About Farhang-e Iran Zamin

Farhang-e Iran Zamin

Overview

Farhang-e Iran Zamin (Culture of the Land of Iran) was a Persian scholarly periodical published in Tehran, Iran, devoted to Iranian studies. Founded in the early 1950s by the bibliographer Iraj Afshar together with Mohammad-Taqi Daneshpazhuh, Abbas Zaryab Kho'i, Manuchehr Sotudeh and Mostafa Moqarrabi, it focused on publishing manuscripts — treatises and short books — edited by Afshar himself or by other scholars. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that this valuable publication continued as long as Afshar lived, ending with its 27th issue. The Ferdowsi School of Persian Literature's survey of Persian journals describes it as a quarterly, later annual, Iranian studies magazine that ran from 1953 to 2008 over some thirty volumes, covering Iranian studies, Persian literature, philology, linguistics and history. By either reckoning it was among the longest-lived scholarly journals of modern Iran, inseparable from the career of its founder-editor.

Founding and Founders

Farhang-e Irānzamin was founded in 1952 or 1953 — the memorial literature variously dates its establishment to 1952 and its founding, with its named collaborators, to about 1953 — by Iraj Afshar (1925–2011) together with Mohammad Taqi Daneshpazhuh, Abbas Zaryab Kho'i, Manuchehr Sotudeh and Mostafa Moqarrabi. The Al-Furqan survey of Afshar's life likewise records that, with the collaboration of colleagues including Muhammad Taqi Danishpazhuh, Abbas Zaryab-i Khu'i, Manuchihr Sutudih and Mustafa Muqarrabi, he established Farhang-i Iran-Zamin in 1952, describing it as a prestigious periodical devoted to Iranian studies. The founding group was formidable: Daneshpazhuh was Iran's leading cataloguer of Persian manuscripts, Zaryab Kho'i a historian and philologist, Sotudeh (Sutudih) a geographer and editor of historical texts famed for his multi-volume description of the Caspian provinces from Astara to Astarabad, and Afshar himself was already, in his late twenties, the librarian of the Faculty of Law of the University of Tehran and the editor of the journal Mehr. Few Iranian journals have been launched by a circle of comparable scholarly weight.

Iraj Afshar, Founder and Editor

Iraj Afshar was born in Tehran on 8 October 1925, the son of Mahmoud Afshar, founder of the journal Ayandeh, and Nosrat Barazandeh. He attended the Shapur Secondary School and the Firouz-Bahram High School in Tehran, managed the Ayandeh journal in 1944–46, and graduated from the Law School of the University of Tehran in 1949 with a thesis on minorities in Iran. He worked as a teacher of Persian, then as librarian of the university's Faculty of Law, and in 1953 was asked to edit the journal Mehr. Farhang-e Irānzamin, founded at about the same time, became the most personal of his editorial projects: Encyclopaedia Iranica calls it an important undertaking and records that it continued as long as he lived. Afshar was a bibliographer, historian, scholar and professor emeritus of the University of Tehran, a consulting editor of Encyclopaedia Iranica at Columbia University, the chief bibliographer of Persian books at Harvard University, and a figure described as the doyen of Persian-language bibliographers, who played a significant role in the development of Iranology in Iran and throughout the world during the second half of the twentieth century. He died in Tehran on 9 March 2011.

A Journal of Edited Manuscripts

What distinguished Farhang-e Irānzamin from other Iranian cultural magazines was its editorial method. Encyclopaedia Iranica's memorial account explains that the periodical focused on publishing manuscripts of treatises and short books, edited either by Afshar himself or by another scholar, and that many works of historical, literary and scientific value were published in it. In effect, each issue functioned partly as a small critical edition: texts that existed only in manuscript, and were therefore inaccessible to most researchers, were transcribed, edited and put into print within the covers of a journal. This was scholarship of a deliberately foundational kind. Before Iranian history and literature could be reinterpreted, their sources had to be made available, and Farhang-e Irānzamin made that work its mission for more than half a century. The journal's name was also used for a related publication series, Farhang-e Iran Zamin, Texts and Researches, under which edited volumes appeared; its sixteenth number, published in Tehran in 1973, was an anthology of the Persian poetry of the Jews of Iran, described in a later annotated bibliography as the first work of its kind ever published in Iran, containing a long introduction and samples of poems by seventeen Judeo-Persian poets.

Contents: Iranian Studies in Print

The journal's subject range, as recorded in the Ferdowsi School survey, covered Iranian studies, Persian literature, philology, linguistics and history. Its contents illustrate that range concretely. Its thirteenth volume carried the Jame al-Khayrat, the endowment deed of Seyyed Rokn al-Din, edited by Mohammad Taghi Daneshpajooh and Iraj Afshar — a foundational documentary text for the social and religious history of Yazd. Its twentieth issue, in 1974, carried Hassan Naraqi's genealogy and history of the Ghaffari family of Kashan, a study still cited in research on Kashan's urban continuity. Such publications — endowment deeds, local genealogies, edited treatises — gave historians primary material that existed nowhere else in print. The journal's approach also complemented Afshar's other bibliographical enterprises: in 1954, collaborating with the National Library of Iran, he published the first volume of Ketab-ha-ye Iran (Books of Iran), the first national bibliographical series introducing Persian books published in Iran and abroad, which appeared annually until 1966.

Farhang-e Iran Zamin among Afshar's Journals

Farhang-e Irānzamin was one strand in an extraordinary web of periodicals that Afshar founded, edited or directed across six decades. He edited Mehr (1952–53), helped edit Sokhan (1954–56) under Parviz Natel-Khanlari, directed Ketab-ha-ye Mah (1955–61) for the Persian Publishers' Society, directed the Institute for Translation and Publication of Books, edited Rahnama-ye Ketab (1958–79), the book-review journal licensed by Ehsan Yarshater, founded the Book Club, later the Book Society (Anjoman-e Ketab), published the Noskheh-ha-ye Khatti (Manuscripts) journal in collaboration with Daneshpazhuh, directed the National Library, and after 1979 revived his father's Ayandeh as a scholarly journal. Within that company, Farhang-e Irānzamin held a particular place: it was the journal of record for edited Persian texts, the place where the manuscript heritage on which all his bibliographical work depended was steadily brought into print. The İRAM Center's survey of his career lists Farhang-e Iranzamin (1952–2011) among the journals he managed and edited, dating its life, like Encyclopaedia Iranica, by the life of its editor.

Frequency, Longevity and Final Issues

The Ferdowsi School survey describes Farhang-e Iran Zamin as quarterly, later annual, published from 1953 to 2008 over some thirty volumes. Encyclopaedia Iranica's memorial, written by a colleague who knew Afshar from 1953, records instead that the publication continued as long as Afshar lived, ending with the 27th issue. The two accounts differ in their counting — volumes against issues, and closing dates of 2008 against the end of Afshar's life in 2011 — but they agree on the essential facts: the journal appeared from the early 1950s for more than five decades, slowed from quarterly to annual appearance as such monumental editing projects tend to do, and did not survive its founder. A scholarly journal that endures for over fifty years under a single editor is rare anywhere; in Iran, where most literary magazines of the period measured their lives in years rather than decades, it was exceptional.

Contribution to Iranian Studies

The contribution of Farhang-e Irānzamin lay in infrastructure. Iranian studies in the second half of the twentieth century depended on access to Persian manuscripts held in libraries in Iran and abroad, and Afshar's generation — Daneshpazhuh cataloguing manuscripts, Sotudeh editing geographical and historical texts, Zaryab Kho'i working on history and philology — built that access piece by piece. Farhang-e Irānzamin was their shared instrument for the texts themselves. Its editions, from the Jame al-Khayrat endowment to studies of Kashani families, entered the footnotes of subsequent scholarship and remain there: modern journal articles on Kashan's history cite its twentieth issue, and bibliographies of Judeo-Persian literature cite its Texts and Researches series. Afshar's wider services to the field — inviting outstanding scholars of Iranian studies to Iran under his father's endowment, among them Nazir Ahmad, Richard N. Frye, J. T. P. de Bruijn and Manouchehr Sotoudeh, and recording the monuments of Yazd in his three-volume Yadegar-ha-ye Yazd — belonged to the same project of making Iran's written and built heritage legible, of which the journal was the longest-running expression.

Legacy

Farhang-e Iran Zamin ceased with its founder's generation, but its volumes remain working tools for historians, philologists and bibliographers. Its legacy is the model it embodied: a journal not of commentary but of sources, edited to scholarly standards over a lifetime. In the Ferdowsi School of Persian Literature's survey of thirty-five Persian journals, it stands among the small group of titles — with Ayandeh, Yaghma and Armaghan — that defined serious Persian periodical scholarship in the twentieth century, and it is the only one of them to have been sustained, under its founding editor, into the twenty-first century. Encyclopaedia Iranica's judgement that it was a valuable publication whose issues preserved works of historical, literary and scientific value remains the standard assessment.

Publication Facts

Farhang-e Iran Zamin was a Persian-language Iranian studies periodical based in Tehran, Iran. It was founded in 1952–53 by Iraj Afshar with Mohammad-Taqi Daneshpazhuh, Manuchehr Sotudeh, Mostafa Moqarrabi and Abbas Zaryab Kho'i, and edited by Afshar. It was published quarterly and later annually; the Ferdowsi School survey dates it 1953–2008 over some thirty volumes, while Encyclopaedia Iranica records that it continued as long as Afshar lived, ending with the 27th issue. It covered Iranian studies, Persian literature, philology, linguistics and history, with a distinctive focus on edited manuscripts, treatises and short books. The magazine had no official website; it is documented in Encyclopaedia Iranica's memorial of Iraj Afshar, in surveys of his life and contribution, and in the Ferdowsi School of Persian Literature's survey of Persian journals.