The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Power, Institutions, and the Limits of Reform. Hadi Enayat and Mirjam Künkler (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Pp. xxxv + 471. £115 Hardback. ISBN: 978-1108481427 – CORRIGENDUM

Abstract This article examines “Salām Farmāndeh” as a case study of sorud s (state-sponsored songs produced to advance ideological narratives and maintain cultural hegemony). The article argues that “Salām Farmāndeh” represents a significant shift in the Islamic Republic’s cultural strategy: blending religious themes, nationalist sentiment, and popular music elements to mobilize younger generations, particularly Generations A and Z. Through qualitative analysis of the song’s musical structure, lyrical content, and state-led promotional campaigns, the article demonstrates how “Salām Farmāndeh” operates as an ideological state apparatus (ISA)—a tool for reinforcing loyalty to the principles of velāyat-e faqīh (guardianship of the Islamic jurist) and the Islamic Republic’s ideological foundations. Guided by Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony and Althusser’s concept of ISAs, this study reveals how contemporary sorud s such as “Salām Farmāndeh” reflect the regime’s adaptation of propaganda techniques to secure consent, not merely through coercion, but via emotional, cultural, and generational appeal. The findings contribute to broader discussions on the intersection of music, power, and ideological reproduction in modern Iran.

Abstract This article analyzes the political ecology of modern Iran as envisioned in the report of Arthur Hills Gleadowe-Newcomen’s 1904–-05 Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia and a covert Persian counter-narrative penned by its military attaché, Mirza Riza Muhandis. The commercial ambitions of the British Empire in Qajar Iran involved a transformation of Iran’s environment. The critiques of these programs outlined in the travelogue of Mirza Riza Muhandis concern whom these interventions by science and engineering should serve. This case study highlights tensions over development and inequality at a critical moment in Iran’s history, just months before the beginnings of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution.

Abstract This article examines diasporic Iranian responses to protests sparked by the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022. While Amini’s death galvanized widespread dissent inside Iran, it also spurred diasporic Iranian solidarity, often expressed through the call to “be the voice” of Iranian protestors. I analyze two key practices of diasporic narration: first, framing the Woman, Life, Freedom protests as a “revolution” in social media discourse; and second, the circulation of nostalgic video montages idealizing pre-1979 Iran as a lost era of political freedom. Together, these practices reveal how diasporic narratives may dilute protest demands by fitting them into revisionist frameworks. The conclusion reflects on both the potential and limits of diaspora narration in shaping political memory and understanding.

Abstract In this article, we examine Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, coining the term “culture revolution” to underline this movement’s distinctive characteristic. While Iran’s “cultural revolution” (1981–83) forcefully usurped the country’s public, educational, and artistic sphere, the “culture revolution” decisively ended the regime’s ideological domination of the public sphere. We explain how culture, using its innate resources of language, performativity, resignification, free play, and the collective trauma process, successfully reclaimed the autonomy of the cultural sphere and the physical and moral integrity of its citizens. We examine the dynamic and dialectical interactions of Iranians in the country, those in the diaspora, and their role in bringing about Iran’s “culture revolution.”

Abstract This article investigates the artistic milieu of the Qajar dynasty through a critical analysis of the distinctive and sophisticated style of Mahmud Khan Malek al-Shuʿarā (1813–93), contextualizing his work alongside that of his contemporaries, with particular emphasis on Kamal al-Mulk (1859–1940), the most renowned painter of the period. Through close analysis of selected paintings, this study reveals the layered complexity of Mahmud Khan’s visual language and underscores the broader interplay between Qajar art and European artistic traditions. Although this inquiry does not seek to provide a reading of modern Iranian art, it contends that Mahmud Khan’s oeuvre warrants serious critical attention—especially within non–Persian language scholarship—as a pivotal yet overlooked juncture in Iranian art history and a missed opportunity for articulating a meaningful continuum between Iran’s classical aesthetic heritage and its modern visual expression.

The works of prominent contemporary Iranian composers Hossein Alīzādeh and Parvīz Meshkātīān demonstrate a novel approach to the text-music relationship, characterized by a new understanding of the interaction between music's internal syntax and structure and the external world. This innovative approach, which can be described as “musical realism,” strives to represent textual meanings through musical gestures, particularly within the tasnīf genre, a metrical, pre-composed song with a pre-determined way of accompaniment, which developed over the past century.1 This approach, emerging primarily in contemporary compositions, is exemplified by the above two composers, who illustrate textual meaning through the intricate utilization of innovative treatments of modes, rhythm, melody, and texture relying on the potentials of the core of Persian musical tradition, the radīf – a collection of traditional Iranian melodic figures passed down orally through generations and serving as the foundational framework for improvisation and composition.2 By examining select instances from these composers’ works, I highlight the growing emphasis on a realist music-text relationship and its interplay with both the inner structures of Persian classical music and the broader context of Iran's modern position in the world.

Iran's Kurdish population, numbering approximately 8 million, is second in the Middle East only to Turkey, home to some 15 million Kurds.Nonetheless, Iran's Kurdish ethnonationalist movement is the weakest in the region, including in comparison with Iraq and Syria, home respectively to Kurdish populations of 6 million and 2 million.Allan Hassaniyan, a lecturer in Middle East studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the University of Exeter (UK), has authored a well-written book that explains why the Kurdish movement in Iran remains comparatively underdeveloped.Hassaniyan shows that first Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, by crushing Qazi Mohammad's Mahabad Republic of Kurdistan in 1947, and then the Islamic Republic since 1979 have freely and successfully unleashed their military strength to dampen Iranian Kurdish demands for autonomy.Hassaniyan then draws on firsthand experience living in Iraqi Kurdistan to reconstruct the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' many attacks against the Iranian Kurdish movement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) in the mid-1990s.As Hassaniyan reminds the reader, these were not the first attacks on Iranian Kurdish activists in the region.When the Iranian Kurds sought refuge across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan, Mulla Mustafa Barzani (d.1979), a hero to many in Iraqi Kurdistan, turned against the Iranian Kurds by murdering some of their leaders, especially those affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), and handing their bodies over to the Iranian authorities.Hassaniyan demonstrates how Barzani, who sought to garner Iranian support against his foremost enemy, the Iraqi government in Baghdad, employed condemnable methods in his targeting of Iranian Kurdish leaders.Nevertheless, none of the examples listed in this book are new, having been well covered by previous studies such as those by David McDowall, Abbas Vali, and Farideh Koohi-Kamali, among others.The author's claim that his book is the first systematic study of the past seven decades of the Kurdish movement in Iran is therefore problematic.In the 1980s, a fratricidal civil war between the mostly nationalist KDPI and the Marxist, class-oriented Komala significantly weakened the Iranian Kurds.Moreover, this fault was compounded by major differences within each party: in the KDPI this took the form of struggle between progressive nationalist leftists and "feudal" forces, whereas the Komala split between those who saw the Kurdish movement partially as a nationalist struggle and those who viewed it exclusively as a class struggle.In addition, the KDPI sought to engage cautiously with the Islamic Republic, whereas Komala eschewed all such engagement and blamed the KDPI for weakness vis--vis the Iranian state.Hassaniyan concludes that the fratricidal Komala-KDPI war undermined the Kurdish movement.