فصلنامه مطالعات تاریخ فرهنگی
پیاپی 36 (تابستان 1397)

Since the Umayyads did not have a religious standing among the people and their government did not have the necessary religious and political legitimacy, they made great efforts to obtain this legitimacy among the people. They gathered poets and Hadith and Akhbar forgers in Shām and took propaganda advantages of them through giving many gifts. One of these poets was al-Akhtal, a Christian poet who used extreme exaggeration to praise the Umayyad rulers and declared them the best of Quraysh and the most deserving people for in Caliphate. Despite his differences of opinion with the Muslim Caliph, this Christian poet depicted an Islamic image of him with the language of poetry that was favored by the people. This research answers these fundamental questions: How did the Umayyads use political literature and poetry to legitimize their rule? How did al-Akhtal’s poetry get in the way of the Umayyad government's request and what concepts and tools did it use? The findings of this analytical-critical study show that al-Akhtal, using various poetic themes, attempted to introduce the Umayyad rule as a legitimate, divine and heavenly blessing. The poet used interpretations and themes that justified the Umayyad's political aims. Promoting the idea of ​​heredity of the Caliphate, sanctification, the use of religious titles and promotion of aristocratic nobility are among the poet's approaches to legitimizing Umayyad rule.

The Buyid period plays an important role in redefining the traditions of governance in Iranian history during the Islamic period; this has been studied by scholars from various perspectives. The present study focuses on the cultural field and relies on identifying the relationship between the thoughts of governance of this family and their other cultural practices. The cultural domain of this study is also naming their children. The approach of this study is descriptive-analytical using qualitative and quantitative content analysis. The results of the research show that naming the children of this family is a dependent of their cultural-political and governance thoughts. This idea relied on deepening the cultural link between Iranian traditions and Islamic culture as well as relying on Shiite interests that are also visible in their naming. Buyid's behavior in naming their children was based on four elements of "Iranian culture," "Islamic culture," "Shiite interests," as well as "paying attention to the preservation of family background."

One of the most important factors in the success of the government in implementing environmental policies is the active and effective public participation. Therefore, in this study, by analyzing the Iranian government's environmental policies, especially environmental legislation, and with a glance at the quintet pre-revolutionary development plans of 1978, the government's contribution and the influence of its policies on reducing public participation and the lack of a participatory culture in environmental protection are addressed. According to this research hypothesis, due to efforts for using its expanding judicial, legislative and administrative system, Pahlavi government sought to carry out all activities related to environmental protection, thus preventing the public from being involved in environmental protection. Therefore, in response to the question of what role the Pahlavi government has played in the lack of active public participation in environmental protection, we will show that in Iran, due to the domination of authoritarian and totalitarian government, the dominance of the institutionalized model of policy making and the imperative approach to development planning using legislation relying on disciplinary strategies, the arena for the active participation of the public in environmental protection was narrowing day by day, and these factors prevented environmental issues from becoming a social issue as it happened in the West.

As a modern autocracy, Reza Shah's government adopted a romantic authoritarian nationalist discourse that was rooted in the ideas of German thinkers such as Fichte and Herder as its paradigm for establishing Iranian national identity. This discourse insisted on the "national characteristics" and imagined the nation based on "romanticism" as an eternal phenomenon and national history was considered to be the essence of national identity. Therefore, in order to create intellectual infrastructure of society for transcending its own national identity, Pahlavi the First focused on the teaching of national history more than ever before, thus emphasizing on the unified identity of all Iranians. Meanwhile, teaching national history to children made it possible to achieve this goal as quickly and efficiently as possible. The main question in this article is how Reza Shah's rule institutionalized the concept of Iranian national identity through teaching history to children. In response to this question, the main hypothesis of this study is that the modern autocracy sought to institutionalize the concept of Iranian national identity among the new generation of the Iranian nation, based on romantic authoritarian nationalism and its application for reading national history in elementary textbooks.

The socio-economic vitality of the prophetic era promoted the society and created the potential to solve socio-economic problems. The main purpose of this article is to identify the factors that regenerate socio-economic vitality in the prophetic period. The paradigm or model of this research is derived from the method of Strauss and Corbin's Grounded Theory. Therefore, based on definition of social vitality phenomenon, this article discusses mediating factors (causal conditions), immediate factors (contextual and intermediate conditions) and its strategies and consequences during Prophetic era. Also, a comparative analysis has been performed through Qur’an, authentic historical narratives and sources by theoretical sampling and quantification based on theoretical saturation. The main hypothesis is that popular attitudes and motivations based on economic mutual assistance experienced under the rational-value management of the Prophet (PBUH) in economic domains had influenced social action based on socio-economic vitality through the distribution of popular institutions (mosques and economic assistance).

How thinkers and writers experience social realities due to the inspiring effects on the works and therefore on the audience's minds and actions is one of the notable areas of cultural studies. Such studies about women in Iran have been less relevant and, as an interdisciplinary subject, have not been able to critically reviewed and commented on their research findings in the form of scientific knowledge and open new fields of study while creating indigenous knowledge accumulation about women. Drawing on the components of modernity from a sociological perspective, this paper studies the experience of Simin Daneshvar as a thoughtful writer and university professor living in the Western world. For this purpose, after specifying the sociological features of modernity from theoretical issues, especially Giddens, Daneshvar's published letters to his husband, Al-e Ahmad, are analyzed in a qualitative content analysis method. The findings show that letters represent both the material components of modernity, including cultural, social, communicative, and specifically urbanization tools and places, and contain non-material components, especially cultural elements including humanistic values, individualism, equality, scientism, and progressivism. Finding of this research merges with two main categories which Daneshvar critically explores and evaluates modern society and introduces dimensions such as capitalism, consumer society, industrialism and love. It is also worth noting that her feminine approach to marginalizing the text and paying attention to details reveals the imperialist nature of the West and presents a post-colonialist narrative.