Ne Night In Tehran

Sani‘ ol-Molk’s The Thousand and One Nights

This book examines The Thousand and One Nights by Abol-Hassan Khan Sani‘ ol-Molk Ghaffari (1813/1814-1867), of the content of the illustrations of the main story, the story of Shahrzad and Shahrbaz, as well as a codicological study of the manuscript. It intends to explain how Sani‘ ol-Molk complicates the visual frame by adaptive strategies that build on the relationship between presented objects inside an illustration and the meanings that could be conventionally attributed to them from outside of the image. Examining the illustrations of the manuscript shows how Sani‘ ol-Molk’s visualization of the main story of The Thousand and One Nights adds to the narrative and adapts it to convey meaning(s) that transcend the story the illustrations refer to.

Tehran Blues

More than two decades after their parents rose up against the Shah's excesses, increasing numbers of young Iranians are risking jail at the hands of religious paramilitaries roughly their own age, for things their counterparts in the West take for granted: wearing makeup, slow dancing at parties, holding hands with members of the opposite sex. Every day anxious parents queue at courthouses to bail out sons and daughters who have been detained for 'moral crimes'. Kaveh Basmenji, who spent his own youth amidst the turbulence of the Islamic Revolution, argues that Iran's youth are in near-open revolt for want of greater freedoms, in furious defiance of the mullahs and their brand of sombre religiosity. Through candid interviews with young people, and in a careful assessment of Iran today (including a special chapter on the implications of the recent election to the presidency of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), Basmenji gets to the heart of the matter: What do Iran's youth want, and how far are their elders prepared to go to accommodate them?

Sorraya in a Coma