ASPS Newsletter

It was with great satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that I completed my term as the first elected ASPS President, having also served the previous three years as Acting President. When I retire one day as a sociologist with a professional interest in constitutionalism and political reconstruction, I will use my notes on the enormous difficulties we encountered in most of our regional offices for a more honest and objective study of obstacles to the development of civil society in the Persianate world. But my present duty as the outgoing President is to present a rosy picture of the success of the institutional development of ASPS, and urge you on.

Our three-year project in institutional development, which was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, was completed at the end of 2002. In its last year, we decided to concentrate on Europe and the Caucasus, and established an office for our Council for Europe, now renamed Council for Eurasia, at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, in February 2002, with Professor Anna Krasnowolska as its Director. I then traveled to Armenia, to arrange for the opening of an ASPS office in Yerevan. The office has been opened under the direction of Professor Garnik Asatrian. To integrate Russia into the restructured Council for Eurasia, Dr. Jo-Ann Gross traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg in July 2002. Meanwhile, the registration of our affiliate in Iran was completed, and its office at the Faculty of Social Science of the University of Tehran opened. The office has now been furnished, with a desk, bookshelves, a computer and an impressive conference table, and has e-mail and a direct phone line (98-21-802 59 17). The success of the institutional development project was marked by the first meeting of the ASPS Regional Councils in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on September 18, 2002, with representatives from Armenia, Europe, India, Iran, Russia and Tajikistan. Only Pakistan, where our office was established in early 2001, was not represented.

The major achievement of last year, however, was the holding of our first biennial convention in Dushanbe, September 15-18, 2002. Securing financial support for the convention was very difficult, and remained uncertain until the eleventh hour. But the Central Eurasia Project and the East-East Program of the Open Society Institute made good on their verbal promises, and we were able to proceed with the convention despite the inordinate logistic difficulties resulting from the paucity of flights to and from Dushanbe. I am most grateful to the Open Society Institute for its generous support. My gratitude to ASPS colleagues is even greater. The Secretary-Treasurer and Chair of the Program Committee, Dr. Jo-Ann Gross, showed incredible stamina in facing and eventually solving these problems with me. The Tajik Organizing Committee did an outstanding job of coordinating the conference in Dushanbe, and we are especially grateful to Dr. Dodikhudo Saimiddinov, Director of the Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature, and to Dr. Bahriddin Aliev, Secretary-Treasurer of ASPS Tajikistan.

The result was an outstanding conference, and an unprecedented event in Tajikistan as an independent academic conference not organized by the state. More than 60 participants from Armenia, China, India, Iran, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the USA presented papers covering a broad range of topics that included folklore and oral studies, pre-Islamic culture, literature, Sufism, social change and cultural development, economic history, historiography, modernity and its challenges, historical linguistics, and art and architecture. If you were not there, please take a minute to look at some of the photographs taken during the event on our Web site.

The year 2002, however, was one of great frustration as regards the administration of our Travel Fellowship Program. Difficulties in obtaining US Visas and the immigration regulations requiring the fingerprinting of Iranian passport holders had been serious enough in 2001, but now the situation became even worse. Just as I was able to set up a regular administrative mechanism and a travel advance fund in Tehran, visa requirements for Iranians, among others, became drastically more stringent with the Enhanced Border Security Entry Reform Act passed by Congress. This year, we had decided to co-sponsor the 4th Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies in Bethesda, Maryland, May 24-26, 2002. After our efforts to persuade US Consular offices in Dubai, Paris and Istanbul to issue visas to the grantees failed, we made an intense last-minute attempt to replace them with individuals who already had or could easily obtain a US visa or who were already in the country. The result was a number of substitute grants to individual participants and a highly successful panel on Iranian NGOs at the 4th Biennial Convention on Iranian Studies, with an offshoot session in Persian by Dr. Edalat. With these last-minute substitutions, ASPS could be present with a sense of accomplishment, and the exhibitions we had sponsored became the central gathering spot of the conference and the place of our uproarious reception (see the pictures on the Web site).

We had a setback with the defection of our regional editor for Iran, but the first issue of our annual publication, Studies on Persianate Societies, is finally in press. The second should appear this winter: it will contain a selection of the convention papers that I am currently working on.

My parting recommendation to the Board of Directors was to formalize the constitutional structure of the Association by creating regular committees, as is normal in the evolution of institutions. This will require increased involvement by members. I therefore hope that you will all attend our business meetings and receptions at the MESA annual conventions and offer your help. I also recommended that Studies on Persianate Societies be allocated a separate budget, with its Editor reporting to the ASPS Board of Directors. --Saïd Amir Arjomand

It is with great pleasure and a sense of anticipation that I begin my three-year term as ASPS President. Nothing that has been accomplished thus far-including the very existence of the organization-would have been possible without the hard work and wisdom of our past-President, Saïd Amir Arjomand. He has done a terrific job in difficult and often frustrating circumstances, soliciting support from grant-giving institutions and dealing with an obstructionist bureaucracy in this country and sluggish ones overseas. On behalf of the entire Association, I would like to express my profound gratitude for his energy and dedication.

Other outgoing Board members who deserve credit for having worked hard to make the Association successful are Abbas Amanat, Hamid Dabashi, Margaret Mills, and especially Jo-Ann Gross, our past Secretary-Treasurer, who put enormous effort into organizing the Dushanbe conference. I also thank John Perry for the time and effort he continues to spend on the Newsletter.

Fortunately for us, Saïd is staying on as editor of Studies on Persianate Societies and as the driving force behind institutional development. I further welcome, and look forward to working with, Alice Hunsberger as our new Secretary -Treasurer and the head of the Travel Fellowship Committee, Devin DeWeese as a new member of the Board of Directors and head of the Nominations Committee, and Manouchehr Kasheff, as a new member of the Board of Directors. I also extend a warm welcome to Anna Krasnowolska, the new head of the Council for Eurasia.

The Persianate world-Iran, South Asia, the Caucasus and Central Asia-forms the heart of a region in great flux where competing political and social visions for the future are causing tension, strife and, at this moment, even war. To keep a dialogue going between scholars in the West and their colleagues from the region, as well as among scholars from the various countries of the region, therefore remains of the utmost importance. I will do my best to continue the efforts the Association's members have made since its inception to foster mutual understanding and the dissemination of critical knowledge about Persianate culture and society through cultural and scientific exchange. Aside from the journal, the most tangible forum for this type of communication is our biennial conference. We had a successful initial meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. It is my hope that the second convention, to be held in Yerevan, Armenia, in April 2004, will match if not exceed the first one in excitement and productivity. I ask all members to help me in continuing to make the Association flourish.

--Rudi Matthee

ASPS President Arjomand sent the following letter to the President of Iran on December 13, 2002:

Dear President Khatami,

As a scholarly association devoted to the advancement of social sciences, we are seriously concerned about the closure of the Ayandeh Research Institute and the Institute for Public Opinion Survey in October, and greatly disturbed by the arrest and current trial of their respective directors, Messrs. Hossein Qazian and Abbas Abdi, and Mr. Behrooz Geranpayeh, on charges of espionage and threat to the national security of Iran.

What was cited as evidence for espionage and threat to national security in the trial of Mr. Qazian last week consisted of contacts with other research institutions, such as the Gallup Poll and Columbia University, and with Iranian-American academics, and participation in academic and current events, such as conferences at Stanford, Washington, Paris and elsewhere. All these are matters of routine scientific consultation and entirely in conformity with the standards of professional responsibility. They are internationally recognized routine activities necessary for carrying out sociological research and opinion polls of an acceptable quality. If the Judiciary's real concern is the conformity of the methods and subject of the public opinion research done by the Ayandeh and Public Opinion Survey Institutes with international scientific standards, it would surely be appropriate for the Court to seek the testimony of experts in the social sciences.

Allow me to repeat that nothing cited as evidence of espionage in the Qazian case deviates from internationally recognized routine scientific research activities. The abuse of judiciary power to prohibit such activities, or hinder them through the threat of legal action, is a violation of the right to the free pursuit of knowledge and information, and will seriously jeopardize the future of research in the social sciences in Iran. I am therefore writing to protest such violation in the closure of the above-mentioned research institutes and the arrest and trial of their directors, in addition to the more obvious violation of the latter's civil rights, and to urge you to consider the future advancement of social sciences in Iran and the irreparable harm done to it by the current trials. It is our sincere hope that the Court will dismiss the ill-founded charges against our colleagues, and that you will order the reopening of their research institutes in the interest of the advancement of social research and freedom of information in Iran.

Yours most respectfully,
Saïd Amir Arjomand
President, ASPS

Persian Monograph Series

ASPS is pleased to announce that the first title in this series is out. The purpose of the ASPS publication of a Persian monograph series, beginning with Ta'rikh-i Inqilâb-i Fikri-yi Bukhârâ (Intellectual Revolution in Bukhara) by Sadriddin Ayni, is to make important unpublished texts accessible for the first time in the original Persian. This book was described by John Perry in the cover blurb as follows:

Sadriddin Ayni (1878-1954) played a leading role in the cultural politics of Stalin's Central Asia; while collaborating with Uzbek intellectuals and Russian scholars, he was instrumental in preserving and reviving Persian culture in its own "safe haven" of Tajikistan. It is most satisfying that his Ta'rikh-i Inqilâb-i Fikri-yi Bukhârâ now joins his memoirs in Perso-Arabic script (Yâddâsht-hâ, published nine years ago by Sa'idi Sirjâni) as a document of his endeavors available to all readers of Persian.

A limited number of copies will be available to ASPS members at a substantial discount at the next MESA meeting. Complimentary copies have been sent for distribution to our Regional Offices, and some 350 will be offered for sale to individuals and institutions in the United States and Europe by a European distributor with which we are still negotiating.
--Saïd Amir Arjomand, Editor-in-Chief

Travel Fellowship Program

The Program will be continued for yet another year with the generous support of the Open Society Institute:

The Association for the Study of Persianate Societies is pleased to announce the continuation of our Travel Fellowship Program, through the generosity of the Open Society Institute. Travel Fellowships are available for scholars and researchers from Iran to take part in academic and cultural conferences and conventions in the United States. Each Travel Fellowship covers all travel and lodging expenses of the recipient subject to a limit of $3000. The conditions for eligibility are engagement in teaching or research in the humanities or social sciences and an invitation or acceptance of a paper from the sponsors of the conference. No special application form is required. Applications must be received as far ahead of the time of travel as possible, and no later than three months before the conference to be attended. Those interested should submit a letter of application, together with a curriculum vitae and the letter of acceptance from the appropriate convention, to:

Alice C. Hunsberger
545 West 111th St. 9D
New York, NY 10025
Tel. 212 666-9663; Fax 212 316-7830
alicehunsberger@hotmail.com

Conference sponsors may also apply on behalf of participants by submitting the same documentation.

Call for Papers

ASPS 2nd Biennial Convention, Society, History and Culture in the Persianate World (Yerevan, Armenia, 2-4 April 2004)

Carpets and Textiles in the Iranian World, 1400-1700 (Sponsored by The Beattie Carpet Archive at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, and the Iran Heritage Foundation. 30-31 August 2003)

Iran and 'History from Below' (Sponsored by The London Middle East Institute and organized by Stephanie Cronin, Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow in Iranian History, Northampton and SOAS, to be held at The Brunei Gallery, SOAS (University of London), on Friday 23 January 2004.)

Please click on the Calls for Papers link, above, for full information about each of these conferences.

Member News and Announcements

Professor Irfan Habib, Director of the ASPS Council for India, has edited the following book for the Aligarh Historians Society: A shared Heritage. The Growth of Civilizations in India and Iran (New Delhi: Talika Books, 2002. Pp. xxxvii+252; Rs 450; ISBN: 81-85229-73-2).

Speaking of Ayni, The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini, translated from the Tajik Persian with an introduction and notes by John R. Perry and Rachel Lehr (Bibliotheca Iranica Literature Series, No. 6; Mazda Publishers, 1998) has been awarded the third annual Lois Roth Prize for translation from Persian by the American Institute of Iranian Studies. The book (in paperback, illustrated with photographs from the collection of Ayni's son) comprises translations of the first volume of Yâddâsht-hâ and the novellas Ahmadi devband and Maktabi kuhna, and is available from Mazda (see http://www.mazdapub.com).

John R. Perry
Editor, ASPS Newsletter
The University of Chicago
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
5828 S. University Avenue
Chicago IL 60637, USA
Fax: 773 702-2587
e-mail: j-perry@uchicago.edu

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