H. E. Chehabi

The identities of the Iranian Zūrkhanah

A MAJOR AMBIGUITY ATTACHES TO THE ZURKHANAH, THE TRADITIONAL GYMNAsium of Iran. It is celebrated as an abode of chivalry and traditional values such as generosity, forbearance, and fair play, but it also has a reputation of harboring unruly elements on the margins of legality, men who are willing to rent their strong-arm services to whomever pays most. In this article I propose to explore this ambiguity and trace its roots in the social history of the institution. To do this, I shall first provide a quick update on the state of traditional athletics today, then expound on the paradox, and finally attempt to explicate it by discussing the identities of three social types that frequented the zurkhanah.

Iran and Iraq

The geographic proximity between Iraq and Iran, their frequent association in discussions of the international politics of the eastern half of the Middle East, and perhaps even the fact that their respective names share three out of four letters, lead many who are not familiar with the Arabic alphabet to conflate if not confuse them. While the similarity in the names results only from their transliteration into Latin letters,1 the semantic fields of Iran and Iraq do indeed overlap geographically. As a geographic area, Iranshahr used to refer to an area bound by the Euphrates in the West,2 while Iraq used to refer to the entire region between the Syrian desert and the central deserts of Iran. To distinguish the predominantly Persian part of it (containing the historic cities of Hamadan, Isfahan, Kermanshah, and Rey) and its predominantly Arab part (most of the modern state of Iraq), they used to be called ’Eraq-e ’Ajam (i.e., Persian Iraq) and ’Eraq-e ’Arab (Arab Iraq), respectively. Until 1937 there was an Iranian province (velayat) called ’Eraq-e ’Ajam, and the toponym lives on in Persianized form in the town that used to be its capital, Arak, formerly Soltanabad-e ’Eraq, which is now the capital of Iran’s Central Province.3 Furthermore, the people of Iran’s northern Gilan province still call the rest of Iran (i.e., the plateau, as opposed to the Caspian lowlands) “’Eraq.”4

Diversity at Alborz

This essay discusses the various dimensions of diversity at Alborz, both when it was run by the American missionaries and when it was under Iranian management. In the first part, the ascriptive traits of human beings are the object of the analysis: gender, race, language, religion and class. In both periods Alborz was characterized by its openness to Iranians of different religious backgrounds, both teachers and students. The second part of the essay discusses the variety of the educational experience enjoyed by students, and concludes that it gradually diminished, as education came increasingly to be defined as instruction and extracurricular activities were reduced after the mid-1960s.

Une bibliographie de Juan J. Linz

Cette contribution propose une compilation, la plus complete possible, des articles publies par Juan L. Linz dans des revues ou dans des ouvrages collectifs.