فصلنامه پژوهش در تاریخ
سال نهم شماره 25 (پاییز و زمستان 1398)

By the fall of the Achaemenids, Greek cultural heirs came to power. However, rather than Hellenistic antithesis for the Achaemenid thesis, we are confronted with an Eastern-Western synthesis. This article deals with a very new concept in the context of the post-Alexandrian period called Persianism or Achaemenidism. Cruel oriental despotism, legendary luxury, excessive sexual pleasure and the enjoyment of innumerable pleasures are repetitions of the old stereotypes we see in the Roman image of the Iranians. The Romans’ perception of the east, especially during the empire, seems to be more deliberate and ideological than imaginative. At that time, it was necessary for the writers to rewrite the glorious history of the Greeks and Greek dialectic between Hellenism and eastern barbarism. Cicero, the foremost Roman thinker, first put forward the idea of the separation of the East and West and called it the will of the gods. He is to be considered the father of the metaphors of oriental and occidental in the history of the mentalities. Using the stereotypes of Augustus, the propagandist machine evolved its discriminatory view of the “Oecumenes” (civilized world) and introduced “Orbis Alius” (the alien world) to the humble Orbis Romanus (Roman Empire).

The story of the king and the minister has always been one of the most fascinating clichés in history and the events behind it. The minister is often questioned as to the extent to which the king, the government and the society under his control have been protected from unfortunate incidents and renamed goodwill. Undoubtedly, among the most controversial in contemporary Iranian history was the Qajar rulers. Haj Mirza Aghasi the Makui, during his crusades and self-judments, has been left in a state of uncertainty about his face and his timing and has not been properly identified despite numerous judgments. The present study, while not claiming to be exhaustive, by presenting reports and facts recorded in historical pages and available sources, attempts to present a truth-based face without any bias that may be incidental to this. The character is perhaps more accomplished than his office holders.

From the existing narratives and documents, it appears that the public atmosphere of the Najaf area during the years of Ayatollah Khomeini’s deportation to Iraq was not very much in line with his political and campaign policies and his student disciples. But this disagreement or noncompliance did not necessarily mean direct conflict. In most cases, Ayatollah Khomeini’s relations with the Najaf authorities and the virtues of mutual respect have been reported despite differences in policy and thought. But the same narrations show that this was not the case with Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Rouhani, a Najaf educator, and he was the most important center of conflict and hostility with Ayatollah Khomeini and his militant followers. In this article, we have tried to provide a comprehensive picture of this confrontation and the impact of the revolutionary view on how it arose and intensified by comparing and evaluating the remaining narratives of this conflict. An image that ultimately reflects, to a certain extent, the struggle of the revolutionary and the dominant view of ethics in the performance of the revolutionary and revolutionary clergy at that time.

The Emergence of Cultural history in the 1970s and 1980s and its subsequent dominance was in part a response to the perceived limitations of the social history. In describing the behavioural tendencies of social groups and emphasizing normative behaviour, often in the abstractions of numbers and charts, social historians had moved beyond an elite-dominated political paradigm but had ignored both the uniqueness of individual experience and the ways in which social life is created through politics and culture. By bringing more marginal practices out from the shadows, cultural historians expose the presumed hegemonic assumptions to which social historians had previously been tied. But cultural history, in the absence of theories about ordinary experience as supplied by economists, sociologists and psychologists, even by biologists, has begun seriously to erode historical knowledge about large slices of human experience. We, cultural historians, have never needed social historians more than we do today. We need to ask searching questions about the theories that have become the commonplace of cultural analysis. We need to make explicit the connections between the theory and the historical behaviour. But most of all, we need to return to that aspect of social history which asked sharply put questions and communicated them through the manner in which the research was organized.