Drawing on the poetry of twentieth-century, Iranian poet, Forugh Farrokhzad, this paper seeks to contribute to the discourse of feminist epistemology as it relates to women’s religious identity. Building on the scholarship of Fatemeh Keshavarz on remaking the sacred through literature, I present Farrokhzad’s poetry as a model for “sacred-making” that speaks to the struggles of Muslim women seeking to live an Islam that is empowering rather than stifling. Farrokhzad has lived on through her poetry both inside and outside of Iran in multiple ways: as a major contributor to modern Iranian poetry, pushing the boundaries of literary and cultural traditions, and exemplifying Iran as it existed before the Revolution for a community living in diaspora. Farzaneh Milani writes of Farrokhzad’s candor, and the reflection of self found in her poetry that was not hidden by the “anonymity or opacity of a veil.” Hamid Dabashi points to Farrokhzad’s poems as reflecting what he considers to be the essence of Shi’i Islam, a resistance of injustice. Echoing the theme of protest, Jasmin Darznik writes of Farrokhzad as “a vital coordinate” for Iranian American women in the discourse on gender, faith, social justice and human rights. I bring together the framing of Farrokhzad’s work by these scholars with my own reading of her poetry to present it as a model for the ways in which Muslim women’s experiences can give shape to ways of reinterpreting and identifying as Muslim. Rather than reading Farrokhzad’s work as solely oppositional to Islam, I offer a reading that regards her poetry as carrying out the necessary task of holding up a mirror to the ways institutional expressions of Islam too often continue to hinder women’s self-realization. I read Farrokhzad within the context of a rich tradition of poetry that weaves together the erotic and the esoteric, that offers social critique, expresses joy and heartbreak, and values personal experience as a form of knowledge. In doing so, I hope to show how the articulation of Muslim women’s experiences outside of traditional religious scripture can be empowering on an individual level in regards to defining one’s own identity as a Muslim, and can add to the larger discourse of what it means to be Muslim.

Known in Iran as the doyen of contemporary dramatic literature and revered as a legendary cultural figure in general, Bahram Beyzaie is much less recognized outside the Persian literary sphere. While his career as a filmmaker has surpassed the national borders, his oeuvre of playwriting is still to be fully discovered on the international level. This essay looks into one of Beyzaie’s most acclaimed plays, Yazdgerd’s Death (marg-e yazdgerd, 1979) written and staged during the turmoil of the Iranian revolution. The play is set in the last days of the Persian Empire at the dawn of the Arab invasion. The specific allegorical interpretation that the work makes in looking at Iran’s contemporary history using the earliest episodes of its exposition to the fast-growing Islamic Empire is the main subject of my analysis. The essay explores Beyzaie’s play for its incorporation of several levels of allegorical and symbolic referencing to modern Iran, and offers an argument regarding the play’s narrating of a counter-history by using various modern techniques such as the Brechtian alienation effect. I will argue that Beyzaie’s distinctive usage of these techniques succeeds in portraying a very problematic national memory, and by extending it through allegorical references, showcases the contemporary Iran’s struggle in collective memory narration.

This paper lays the groundwork for comparative study of Arabic and Persian poetic modernism, focusing on the work of modernist pioneers in Iraq and Iran. Though the modernist movements in each of these traditions share a number of features, including but not limited to innovations on the pre-modern system of Arabic prosody (ʿarūḍ) and a return to pre-Islamic myth—particularly myths of death and rebirth, there are no comprehensive comparative studies in English. By tracing modernist applications of death-rebirth myths through the poetry of the Iraqis Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb and ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and the Iranians Nīmā Yūshīj, Aḥmad Shāmlū, and Furūgh Farrukhzād, I make the case for a comparative analysis of Arabic and Persian modernisms. I link these poets’ development of form with the innovative content of their verse in order to show how, in each tradition, poetic modernism developed in the same way over the course of thirty years, from 1938-1968. As this paper is part of a larger project, I limit my analysis to these poets’ use of the Phoenix (quqnūs; al-ʿanqāʾ) and other bird imagery as a representation of their modernist vision. Beginning with Nīmā Yūshīj's 1938 poem “Quqnūs” (“The Phoenix”), I highlight the centrality of rebirth myths in Arabic and Persian modernist projects and in poetic modernism more generally. I then look to Nīmā's use of birds in a number of later poems as a central feature of his poetics. Continuing on to the later Arabic and Persian tradition, I analyze al-Sayyāb and al-Bayātī's incorporation of the Phoenix into their poetic projects, which they elaborated during a time of political upheaval in their home country of Iraq. I then return to Iran and Shāmlū's 1967 collection Quqnūs dar bārān (“Phoenix in the Rain”) to explore the further development of mythic themes following Nīmā. I continue this exploration in the poetry of Farrukhzād's later period, when she too found inspiration in myths of rebirth and bird imagery in particular. By tracing the presence of the Phoenix and other rebirth myths in these poets' works, I lay the groundwork for further comparative study of Iraqi and Iranian poetry in terms of both form (in their parallel developments of the ʿarūḍ system) and content (rebirth myths like that of the Phoenix serving as one of the central themes in either tradition).

Samad Behrangi (1939-1968), a leftist revolutionary writer, educator, and folklorist, played a major role in the history of modern Iranian literature. His short story “The Little Black Fish” (1968) is considered a classic -- a significant political allegory that ushered in a new generation of children’s literature -- but in recent decades its status has declined. The work’s reputation now rests on nostalgia for the past instead of Behrangi’s standing as a revolutionary martyr. The merit of his story as a literary or revolutionary text needs to be re-evaluated. Few modern Persian works received as much attention. The story won international awards in places like Bologna and Bratislava, and Behrangi’s suspicious drowning, attributed to the shah’s regime, burnished his status as a revolutionary hero. In 1971 the University of Tehran sponsored a festival in his honor, and by 1973 his writings were banned. Behrangi’s heyday immediately preceded the Iranian revolution. Before 1979, “The Little Black Fish” was one of only three modern Persian literary works published as a book in America (the others were Hedayat’s The Blind Owl and Al-e Ahmad’s The School Principal). In fact, it was published four times: as an adapted children’s story; in a collection of Behrangi’s stories by a leftist Iranian student association; as part of a special issue of The Literary Review; and in a collection of his stories by Three Continents Press. “The Little Black Fish” has been translated more than any other modern Iranian story, but it is now missing from English anthologies of modern Persian literature. While a number of earlier essays focus on his writing, no recent scholarly work has been done on Behrangi in English. And more recent translations often cast the story as a tool for teaching Persian or as a nostalgic children’s story. They stress the sentimental aspects, domesticating it for the American reader and forgetting the political message. In my paper, I review the different ways this text can be read: as a children tale, a coming-of-age story, a literary fable, or a political allegory. I consider how these interpretations have changed before and after the Iranian revolution, comparing different retranslations in order to show how they reflect Iranian history and the perspectives of the translators as well as the changing narratives of the Iranian-American diaspora and its complicated relationship with Iran.

Many scholars argue that homogenization is an essential part of nationalism. National states apply various strategies to mask difference, to assimilate various ethnicities, to homogenize people within a territory, and to create non-national others. However, nationalism is not just about unification and homogenization; it is also about constructing differences, creating new boundaries, building distinctions, and representing others within the nationalist discourse. Indeed, national identities are “the product of the making of difference and exclusion.” We can say that homogenization and differentiation are two crucial dynamics by which nationalistic discourse constructs minorities. This process includes suppressing the incompatible and promoting the compatible identity. Positioning the other in the attempted unified image of a nation is a crucial element of this process. In this research project, I examine this mechanism in the case of Iran to observe how these two mechanisms, homogenization and differentiation, work in constructing ethnic identity. By focusing on the cultural products of three influential Iranian studies institutions in recent years, in this project I will address the following questions: How is Iranian Arab identity narrated in Iranian national discourse? How is the identity of Arab people in Iran constructed as a minority? How they are differentiated from other Iranians and how they are included in the national discourse? And how are the culture, history, and social structure of Arab people in Iran narrativized in Iranian nationalism? In this project, I will use narrative analysis as the methodological approach to examine the above-mentioned questions. As many studies show identity is constructed, shaped and reshaped through constructing different narratives. Through telling stories, people understand themselves and represent their identity. Analyzing these narratives can provide us insight into identity production mechanisms. In this project, I will collect and review the identity narratives produced about Arabs of Iran in the last decade by three influential Iranian studies institutions: Afshar Foundation (Bonyad Moqofat Doktor Mahmod Afshar), Foundation for Iranian Studies, and The Encyclopædia Iranica.