Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of maps -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 The historical development of Tehran -- 2 Judicial system -- 3 Shari'a court -- 4 An actual dispute: the case of double vaqf -- 5 Attestations and transactions in shari'a courts -- 6 Vaqfs in Tehran -- 7 Vaqf and private property -- 8 Transformation of vaqfs -- Conclusion -- Appendix: List of vaqf deeds referred to in Chapter 6 -- Bibliography -- Index

After the Mongol period, Persian was the official written language in Iran, Central Asia and India. A vast amount of documents relating to administration and social life were produced and yet, unlike Ottoman and Arabic documents, Persian historical resources have received very little critical attention. This book is the first to use Persian Documents as the sources of social history in Early Modern Iran and Central Asia. The contributors examine four distinct elements of the documents: * the formal aspects of the sources are initially inspected * the second part focuses on newly discovered sources * the most abundant documents of the period - waqf deeds - are individually studied In this way the reader is led to realize the importance of Persian documents in gaining an understanding of past urban and rural societies in the Middle East.

Abstract
This article examines various aspects of conditional sales (bayʿ-i sharṭ) and other types of loans in Qajar Iran (1796-1925). Islamic law prohibited usury, but Shiʿi jurists found a way to legalize money lending at interest. In this paper, I explore how these transactions occurred in practice and what features they had. To this end, I consider three groups of bayʿ-i sharṭ deeds from the National Archives of Iran, discussing how each case proceeded and how differences between cases reveal the ways in which this type of transaction functioned. While similar types of transactions were allowed in other regions and schools of law, the details of Shiʿi legal devices were distinctive.

The aim of this paper is to investigate historical change that occurred in a Turkic tribal group, the Afshars in Urmiya, western Azerbaijan, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The Afshars were important in Iranian history as part of the Qizilbash tribal confederation that contributed to the rise of the Safavids, and as the founders of the Afsharid dynasty. Their branch in Urmiya also played notable roles in the civil wars of the eighteenth century.Numerous attempts have been made by scholars to show the political and military role of the Qizilbash in the early Safavid period. However, few studies have dealt with their later history. Recently, Kathryn Babayan argued that as a result of the centralization policy of Shah ᶜAbbas (r. 1587-1629), the Qizilbash lost their power and their political and spiritual cohesion, but after that we know little about their actual situation. More than twenty years ago, Ann Lambton pointed out that the collapse of the Safavids caused a resurgence of tribes like the Afshars and Qajars, in the eighteenth century, but the process of and reasons for this "resurgence" have never been examined.