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This article reveals how engagements with the photographic archives of premodern Iran and the Persian carpet break open transtemporal, affective, and queer interplays in diaspora. Examining a digital remix of a photograph of a Qajar princess, 'Ismat al-Dowlah, from the archives of nineteenth-century Iran, the article argues that the digital (mis)use of archives exposes what forms such as the Persian carpet and photography erase: each medium's close ties with power, labor, gender, and sexuality. It develops a relational approach to understandings of photography that highlights the performative registers for a diasporic gaze while also troubling the imperial investment in understanding photography's history and its practices as a new technology that developed in the nineteenth century. This work considers how unlearning the history of Qajar photography entails deemphasizing the Qajar's king Naser Al Din Shah's fascination with photography's technological newness and instead exposes what desires his fascination was tethered to. This piece brings into conversation techno-historical overlaps between carpet weaving, the Jacquard machine, and computational arts, opening up critical questions about gender vis-à-vis production, labor, and computation within both carpets and computers as media interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the role of religion in the political history of Iran since 1796 to 2009. The author analyses the conditions of state and religion during various political periods in Iran, including Qajar dynasty, reign of Pahlavi shahs, Islamic Revolution and supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini's rule, and presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He opposes the popular assumptions that Shi'ism is integral part of Iranian culture, and that ulema always had crucial role in Iranian politics.

The article attempts to place the history of the Bakhtiyari's involvement in the constitutional revolution with the context of development and transition in southwestern Iran. It suggests that the encounter of pastoral nomads with Iranian nationalism can be traced back to the late Qajar period, before Riza Shah Pahlavi's attempts at military pacification and sedentarization of the tribes in the 1920s and 1930s. The role of the Bakhtiyari in the constitutional revolution represents a somewhat awkward moment in modern Iranian history, for were pastoral tribes that took part in a nationalist event.