continuities and changes within the use and understanding of eleutheria and autonomia from the 5th to the 3rd centuries. Part Two, Analysis, focuses on the use in action of both terms and the role they played in structuring and defining the relationship between city and king. Part Three, Themes, explores the importance of commemoration and memorialisation within the early Hellenistic city, particularly the connection of eleutheria with democratic ideology and the afterlife of the Persian Wars. Underpinning each of these three sections is the argument that eleutheria played numerous, diverse roles within the relationship between city and king. In particular, emphasis is continually placed variously on its lack of definition, inherent ambiguity, and the malleability of its use in action. Chapter one opens with the discovery of eleutheria during the Persian Wars and traces its development in the 5th and early 4th centuries, arguing in particular for a increasing synonymity between eleutheria and autonomia. Chapter two provides a narrative focused on the use and understanding of eleutheria in the years 337-262. It emphasises continuity rather than change in the use of eleutheria and provides a foundation for the subsequent analytical and thematic chapters. Chapter three analyses eleutheria itself. It emphasises the inherent fluidity of the term and argues that it eschewed definition and was adaptable to and compatible with many forms of royal control. Chapter four looks at the role of eleutheria within the relationship between city and king. It elaborates a distinction between Primary and Secondary freedom (freedom as a right or freedom as a gift) and treats of eleutheria as a point of either unity or discord within a city‘s relationship with a king. Chapter five explores the connection between freedom and democracy and looks at how the past was used to create and enforce a democratic present, specifically in constructing both Alexander‘s nachleben as either a tyrant or liberator and the validity of Athenian democratic ideology in the 3rd century. Chapter six concludes the thesis by returning to the Persian Wars. It analyses the use of the Wars as a conceptual prototype for later struggles, both by kings and by cities. Exploring the theme of the lieu de mémoire, it also outlines the significance of sites like Corinth and Plataia for personifying the historical memory of eleutheria.

In this thesis, I aim to investigate the variation of Persian pronominal address system and politeness strategies in contemporary Iranian society from a quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic perspective. I focus on Persian speakers’ use and perception of pronominal address forms in the light of socio-cultural norms in contemporary Iran. Persian, has two personal pronouns for singular address, to ([to]) the familiar or intimate ‘you’ and šoma ([∫oma:]) the deferential or formal ‘you’ (historically the second person plural but now also used as second person singular). Moreover, Persian is a pro-drop language, so the interaction between address pronouns and agreement marking on the verb must be taken into account. Another significant feature of colloquial Persian is a hybrid usage of the overt deferential second person pronoun and informal agreement forming a mismatch construction (i.e. šoma with 2s verb agreement) and intra-speaker pronominal address switches that occur between the deferential and casual pronominal address forms. Those deviations from the prescribed forms and/or distribution of the address pronouns are very interesting aspects that may show different levels of politeness even in one utterance. Consequently, this research examines spontaneous data looking at the sociolinguistic distributions and the pragmatic functions of pronominal address forms in contemporary Persian language and politeness synchronically. Three types of spontaneous data were collected for the purpose of analysis: a) participant observation, b) natural media conversations and c) sociolinguistic interviews with Persian speakers. In this study, the quantitative analysis investigates the correlation of pronominal address forms with extralinguistic factors such as age and gender of speaker and addressee in the interactional data. The qualitative analysis sheds light on how pronominal address forms and their variation encode communicative strategies in face-to-face interactions. Based on triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results with sociolinguistic interviews, I propose a dynamic model of indexicality for Persian pronominal address forms, which accommodates different forms and functions of address pronouns in interactional stances.

No description available.

This dissertation is an attempt to solve a puzzle: how and why did the poor, remote and isolated country of Afghanistan become a site of international Muslim aspiration and imagination in the early 20^th century? To answer this question, the dissertation focuses on the creation of ‘place’ - of Afghanistan in conceptual and material terms - out of the movement through ‘space’ of Afghan and Muslim travellers, and the inscriptions of such movement in texts. Through such a study, the dissertation argues that Afghanistan’s emergence as imperial counter-space and practical base for Muslims was the product of new physical and intellectual interactions amongst Afghan and Muslim travellers, powered by new technologies of steam and print. Such an argument resituates Afghanistan in connection to larger transformations taking place elsewhere. It thus marks an attempt to write late 19^th and early 20^th century Afghanistan back into global history. At the same time as drawing Afghanistan into that larger global story, however, the dissertation stresses the distinctiveness of the ‘Muslim turn’ to Afghanistan: how many of these new physical and intellectual movements relied on older physical or imagined connections with ‘the land of the Afghans’; how other movements offered strikingly original visions of what Afghanistan was and could be; how the Afghan court fostered and encouraged such movements through its particularist policies; how Afghanistan’s seemingly remote location, on the peripheries of the religious heartlands of the Middle East and the political and economic centres of western imperialism, made it such a prominent and attractive focus of Muslim interest and action. By plotting the inter-connections of Afghan and Muslim travellers over a forty-year period, the dissertation charts how Afghanistan grew to become one of the great hopes of the Muslim world. At the same time, the dissertation charts the growing gap between the idealized representation of Afghanistan and its reality. Finally, it illustrates how the ‘Muslim turn’ to Afghanistan ended in disillusionment and disaster, on Afghanistan’s plains.

Thesis advisor: David S. Vanderhooft / The book of Haggai emerged from a dispute in the early Persian period over the propriety and feasibility of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem in 520 BCE. As a record of that dispute, the book is a rhetorical artifact that displays a variety of strategies designed to persuade the Yehudite community that Yhwh wanted his house rebuilt. Theological and socioeconomic objections and obstacles to reconstruction had to be overcome before the Yehudites would accept Haggai’s call to rebuild. This dissertation argues that although some of the Yehudite community accepted Haggai’s claim that Yhwh wanted his temple built, others remained unpersuaded, fearing that the adverse agricultural and economic conditions, as well as the lack of a royal builder, were signs that Yhwh was not ready to begin the period of restoration. The oracles and narrative portions of the book are intended to counter these fears by arguing that Yhwh will provide for the adornment of the temple, bring prosperity to Yehud once the temple is built, and has already designated the Davidide Zerubbabel as the chosen royal builder. Haggai further strengthened commitment to reconstruction by vilifying those Yehudites who failed to support the temple as unclean and non-Israelite. Rhetorical analysis illumines not only particular features of the text but also indicates what theological and socioeconomic sources of opposition to temple reconstruction were most important in this period. This sheds further light on the socioeconomic conditions of early Persian period Yehud. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.