Low-life and Sufism in late Timurid painting.

17th-century oil-paintings from Safavid Isfahan:  ‘People From Parts Unknown’.

The talk will cover Zoroastrian or Avestan Medicine from about 2, and 700 BCE through to the Sassanid period when Gondeshapur was the hub and melting pot of Greek, nurse Indian and Iranian medical teachings and will end with what is known as The Golden Age of Persian Science in the 9th-11th centuries CE with Zakariya Razi and Abu Ali Sina. Dr Nayer Nouri will also briefly mention why he thinks that the Simurgh should replace the Asclepius as the Iranian symbol for medicine. Dr Nayer-Nouri is a retired neurosurgeon and member of the Academy of the Medical Sciences of the I.R. of Iran.  In his retirement, when not gardening or cooking, in order to keep his synapses in good working order he has been writing articles on a number of subjects that interest him.

An often discarded topic, recipe Safavid jewellery to this day keeps puzzling  many Safavid and Iranian art experts. Does such a thing as Safavid jewellery exist? And if so, nurse why did this production not share the same fame of Ottoman and Mughal jewellery, viagra given that the Islamic Gunpowder Empires ruled concurrently over the Islamic territories and must have clearly been exchanging goods and diplomatic gifts among each other? This talk will try to unravel some of these questions and will mostly focus on the origins of the Safavid jewellery tradition. Beatrice Campi is an alumna of the Postgraduate Diploma of Asian Arts (a. a. 2012/2013) and a Master Graduate in History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies). In 2014, she graduated with Distinction writing an MA dissertation on The Bejewelled Aesthetic of the Three Great Islamic Empires in the 16th-17th Centuries. Her research focuses on the earliest developments of the Islamic Gunpowder Empires’ fashion to heavily encrust all sorts of daily objects and personal accessories, including jewellery, vessels, and weapons. She is particularly intrigued by the different degrees of artistic indebtedness and independent experimentation of each Islamic Empire. Her passionate interest in Islamic and Indo-Islamic art had already started to flourish at the time of her undergraduate studies (BA) in Venice, where she successfully got a combined degree of Islamic Art and Eurasian languages (Persian and Hindi). In the past two years, she has been working at Christie’s as a Client Service Representative, working side by side with several specialist departments especially Islamic Art and Jewellery. She has also presented the proceedings of her researches at various academic conferences and courses, such as the SAMS (Society for Archaeological Masters Students) Annual Conference II 2014, Institute of Archaeology, UCL; the BIPS (British Institute of Persian Studies) Glasgow Workshop 2015; and the short course Traditions of Gems & Jewellery: Asia and the Middle East, Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art, SOAS University.

Dr O’Sullivan has undertaken extensive research in the German and British archives on the subject of secret operations by both sides during World War II in Iran, and has produced two books on the subject. The first one deals with the German effort and the second one deals with the British counter-effort. His work shows why the Allies needed to occupy Iran at the time.

To be followed by the Christmas Party.  Admission by paid ticket only.

THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT.  PLEASE EMAIL THE OFFICE TO BE PUT ON THE WAITING LIST.

In the wake of the 1979 Revolution in Iran, the new régime aimed for an independent domestic cinema with Islamic and educational content in the service of the revolution. Cinema as both an industry and an art-form went through a process of cleansing and purification. As a result, many young non-professional Islamic revolutionaries started making their own state-funded ideological films. However, this new wave of Iranian cinema didn’t find its true cause until the start of the Iran-Iraq war. War became the main focus of these young Islamic filmmakers. This new wave of Iranian cinema, known as the Sacred Defence Cinema, has gone through several phases and continues to be an important but less known part of the cinema of Iran. This presentation is an aesthetic and socio-political analysis of the Sacred Defence Cinema through all its phases. The presentation includes both documentary and fiction films, with a focus on two of the most prominent figures of this cinema: Morteza Avini and Ebrahim Hatamikia.

Georgians made many important contributions to Iran, particularly under Shah Abbas I, as military men, provincial governors and builders.  Allahverdi Khan Undiladze, who built the eponymous bridge over the Zayandeh Rud in Isfahan, was a Georgian.  In Georgia, however, wherever one looks at a ruined church one is told that it was destroyed by Shah Abbas. Did Iran contribute nothing to Georgia other than ruin and destruction? Professor Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He has written many books about Russian and Georgian history and literature. He has translated Georgian poets and prose writers into English and is also the author of the Georgian-English dictionary.  He is much in demand as a lively and entertaining lecturer on Georgian history and literature. Members of the British-Georgian Society are invited to this lecture, which should make for some animated discussion afterwards.

The lecture will be preceded by the Annual General Meeting at 6.15pm

The Mosque of Shaykh Lutfallah in Isfahan is one of the most significant of the many historical buildings of Iran, and it is certainly one of the most beautiful. However, it is also one of the most misunderstood buildings in the country, and conclusions regarding a number of aspects of the mosque still elude academics. Built on the eastern side of the Maydan-i Naqsh-i Jahan in the early 17^th century, the building was part of Shah Abbas’s new capital in Isfahan and has long been associated with Shaykh Lutfallah, a character about whom relatively little is known. If you ask a local of Isfahan, you will be told that the mosque was built for use by the harem of Shah Abbas, but what evidence is there for this? Through a study of both the building itself, the inscriptions which it bears and the religio-political setting in which it was founded we will shed some light on the originally intended purpose of the mosque. A study of this building can, in turn, help us to understand the complex relationship between crown and clergy during this remarkable period in Iran’s history. Fuchsia Hart is a DPhil candidate based in the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford. She holds a BA in Persian with Old Iranian and an MPhil in Islamic Art with Arabic, both from the University of Oxford. Fuchsia is primarily interested in the material and visual culture of Shiʿism. Her DPhil research is investigating the visitation of Imamzadahs, with a focus on the shrine of Fatimah Maʿsumah in Qom.