The Royal Harem of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848–96): The Literary Portrayal of Women's Lives by Taj al-Saltana and Anonymous ‘Lady from Kerman’ (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Photo exhibition curated by: Dr. Pedram Khosronejad (October 19th, 2018 at the University California, Santa Barbara) Unveiling the Veiled: Royal Consorts, Slaves and Prostitutes in Qajar Photographs is the first public visual venue in the field of Middle Eastern and Iranian Studies bringing together photographs of Naser al-Din Shah’s (b. 1831-d. 1896) consorts and their African female slaves (kaniz) inside the royal harem, accompanied by images of women, probably prostitutes of the Naseri period (1848-1896), inside the studio of Amir Doust Mohammad Khan Moayer al-Mamalek (b. 1857-d. 1913), one of the influential members of the royal court and the king’s son-in-law. Indeed, properly analysing these three innovative and provocative topics –royal consorts, slaves and prostitutes– together requires a deep understanding of several fields of research. This is why I am presenting this exhibition in conjunction with the conference on Slavery and Sexual Labor in the Middle East and North Africa in the hope of providing a new platform for those of us who consider photographs of the Qajar period of Iran as material culture for use in further social, cultural and historical investigations. Dr. Pedram Khosronejad Associate Director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies School of Global Studies & Partnerships Oklahoma State University https://www.amazon.com/Unveiling-Veiled-Pedram-Khosronejad/dp/1727627199/ref=sr\_1\_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1538518323&sr=1-1&refinements=p\_27%3APedram+Khosronejad
The Situation of Women in Sasanian Iran : Reflections on the Story of Bahr ā
2010
The concept of history of which the Zoroastrian priests and their secretaries were in charge in the Sasanian period was different from what is known as history nowadays. History was a means of education, glorification of kings, and preservation of the social order. Acts, myths, and legends were intertwined in historical accounts. Thus, historians were in a privileged position to modify history in favour of its educational aims, or even to make history more impressive by using rhetorical and figurative language such as metaphors and hyperboles. It is commonly believed that the situation of women in Iran in the Sasanian era had improved more significantly than that in the rest of the world, and that the women were better treated than in all previous epochs of Iran’s history. But there is a story about the king Bahrām Gōr that testifies to tyranny and injustice towards women. It is a hunting story where Barhām Gōr cruelly causes the death of one of his mistresses, who was in his compan...
Iranian Woman as Reflected in Travel Books written in Qajar Period by European Travelers
Foreign travelers to any country usually record their observations precisely and these recordings provide any nation with valuable resources based on which they could scrutinize the dominant culture and worldview prevailing in a specific period of time in the target land. The present paper aims to delineate foreign travelers' outlooks and viewpoints regarding Iranian women in Qajar period as reflected in their travel books. To this end, their observations regarding women's personality traits, clothing style, habits, beliefs, familial relationships and appearance are analyzed. It should not be forgotten that while many of these observations are recorded impartially and objectively, we could positively assume that these recordings are by no means devoid of prejudice and preconception. Readers will get acquainted with many startling and absorbing facts regarding women which could not be found in native sources.
Beyond the Haram: Ibn al-Khatib and his Privileged Knowledge of Royal Nasrid Women
Praising the ‘Tongue of Religion’: Essays in Honor of the 700th Anniversary of Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s Birth, 2014
One of the most difficult tasks of specialists devoted to the study of Islamic Medieval societies is to reconstruct the historical role of women. The patriarchal interpretation of Islamic scriptural sources by largely male Muslim chroniclers, as well as the masculine nature of Arabic historiography, produced by and for men, determined the relegation of women to the background in both history and society. As a consequence, the presence of women was usually veiled in the chronicles, due to the exacerbated respect towards their identities stipulated by the Muslim sacred texts, which recommended preserving women within the private area of society. However, some authors went beyond these conventions and offered interesting data concerning the women of the dynasty that they served. This was the case of Ibn al-Khaṭīb, whose work is unique and fundamental to our knowledge of the female sultans of the Alhambra and the particularities of the Nasrid harem, as we will prove throughout this paper.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2005
ince the late 1970s and early 1980s, women's studies and, more recently, alongside and interlaced with it, gender studies have developed into a full-fledged and broad-based subdiscipline of Middle Eastern studies. Suffering generally, however, from a lack of historical record, the field has tended to focus on the contemporary period, and, accordingly, many of the main contributions have been made by anthropologists, insight sociologists, and political scientists. Historical studies of women and gender in the Middle East have been slower to emerge. In general, relatively little work was done before the mid-1990s; 1 research on Iran and Egypt, however, has been somewhat exceptional in this regard, and the echoes of the rise of women's public voice and action at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, when a public discourse on women began to take shape in the Middle East, have received relatively considerable treatment. 2 In the case of Iran, many of the historical studies on women point to the turn of the twentieth century and, more specifically, the 1905-11 constitutional revolution period as the I thank David Menashri, Rami Regavim, Liora Baavur, and an anonymous reader for their thought-provoking comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to Houri Berberian for sharing with me her knowledge on the subject and for offering her wisdom and insight. 1. For assessments of the state of the historiography of women and gender in Middle Eastern studies conducted in Europe and the United States, see the 1999 volume edited by
The objects on display, consisting of paintings, lacquered mirror cases and pen boxes, manuscripts, jewellery and ceramics, are juxtaposed with photographs from the Qajar period that were selected from the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran digital archive of the Harvard University Library. We were delighted to include artwork reproductions by contemporary artists Hojat Amani, Shadi Ghadirian and Mahmood Sabzi inspired by Qajar photographic practice and iconography, which demonstrate how the imagery of Qajar women continues to inspire artists today. The exhibition and the catalogue explore four themes on the images of women in 19th-century Iran: Notions of Beauty is a section presenting changes in the perception of female beauty over time and the definition of femininity during the Qajar era. Daily Life shows the portrayal of women and their daily activities in the private versus the public sphere. Women, Power and Refinement displays images of women in an aristocratic context and how these images indicate the important role of women and their refinement at the court. Women as Symbols in Qajar Art demonstrates how images of women were used to represent archetypal heroines and icons from famous stories that are still popular in Iranian society today. Our colleagues Amélie Couvrat-Desvergnes (Paper Conservator) and Stefan Masarovic (Stone and Wood Conservator) have put a lot of effort into conserving the objects on view in this exhibition and we are very pleased and honoured to have been able to integrate their valuable expertise in this catalogue. We are very proud to present a completely new and innovative approach to Qajar art. The few previous exhibitions on the topic have for instance mainly focused on the official portrayals of male Qajar officials, especially the royal image that was disseminated in various media from coins to rock reliefs and photographs. The Qajar Women exhibition and accompanying catalogue indeed provide an opportunity to showcase and publish MIA’s permanent collection and give the audience insight into the lives of 19th-century Iranian women, while exploring how images of women were employed in Qajar artistic production.
Narrative Culture 5, no. 1 (2018): 120–40., 2018
The article draws attention to the significance of a sixteenth-century (?) Persian manuscript titled Mūnis-nāma, which contains thirty-one popular tales from the late twelfth century. Most of the tales correspond to the fourteenth–fifteenth-century Ottoman Turkish tales of Faraj baʿd al-shidda, which were adapted into French as Les Mille et un jours in the early eighteenth century. Although the existence of a Persian precursor to these tales was already hypothesized, the corresponding Persian equivalents were hitherto only found in much later works (commonly known as Jāmiʿ al-ḥikāyāt) dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Predating the Ottoman Turkish works by some 200 years, the Mūnis-nāma provides an extremely valuable source for studying the historical development and transmission of specific tales from one language and culture to another. The Mūnis-nāma also contains works that can be classified as elite literature, such as advisory literature for rulers and courtiers and Sufi allegorical texts. The combination of popular and elite literature in the Mūnis-nāma blurs the traditional lines between the two realms in Persian literature and provides an excellent source for the study of elite and popular literature as parts of a larger whole. Furthermore, thanks to the compiler’s detailed introduction, we know that the intended audience of the Mūnis-nāma were the female members of a royal court. A thorough examination of this work in view of its intended audience will contribute to the current scholarship on advisory literature for rulers and courtiers.
Iranian Studies, 2016
Authorial Voices and the Sense of an Ending in Persian Diaries: Notes on Eʿtemād al-Saltaneh and ʿAlam This essay examines certain common themes as well as conflicting voices in two extensive sets of Persian diaries, written almost a century apart, by Mohammad-Hasan Khān Eʿtemād al-Saltaneh (1843-96), a long-time courtier and confidant of Nāser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848-86) and Asadollāh ʿAlam (1919-78) a close associate and court minister of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941-79). On the whole these diaries provide significant amounts of information about the inner workings of the court and the overall institutional setup of the Iranian state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although in writing their diaries these authors did not set out to produce a literary work, and nor did they intend to chronicle a general history, each in his own way captured his respective epoch and, within their limitations of time, scope, and insight, each reflected a broad range of private and social relationships. Also each in his own way echoed older ministerial voices, reminiscent of the voice that often resonates in the "mirror for princes" genre, of part player part intimate observer, and with a certain sense of admonition and resignation, lamenting the loss of an era which they felt was slipping away as they wrote.