Books published by Mage Publishers

Throughout history, many an ambitious diplomatic initiative has slipped into obscurity, but few have been so thoroughly forgotten as the efforts of a young man named Pedros Bedik to foster an alliance between two great seventeenth century powers, Persia and the Holy Roman Empire, against the mighty Ottoman Empire that lay between them. As a related enterprise, he worked to end the separation between the Western and Eastern versions of Christianity. In 1678, he published a book--written in Latin, with a Persian introduction--intended to explain the East to the West and thus further those aims. Never reprinted or translated, it has remained virtually unknown until now. Bedik was raised in an Armenian, Christian community in Ottoman-ruled Aleppo. At the age of 16, he was sent to Rome by his mother to avoid forced conversion to Islam. For seven years he attended a missionary college there, but his theological education abruptly ended in 1668 when he was expelled for carousing. Soon after, he left Rome in the company of the archbishop of Nakhchivan, in present-day Azerbaijan. En route the two agreed to launch a project to unite the Armenian Church with that of Rome. Bedik wanted to use this plan as leverage to get European Roman Catholic support for the protection of Armenian Christians. From Armenia Bedik travelled to Iran and spent 5 years there. In his book, which is mostly about his time in there, he is aggressively Christian and scathing about Islam, but not about Iran and Iranians. And he goes to great pains to show that the Shah was more than willing to enter into a pact with the Pope and the Christian princes of Europe to jointly attack the Turks from all sides. The value of this long-forgotten book lies in Bedik's talents as a knowledgeable, linguistically-skilled and keen-eyed observer, although a highly partisan one. Its pages contain fascinating descriptions of the court, customs, and people of Iran, including such unique information as the ash-e su memorial banquet ceremony; the abbasiyaneh drinking custom; how Persians threw a party and their cooking; the Nowruz ceremonies; the various breeds of horses; the race of messengers, and the Caspian Kalmyk nomadic tribe's annual oath to the Russian tsar. Bedik eventually returned to Europe, entered the Holy Roman Emperor's service as diplomat and soldier, and was made a count. In 1683, he was appointed ambassador and sent to Iran to discuss joint military action against the Ottomans and to seek better treatment for Iran's Christians. En route, after discussions in Warsaw, he disappeared in Russia. In this book, his vital and adventurous spirit lives again.

Life at the Court of the Early Qajar Shahs, a memoir translated into English for the first time, offers a uniquely intimate look at a world veiled by privilege and power. Its author, Soltan Ahmad Mirza, was a prince-the forty-ninth son of Fath Ali Shah Qajar, who ruled Iran from 1797 to 1834. Looking back over the reigns of his father and two other shahs, he assembled a vast wealth of detail about life at the apex of Persian society: the role of the ruler, the hierarchy of the harem, court eunuchs, ceremonies, diversions, disputes, occasional violence, and-as a nexus for it all-an extraordinarily intricate web of connections by birth and marriage. Among members of the royal family, Soltan Ahmad Mirza was revered for his vivid recollections of the past. When he set about composing his memoir in 1886, he widened his own knowledge by drawing extensively on the memories of women of the court-his mother (the favorite among his father's hundreds of wives), his sisters, aunts and other residents of the harem. As a result, for the first time in any work about the period, women shine and cut sharp and sometimes-splendid figures. They are not mere appendages to the greater glory of the ruler, passively submitting to the dominant religious and patriarchal structure. Rather, they are complete persons, some of them highly intelligent and resourceful, as related in the memoir's many vignettes about their influence in court matters. This translation not only includes the complete text of Soltan Ahmad Mirza's memoir, but is augmented with a great deal of additional contextual information and ancillary materials that makes the book an invaluable source to those interested in this important era of Iranian history. Dr. Eskandari-Qajar is founder/president of the International Qajar Studies Association (IQSA), a scholarly association dedicated to the study of the Qajar era. In 2009, he joined a team of scholars at Harvard University working on the NEH-funded Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran Harvard Project. The Project's aim is to safeguard digitally and make available documents, photographs and oral history of women in the Qajar era.

Muscat, the capital city of present day Oman, has had a long, and colorful history as a typical Indian Ocean port at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. International trade brought about a rich mix of various ethnic and religious groups including, besides Arabs, Africans, Baluchis, Mekranis, Sindis, Gujaratis, Persians and many others. At the turn of the twentieth century fourteen languages could be heard spoken in the city. As a result the people of Muscat tended to be more outward-looking, and tolerant of various cultures, than those of the hinterland. Nonetheless, the city remained a secondary port for most of its history.By 1750, due to anarchy in Iran and problems in Basra, Muscat became the most important Persian Gulf port, and very wealthy. This position was further enhanced by a strong Omani fleet built by the early Al Bu Sa`id rulers. By 1820, however, the Persian Gulf ports reasserted themselves and the Pax Britannica put an end to the use of Omani sea power, and Muscat started to decline. Sultan Sa`id II focused his energies on the development of Zanzibar on the African coast, but by 1868 revenues from Zanzibar and Bandar Abbas had all been lost. Furthermore, conflict between Muscat and the interior and the arrival of steam ships, which supplanted the smaller, local vessels, further sapped the city''s strength, and its prosperity. By 1900, Muscat had become a sleepy steamer port with a considerably reduced population.In Muscat: City, Society, & Trade, Willem Floor marshals a wealth of historical documents and challenges some of the heretofore accepted wisdom about the city. Those interested in the socio-economic and medical history of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf will find here a rich banquet of information.

Merchants and bankers managed much of nineteenth-century Iran''s economy and finances. The ulama-clerical leaders-who considered themselves responsible for the spiritual welfare of their flock also played an important economic role, in particular, through management of religious endowments. Numerically, however, the most important group was that of the traders and craftsmen, who were organized into guilds and who formed thirty to fifty percent of the urban population. Finally, there were the unskilled, mostly seasonal, laborers. Guilds, Merchants and Ulama analyzes the major functions and characteristics of these groups, and discusses how they each coped with the pressures of the world market to which Iran was increasingly exposed and which resulted in the disappearance of jobs reducing Iran''s economic and political independence. After 1870, Iran''s economic situation was aggravated by an influx of peasants into the main cities significantly increasing the size of permanent unskilled labor in these cities. Guilds only provided some measure of social and economic benefits and protection to its members but could not prevent major downsizing, which is detailed in a contemporary report included here in translation. Meanwhile, both the merchants and the ulama demanded government action to better protect the country''s economy and its independence. To make a bigger fist, the ulama, merchants and reformists mobilized the guilds to support their political ends. As such, the guilds provided the force that powered the political events, which resulted in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in 1906. The ulama''s interference in economic life only made matters worse. They had no grasp of economics, beyond stating that people should not be greedy. And the guilds, despite their visible role during the 1905-06 events, found themselves used, and discarded when they were no longer needed. This created the parameters for major structural change to finally take place after 1925. In Guilds, Merchants, and Ulama Willem Floor provides a detailed analysis of primary source references essential for a better understanding of the socio-economic conditions that led to Iran''s push toward modernization in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

This study illuminates the 2,500-year social history of sexual relations in Iran. Marriage, temporary marriage, prostitution, and homosexuality are all discussed, as well as the often unintended result of these relations-sexually transmitted diseases. A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran uses travelers' accounts, Iranian and international archival sources, as well as government data, to bring together, in detail, and within the context of Iranian culture and religion, the nature, variety, and problems of sexual relations in Iran over the ages. Finally, Willem Floor summarizes the issues that Iranian society faces today¿which are not dissimilar to that of many other industrial nations¿the challenge to the male claim to dominance over women; change in the age of marriage; premarital sex; rising divorce rates; rising promiscuity; prostitution; sexually transmitted diseases; homosexuality; and street children. Willem Floor studied development economics and non-western sociology, as well as Persian, Arabic and Islamology from 1963-67 at the University of Utrecht (the Netherlands). He received his doctoral degree from the University of Leiden in 1971 and went on to work for the World Bank as an energy specialist. Throughout this time, he published extensively on the socio-economic history of Iran. Since his retirement from the World Bank in 2002 he has published numerous scholarly history books and translations, including: Public Health in Qajar Iran, Agriculture in Qajar Iran, The History of Theater in Iran, The Persian Gulf: A Politcal and Economic History of Five Port Cities, The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs, and Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin's Travels Through Northern Persia 1770-1774. --

Obeyd-e Zakani, who died in 1372 is among the great poets of Iran but little known in the West. This selection of his work is the first to be translated into English. Obeyd was a remarkable satirist and social critic who looked upon his world of extravagant indulgence and corruption with the censorious eyes of a Juvenal, and portrayed it with the cynicism and wit of a Voltaire, and the hilarious grotesqueness of a Rabelais. He used scathing stories and sardonic maxims to paint a world full of deceit, greed, lust, sycophancy, and perversion, where old values and virtues were scorned and extremes of wealth and poverty, violence and bloodshed were the order of the day.

Iran and the West is a critical bibliography of over 4000 books, articles, journals, and catalogs about Iran written in Western languages and published from 1500 up to the late 1980s. The author, scholar and collector Cyrus Ghani, who collected books for more than 40 years, has written a personal commentary for each entry. Some entries are brief factual annotations while for others such as biographies, autobiographies and books about modern Iranian history and politics, Ghani has made lengthy and erudite comments demonstrating his broad knowledge of Iranian and world history as well as his cultivated moral intelligence. Iran and the West is a useful reference book that brings together a vast array of cross-discipline writing about Iran, including some books and articles whose titles would not make them obvious candidates. It is not only an indispensable tool for scholars and researchers of Iranian studies; it also provides a wealth of fascinating information that will reward any reader who dips into it. This paperback edition has been published in two volumes: Volume 1, Books; Volume 2, Articles, Journals, and Catalogs

Contains six stories including A City Like Paradise, Childbirth, Potshards, Bibi Shahrbanu Sutra, and Daneshvar's Iran.

"Many dangers and many anxious days lie before the new Persia." Almost a century later, Edward Browne's fears and hopes have a special resonance in the minds of contemporary readers. The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, has maintained its relevance and freshness, even after the occurrence of a revolution more intense and all-embracing than the Constitutional Revolution. Furthermore, the aspirations of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 were a distant protest against the failure of that earlier revolution. Edward Browne was a professor of Persian studies at Cambridge University who had written A Year Amongst the Persians and the four-volume Literary History of Persia. What he primarily intended to achieve in The Persian Revolution was to demonstrate to his readers that the tumultuous events they were witnessing in Iran, often with suspicion if not disdain, were in fact no less than a genuine struggle by an oppressed and impoverished nation to establish a constitutional order despite the overwhelming odds of domestic tyranny, foreign intervention, and ideological divisions. He strove to serve as a voice in the West for the Persian Constitutionalists. The Persian Revolution was more than a simple record of a revolution, for it influenced the very course of events it covered in its pages. This new edition of the book first published in 1910 features an introduction by Abbas Amanat, a professor of History at Yale University, as well as a section featuring Browne's correspondences and contemporary reviews of the book. Also included are 56 period photographs. This is an essential volume for anyone attempting to understand Persia's past and present.