The Petitioning System In Iran

Filing petitions to the ruler was a common practice in the history of the Middle East. But despite its social and political importance, the institution of mazalim, the so called "Investigation of Complaints," has still not been subjected to adequate investigation, neither its normative regulations and regional settings, nor the petitions themselves, as a source for political, economic, social and administrative history, the petitioning system in pre-modern and modern Iran being no exception. In contrast to royal decrees or official historiography, these petitions reflect complaints of people from all social strata, men and women, farmers, religious people and state officials, urban and rural population, including nomads. The petitions thus express the perspective of common people, their desires and grievances about tax collectors and governors, about the malfunctioning of the legal system and the royal administration. This book is based on a sample of petitions which were submitted to Nasir al-Din Shah between 1301/1883 and 1303/1886 and contains the texts of a selection of these petitions pertaining to the year 1301/1883-1884 as well as their classification and an analysis of the role and functioning of this institution.

The relationship between Islamic law and society is an important issue in Iran under the Islamic Republic. Although Islamic law was a pivotal element in the traditional Iranian society, no comprehensive research has been made until today. This is because modern reformers emphasized the lack of rule of law in nineteenth-century Iran. However, a legal system did exist, and Islamic law was a substantial part of it. This is the first book on the relationship between Islamic law and the Iranian society during the nineteenth century. The author explores the legal aspects of urban society in Iran and provides the social context in which political process occurred and examines how authorities applied law in society, how people utilized the law, and how the law regulated society. Based on rich archival sources including court records and private deeds from Qajar Tehran, this book explores how Islamic law functioned in Iranian society. The judicial system, sharia court, and religious endowments (vaqf) are fully discussed, and the role of ‘ulama as legal experts is highlighted throughout the book. It challenges nationalist and modernist views on nineteenth-century Iran and provides a unique model in terms of the relationship between Islamic law and society, which is rather different from the Ottoman case. Providing an understanding of this legal system in Iran and its role in society, this book offers a basis for assessing the motives and results of modern reforms as well as the modernist discourse. This book will be of interest to students of Middle Eastern and Iranian Studies.

Iran's interaction with its neighbours is a topic of wide interest. But while many historical studies of the country concentrate purely on political events and high-profile actors, this book takes the opposite approach: writing history from below, it instead focuses on the role of everyday lives. Modern Iranian historiography has been dominated by ideas of nationalism, modernization, religion, autocracy, revolution and war. Iran in the Middle East adds new dimensions to the study of four crucial areas of Iranian history: the events and impact of the Constitutional Revolution, Iran's transnational connections, the social history of Iran and developments in historiography.

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility. Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.

A social history of modern Iran 'from below' focused on subaltern groups and contextualised by developments within Middle Eastern and global history.

Uses political practices and a socially-oriented approach to explain imperial formation under the Qajars in early nineteenth-century Iran.

Gleave brings together studies by experts in the area of religion in nineteenth-century Iran in order to present new insights into Qajar religion, political and cultural history. Key topics covered include the relationship between religion and the state, the importance of archival materials for the study of religion, the developments of Qajar religious thought, the position of religious minorities in Qajar Iran, the relationship between religion and Qajar culture, and the centrality of Shi'ite hierarchy and the state.

Against conventional views of the unchallenged hegemony of a modernizing monarchy, this book argues that power was continuously contested in Riza Shah's Iran. Cronin excavates the successive challenges to Riza Shah's regime posed by a range of subaltern social groups and seeks to restore to these groups a sense of their historical agency.