Publications
Discover our comprehensive collection of scholarly publications.
The Contest for Rule in Eighteenth-Century Iran
This volume explores the troubled eighteenth century in Iran, between the collapse of the Safavids and the establishment of the new Qajar dynasty in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Despite the striking military successes of Nader Shah, to defeat the Afghan invaders, drive back the Ottomans in the west, and launch campaigns into […]
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Safavid Persia in the Age of Empires
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi’ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran’s […]
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The Timurid Century
The century after the conquests of Timur witnessed the division of eastern and western Iran between his Turko-Mongol successors, and a flowering of Persian culture in the great cities of Herat, Samarqand and Tabriz, among others. In this, the ninth volume in The Idea of Iran series, leading scholars analyse the ways that Timurid contemporaries […]
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Iran After the Mongols
Following the devastating Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, the domination of the Abbasids declined leading to successor polities, chiefly among them the Ilkhanate in Greater Iran, Iraq and the Caucasus. Iranian cultural identities were reinstated within the lands that make up today’s Iran, including the area of greater Khorasan. The Persian language gained unprecedented […]
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The Coming of the Mongols
The Mongol invasions in the first half of the thirteenth century led to profound and shattering changes to the historical trajectory of Islamic West Asia. As this new volume in The Idea of Iran series suggests, sudden conquest from the east was preceded by events closer to home which laid the groundwork for the later […]
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The Age of the Seljuqs
From their ancestral heartland by the shores of the Aral Sea, the medieval Oghuz Turks marched westwards in search of dominion. Their conquests led to control of a Muslim empire that united the territories of the eastern Islamic world, melded Turkic and Persian influences and transported Persian culture to Anatolia. In the eleventh and twelfth […]
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Early Islamic Iran
How did Iran remain distinctively Iranian in the centuries which followed the Arab Conquest? How did it retain its cultural distinctiveness after the displacement of Zoroastrianism – state religion of the Persian empire – by Islam? This fifth volume in The Idea of Iran series traces that critical period in Iranian history when ancient tradition were […]
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Remembering the Past in Iranian Societies
The study of culture in non-Western civilisations, moving away from the traditional approaches of ‘Orientalism’, is turning towards more sophisticated and objective ways to gain an understanding of these cultures. As part of this process, the concept of ‘memory’ and the various ways this affects communal discourse − and therefore societies as a whole − […]
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The Complete Fauna of Iran
Iran is host to some of Asia’s most diverse animal wildlife. Its lush Caspian coastline, arid central deserts, majestic mountains and fertile plains are the habitat for a vast range of creatures. Eskandar Firouz’s prize-winning book is the most comprehensive work to-date on the fauna of Iran. Indeed it is the only book to cover […]
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Lion Tombstone Sculptors in Iran: Their lives and techniques in Bakhtiari Territories
Three-dimensional sculpture is a rare artistic form across the Islamic world, yet is almost commonplace in the form of lions in the Bakhtiari cemeteries of the central Zagros mountains in western Iran. Despite their numbers and significance, these lions have neither been studied nor analyzed before this book.
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The Hunt as Metaphor in Mughal Painting, 1556-1707
Based on her PhD thesis completed with the support of the Soudavar Memorial Foundation, Adeela Qureshi de Unger discusses in this book the development of the Mughal style, the illustration of manuscripts and the transition from manuscript illustration to single-page paintings and album leaves. All these aspects are discussed in the context of natural history […]
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Images of Islamic Science: Illustrated Manuscripts from the Iranian World (Volume I)
This is the first volume of a UNESCO project published under the auspices of Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, Fondation Max van Berchem and the Islamic Azad University, this volume has a dual purpose: to assemble reference materials on the illustration of scientific literature from the Iranian world in the Islamic period, and to […]
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