Whereas the momentous consequences of N?ser-e Khosrow's allegiance to Fatimid Ismailism manifest themselves resonantly throughout his rich literary output in both prose and verse, the true-life processes or event(s) which had him profess Ismailaism in the first place were recorded solely by Nbser himself, who clearly cannot pass as a disinterested witness. He committed his spiritual journey to religious truth as he found it embodied in Ismailite doctrine to poetry as well as the ostensibly non-fictional mode of prose. However, the pertinent texts, his Travelogue (Safarname) and the often so-called 'confessional ode,' present the reader with, as here submitted, hitherto unsolved problems of interpretation. While there is broad agreement on the distinctness of any given poetic representation from reality, the self-professed truthfulness of autobiographical prose as encountered in the introduction to Ncser's Travelogue has to date largely muted critical questioning. The majority of modern students, including Alice Hunsberger and even Heinz Halm, have tended to accept the author's stress on suddenness as regards first his departure for Mecca and subsequently his induction into the Fatimid organization of instruction and mission (da'wa). In the paper here summarized, a close reading of Nlser's two variant self-statements will be used to construct an argument for recasting his conversion to Ismailism as a gradual, if mostly unrecorded process. Thus the 'pivotal' dream in the Travelogue will be assigned the function of marking the consummation rather than initiation of a process of conversion which came to fruition in Cairo (pace Halm). The 'confessional ode' will be shown to support this reading once the constraints of--panegyric--poetry are duly taken into account.

Among the great Islamic dynasties, the Safavids are distinguished by the unusual path they followed in their ascent to power. Their emergence onto the world-historical scene involved a process of metamorphosis of the Safaviyya from a conventional Sufi order into a religio-political project, which culminated in the establishment of the empire under the charismatic leadership of Shah Isma'il (r.1501-1524). While scholars commonly acknowledge that the Safavids' followers from Anatolia, known as the Kizilbash, played a key role in Shah Isma'il's success, the nature of the Kizilbash movement is still poorly understood. How was Shah Ismail able to mobilize a following of such magnitude? Who were these dedicated Kizilbash adherents to the Safavid da'wa, scattered all the way from the Balkans to Northern Syriai A group of recently surfaced documents and manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in the family archives of members of the Kizilbash/Alevi community shed new light on various aspects of these questions, and force us to rethink the formation and evolution of the historical Kizilbash milieu in Ottoman Anatolia and its connection to the Safavids. In the existing literature, Kizilbash-ism is almost exclusively associated with the tribal milieu. This view for the most part took shape on the basis of a number of Turcoman tribes' prominent place in the early Safavid political and military establishment. But the larger Kizilbash milieu in Anatolia and neighboring regions comprised ethnically and socially diverse elements, tribal as well as non-tribal rural communities, and even individuals from within the Ottoman bureaucracy. Moreover, new documents demonstrate the WafaWi origins of an extensive web of Alevi charismatic lineages, or ocaks, in eastern Anatolia. The case of the Wafi i cum Kizilbash ocaks suggests that the building blocks of the Kizilbash milieu were not individual tribes as such, but rather various Sufi circles and itinerant dervish groups who joined together under the spiritual and political leadership of the Safavid shahs. In other words, Shah Isma'il's predecessors established the foundation of the Kizilbash network in Anatolia, not by directly enlisting individual tribesmen or groups of them to their cause, but by recruiting for the Safavid project a number of already well-established mystics and sheikh families with widespread (tribal or non-tribal) followings of their own. With this new perspective on the subject we can more easily account not only for the surprisingly rapid expansion of the historical Kizilbash milieu, but also for its often little recognized resilience.

There have been few efforts to examine the lives, and especially the religious experiences, of ordinary Iranians especially those belonging to non-Muslim communities. Standard Qajar chronicles leave out non-Muslims in the official narrative and are mostly concerned with the lives of the elite. Few Jews have written accounts of their own life experiences in this period. However, the experience of conversion among Jews seems to have engendered a new sense of self-awareness and an urgency to share what a number of converts saw as their personal transformation. Their unconventional accounts fill an important gap in the existing historical sources for this period of Iranian history. This paper is inspired by memoirs of Rayhan Rayhani (1859-1943), an orphan from Kashan who became a Jewish peddler and later underwent a religious transformation when he converted to the Baha'i faith. His memoir, written with a keen historical insight, gives voice to the experience of a disadvantaged, marginalized, and evolving Jewish community. Being self-educated, his memoir may lack in style and sophistication. But its rawness also makes him more transparent. As a Jew branded as ritually "impure" by Shi`i law, Rayhani illustrates the often invisible experience of the "Other," who also carried the burden of being "unwanted." His account is a refreshing view of history from below. It tells the story of commoners who struggled to survive in a harsh environment of instability, war, and economic decline and who struggled for improvement in spite of overwhelming traditional obstacles. The fascinating picture Rayhani draws of the undercurrents of life in Iran challenges conventional notions of rigid social and religious barriers. His testimony gives insight into a life wherein, as a matter of survival, identities had to be both resilient and negotiable. His story reflects the complexity and prevalence of the conversion process and its interaction with a range of factors including Iran's social and political changes of the late Qajar period and a rise in messianic expectations, especially among Jews. For Baha'is, Rayhani's life was a period that began with fluid identities and ended with doctrinal and communal consolidation. He started out as what can be called a "Judeo-Sufi" Baha'i and ended up with a mainstream Baha'i identity, a notion defined in his lifetime.

Historiography of the Iranian Constitutional Movement has established Tehran and Tabriz as the major centers of the revolution and scholarly works written on the subject have focused heavily on the study of these two centers. Yet, it was neither Tehran nor Tabriz, but rather the uprising in Gilan that led the constitutional revolution to the victory. Thus, the study of this stage of the revolution, the paper argues, is essential to deconstructing and better understanding the revolution, as it will address questions such as how the revolutionary movement in the state of isolation and nearly complete suppression managed nevertheless to regain momentum and achieve victory; why the movement in Gilan succeeded while the two larger movements in Tabriz and Tehran were failing; and, what factors and conditions determined successes and failures of the revolution at its various stages. The lack of focus on the Gilan resistance is, partly, a result of the few accounts on the Gilan events found in the commonly used primary sources, especially when compared to the volume of accounts available on the developments in Tehran and Tabriz. Even those few sources that focus on the Gilan uprising are of a rather narrow focus addressing almost exclusively the groups their authors represented in the revolution with no sufficient material for the study of the broader domestic and international context of the Gilan uprising1. To the author of this paper, a particularly interesting aspect of the international, namely the Caucasian involvement in the revolution is a number of primary sources left by the Transcaucasian participants of the revolution in Gilan. Still to be published in any commonly known language these sources remain unutilized and mostly unknown to the broad scholarly community. These sources focus specifically on the Gilan uprising and cast new light on the entire spectrum of internal and external factors and conditions that surrounded the emergence and development of the Gilan uprising and determined its outcome. The Gilan movement exhibited its own peculiar characteristics different from those of the movements elsewhere in Iran, and perhaps, the paper argues, these differences were the very factors that determined Gilan's success. The above mentioned sources shed new light on those characteristics. 1.The Caucasian connections of the Iranian constitutionalists have been recognized by the contemporaries as well as modern scholars as 'lifeblood of the resistance'( Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, Columbia University Press, NY, 1996: 222)