This event will be co-hosted by the Gingko Library to celebrate the publication of Revealing the Unseen: New Perspectives on Qajar Art.   The articles in the first section of the book are dedicated to the arts of painting, illumination and lithography. The second section is also concerned with works on paper but looks at newly introduced techniques such as fingernail art and photography. The third section looks at different materials: tiles decorated with mounted falconers, ikat velvet textiles, carpets as diplomatic gifts and a type of armour known as chahar ‘ayna. The two final articles focus on artefacts acquired through diplomatic and commercial exchanges. A presentation will be made by Gwenaëlle Fellinger, Senior Curator in the Department of Islamic Art in the Louvre Museum where she is in charge of Qajar Art and Melanie Gibson, Senior Editor of the Gingko Library Arts Series. Her publications focus on sculpture, ceramics and glass produced around the Islamic world. Gingko Library will be offering copies of the book for sale at a generously discounted price. The event will be held live at the Army & Navy Club, with Zoom for those unable to attend. There will be a reception upstairs at 6.30. The talk will start at 7pm. Entry is free to members of the Iran Society and to guests of Gingko Library, but prior registration is essential to gain admission. Registration details from info@iransociety.org      

‘Mirrors for Princes’ are mediaeval prose works of advice for rulers or prospective rulers on how they should exercise kingship. They were usually written by a ruler for the benefit of his son and heir, or by a high-ranking official or a senior religious scholar, in which case they were sometimes commissioned by the ruler. They have their origins in the cultural world of pre-Islamic Iran. The first ‘Mirrors’ of the Islamic era were written by Persians in Arabic, but with the re-emergence of the Persian language they were written in Persian. This talk focuses chiefly on two of these Persian-language ‘Mirrors’ which are generally regarded as the finest examples of the genre. They are the delightful and entertaining Qabus-nama written by the ruler of a principality in the Caspian region for his son, and the Siyasat-nama or ‘The Book of Government’, written by the famous Seljuq vizier, Nezam al-Molk, at the request of the Sultan. David Blow is the author of Shah Abbas: the ruthless king who became an Iranian legend - a very readable account of life in Iran in Safavid times. He also compiled Iran through Writers' Eyes, a compendium of travel writing about Iran from earliest classical times to the present day, published with support from the Iran Society. The lecture will be held at the Army & Navy Club, for members and their guests.

Milan has a fabulous collection of Safavid carpets. Robert Marin, currently in England, hails from the Università Ca' Foscari of Venice. Roberta is well known to the Iran Society and to the Oriental Rug & Textile Society, having lectured to us before.  She took an MA in Art and Archaeology with a focus on Islamic Art and Architecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).  Following her MA, she worked at the Asian Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, collaborated with the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, and taught at various public institutions, such as  Birkbeck College, the London College of Communication, SOAS, Asia House and the University of York. Due to the lecturer's indisposition this lecture is postponed for a future occasion.

This lecture will examine Iran’s political interactions with Sub-Saharan Africa under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Much of the scholarship on Pahlavi Iran’s global interactions has focused on its relations with the West. Comparatively little attention has been paid to Iran’s relations with the countries of the Global South, and the literature on its interactions with Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly sparse. This has led some to assume that the Shah had little interest in this part of the world, or that it did not play a particularly important role in late Pahlavi foreign policy. In fact, as will be discussed in this lecture, from the early 1960s and with increasing urgency in the 1970s, Imperial Iran worked to carve out a position for itself on the African continent, and developed deep political, cultural and economic ties with the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Robert Steele is now a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics  after a spell at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He has written a book on the inside story of the Persepolis celebrations of 2500 years of Iranian monarchy and is currently researching Iran's policy towards sub-Saharan Africa. This will be  a zoom lecture, starting at 7pm.  The link will be published shortly before the event.

    [caption id="attachment_917" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Sevruguin, Antoin:           Kashan bazaar[/caption] Shahs and their courts, royal art and architectural patronage, capital cities, and dynastic histories still dominate narratives of Iran’s past. Although these narratives provide us with invaluable insight into the history of Iran, they only address a small portion of people, artifacts, buildings, and cities of its past. In other words, royal figures and architecture consisted of a minority of the population and built environment of the capital cities of Tehran, Isfahan, or Shiraz, while they were virtually absent from the lives of many other cities across the Iranian Plateau. So, who built those cities? And how? This talk focuses on the reconstruction of the city of Kashan, a provincial urban center in central Iran, after a devastating earthquake in the late eighteenth century. By examining the regional and local political histories of Kashan concerning its notable households and their architectural patronage, this study discusses the role the local elites played in the revival of the city’s economy and built environment with no significant dynastic interference from outside. Nader Sayadi is a post doctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  He is a specialist in Islamic art, architectural, and urban history with a concentration on early modern global economic history. His academic and professional background is in historic preservation and architectural design. His research interests include textile history, the built environment of manufacturing, commerce, trade, and mobility, the material culture and built environment of power and piety. His talk will cover the architectural and urban history of the city of Kashan, in the eighteenth through the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of the local economy and the craft of silk weaving. This talk will be held on zoom.

The talk will look at the rise of Jews in the Iranian public sphere between 1900 and 1925, starting with a background of the conditions faced by Iranian Jews in the nineteenth century and their involvement and interest in the Constitutional Revolution. This would include questions about parliamentary representation, greater access to the press, and the expansion and modernisation of Jewish education. A discussion of the development of the Jewish press will follow, covering the change in tone, language, and self-confidence in the years 1915-1925 between three major Iranian-Jewish publications. This will be followed by a short discussion of Iranian-Jewish poetry from the period, showing how it parallels developments in the press. The talk will end with the story of the MP and newspaperman Shemuel Hayyim as the culmination of the expansion of the Jewish public sphere, asking how his arrest and execution set the tone for the community as it headed into the Pahlavi period. Daniel Amir is a DPhil student of Iranian history at Oxford University. He has worked with the BBC and as a freelance journalist.

This event will be to celebrate the publication of this lavishly illustrated book by Barbara Brend, independent scholar of Persian art. The Khamseh is a set of five poems by the 12^th century poet Nizami. They recount the story of the love of the Sasanian king Khusrow for Shirin, a queen of Armenia; the ill-fated love of Leila and Majnun; the storied told by seven princesses to Bahram Gur; and the story of Alexander the Great. Both illuminated manuscripts were made in Herat in the 15^th century and one of them contains paintings by the incomparable Behzad. Barbara Brend will give an account both of the poems and of the miniatures.  A reception will precede her talk. This event is open to members of the Iran Society and their guests, who need to register beforehand.        

Ali Ansari is the Professor in Modern History with reference to the Middle East at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies. He is a senior associate fellow at RUSI and sits on the Governing Council of the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS).  The lecture will be held at the Army & Navy Club and will be preceded by the AGM of the Iran Society. The lecture will start at 7pm, preceded by the AGM (for members only) at 6, with an interval for drinks in between.

Little is known outside Iran about the silverwork produced in Iran during this period. John Rogers, of the Chiswick Auction House, has been studying the subject for some years and has acquired a small collection himself. His talk will be about the current state of his knowledge of this subject and he will bring some of his own items to show. Members are welcome to bring items of their own for discussion if they wish. As numbers will be limited, this lecture will be a ticketed event for members and guests (max 1 guest per member). Nearer the time details will be sent out as to how to register. The lecture will be held at the Army & Navy Club at 7pm.