Table of Contents

• BORHĀN-AL-MAʾĀṮER

  Cross-Reference

  See Supplement.

• BORHĀN-E JĀMEʿ

  Moḥammad Dabīrsīāqī

  (Comprehensive proof), title of a dictionary (completed 1833) by Moḥammad-Karīm b. Mahdīqolī Garmrūdī Šaqāqī.

• BORHĀN-E QĀṬEʿ

  Moḥammad Dabīrsīāqī

  (Conclusive proof), the title of a Persian dictionary compiled in India in the 11th/17th century by Moḥammad-Ḥosayn b. Ḵalaf Tabrīzī, who used the pen-name Borhān.

• BORHĀNIDS

  Cross-Reference

  See ĀL-E BORHĀN.

• BORHĀNPŪRĪ, BORHĀN-AL-DĪN

  Richard M. Eaton

  Indo-Persian Sufi of the Šaṭṭārī order (d. 1089/1678).

• BÖRI

  C. Edmund Bosworth

  or Böritigin,  name of a Turkish commander in Ḡazna and of the ruler of the western branch of the Qarakhanid dynasty of Transoxania.

• BORJ

  Abbas Daneshvari, David Pingree

  in both Persian and Arabic with two principal meanings: 1. tower, castle, or fortress; dovecote; 2. a sign of the zodiac, and by extension a solar mansion, a month.

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• BORJ-E ṬOḠROL

  Bernard O’Kane

  name commonly applied to a large tomb tower of the Saljuq period situated near Ray.

• BORJ-NĀMA

  Žāla Āmuzgār

  maṯnawi by Anuširavān b. Marzbān Rāvari (17th century), who wrote poems on several subjects relating to the Zoroastrian religion and uses several Zoroastrian terms here.

• BOROUGH, Christopher

  Parvin Loloi

  (fl. 1579-1587), English merchant and linguist who traveled to Russia and Persia as an interpreter with the sixth voyage by the Muscovy Company to establish trade with these countries.

• BOROWSKY, ISIDORE

  Bo Utas

  (ca. 1770-ca. 1838), Polish officer in the Persian army, said to have been fatally injured by a bullet in the abdomen during the second siege of Herat in 1837-38.

• BORQAʿĪ

  Hamid Algar

  (Ar. Borqoʿī), AYATOLLAH ʿALĪ-AKBAR (b. 1900), religious leader of the postwar period to whom leftist tendencies were imputed and whose name became embroiled in a significant incident in Qom in January, 1953.

• BORŪJ

  cross-reference

  See BORJ.

• BORŪJERD

  Eckart Ehlers

  (or Barūjerd), town and šahrestān in the province of Lorestān in western Iran. It has always been a road and railway junction of great strategic importance.

• BORŪJERDĪ, ḤOSAYN ṬABĀṬABĀʾĪ

  Hamid Algar

  , AYATOLLAH ḤĀJJ ĀQĀ (1875-1961), director (zaʿīm) of the religious teaching institution (ḥawza) at Qom Qom for seventeen years and sole marjaʿ-e taqlīd of the Shiʿite world for fifteen years.

• BORŪJERDĪ, ḤOSAYN

  Hamid Algar

  b. Moḥammad-Reżā Ḥosaynī, Shiʿite scholar of the Qajar period (d. ca. 1860); his main work was  a collection of chronograms on the deaths of famous transmitters of ḥadīṯ.

• BORŪMAND, NŪR-ʿALĪ

  Bruno Nettl

  (1905-1977), one of the foremost authorities on the performance and history of Persian classical music in the 20th century.

• BORZMEHR

  Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

  (Pahlavi, lit. “deep affection”) one of the priests (mōbed) and scribes who served Ḵosrow I (r. 531-79).

• BORZŪ-NĀMA (article 1)

  William L. Hanaway, Jr.

  an epic poem of ca. 65,000 lines recounting the exploits and adventures of the legendary hero Borzū, son of Sohrāb.

• BORZU-NĀMA (article 2)

  Gabrielle van den Berg

  an epic poem named after its main hero, Borzu, son of Sohrāb and grandson of Rostam. The Borzu-nāma belongs to the cycle of epics dealing with the dynasty of the princes of Sistān.

• BORZŪYA

  Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

  (also transcribed Burzōē), a physician of the time of Ḵosrow I (r. 531-79) and responsible for a translation of the Pañcatantra from Sanskrit to Pahlavi, the Persian translation of which is known as the Kalīla wa Demna.

• BOSḤĀQ AṬʿEMA

  Heshmat Moayyad

  , FAḴR-AL-DĪN ḤALLĀJ ŠĪRĀZĪ (d. 1420s), satirical poet who used Persian culinary vocabulary and imagery and kitchen terminology to create a novel style of poetry.

• BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

  Hamid Algar

  : Persian Influence in Ottoman and post-Ottoman times. The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina came to assimilate virtually all the cultural habits and interests of the Ottoman Turks. For the learned elite, this included an acquaintance with Persian language and literature.

• BOŠRŪʾĪ, Mollā Moḥammad-Ḥosayn

  Denis M. MacEoin

  Shaikhi ʿālem who became the first convert to Babism, provincial Babi leader in Khorasan, and organizer of Babi resistance in Māzandarān (1814-49).

• BOST

  Klaus Fischer, Xavier de Planhol

  archeological site and town located near the confluence of the Helmand and Arḡandāb rivers in southwest Afghanistan.

• BOSTĀN AL-SĪĀḤA

  ʿAlī-Akbar Saʿīdī Šīrjānī

  a descriptive geography book by a mystic writer of the early 19th century, Mast-ʿAlīšāh, Ḥājī Zayn-al-ʿĀbedīn b. Mollā Eskandar Šīrvānī.

• BOSTĀNAFRŪZ

  Ahmad Parsa

  amaranth, a medicinal and ornamental plant of the family Amaranthaceae.

• BOSTĪ, ABU’L-FATḤ

  Zabihollah Safa

  NEẒĀM-AL-DĪN ʿAMĪD ʿALĪ b. Moḥammad b. Ḥosayn b. Yūsof Kāteb, a notable bilingual secretary and poet of the 10th century.

• BOSTĪ, ABU’L-QĀSEM

  Wilferd Madelung

  ESMĀʿĪL b. Aḥmad JĪLĪ, Muʿtazilite and Zaydī author of the late 10th and early 11th century.

• BOT

  William L. Hanaway, Jr.

  a term frequent in poetry with meanings ranging from an idol in the literal sense to a metaphor for ideal human beauty. These senses have been used since the earliest surviving Persian poetry.

• BOTANICAL JOURNAL OF IRAN

  Valiolla Mozaffarian

  (Žurnāl-e giāhšenāsi-e Irān), begun in 1976 as an outcome of the National Botanical Garden of Iran. The contributions are in English with brief abstracts in Persian.

• BOTANICAL STUDIES

  Hūšang Aʿlam, S.-W. Breckle, Hūšang Aʿlam and Aḥmad Qahramān

  ON IRAN i. The Greco-Islamic tradition. ii. The Western tradition. iii. Persian Studies in the Western tradition. In the Islamic period, generally speaking, botany was an ancillary branch of medicine or, more precisely, pharmacology.

• BOUNDARIES

  Multiple Authors

  i. With the Ottoman empire. ii. With Russia. iii. Boundaries of Afghanistan. iv. With Iraq. v. With Turkey.

• BOUNDARIES i. With the Ottoman Empire

  Keith McLachlan

  shaped by conflict over an ill-defined strip of territory with constantly shifting outlines extending from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf.

• BOUNDARIES ii. With Russia

  Xavier de Planhol

  West of the Caspian. The problem of drawing a stable territorial boundary between the Russian and Iranian powers must have arisen with the first arrival of the Russians in the Caspian area, after the conquest of Astrakhan in 1556.

• BOUNDARIES iii. Boundaries of Afghanistan

  Daniel Balland

  , the seventh largest landlocked country in the world in area, is delineated by a boundary some 5,600 km long, over which it has never exercised more than partial control. None of these boundaries was established before the last third of the 19th century.

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• BOUNDARIES iv. With Iraq

  Joseph A. Kechichian

  iv. With Iraq. In 1921, Iraq became a state under British mandate, inheriting the old Ottoman dispute with Iran over the Šaṭṭ al-ʿArab. Relations between Iran and Iraq were thus strained from the beginning.

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• BOUNDARIES v. With Turkey

  Richard N. Schofield

  v. With Turkey. The Mixed Commission of 1914, on which Britain and Russia were vested with powers to arbitrate, had settled the line of the Perso-Ottoman frontier in detail for almost its whole length from the Persian Gulf to Mount Ararat.

• BOWAYH

  cross-reference

  See BŌĒ; BUYIDS.

• BOWAYHIDS

  cross-reference

  See BUYIDS.

• BOXTREE

  Hūšang Aʿlam

  Buxus L. spp., šemšād, common name for numerous species of evergreen shrubs or trees of the family Buxaceae. The species B. sempervirens grows wild in lowland or plain forests of the Caspian provinces.

• BOYCE, MARY

  John Hinnells

  (1920-2006), scholar of Zoroastrianism and its relevant languages, and Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. In addition to her own contribution, Boyce was an outstanding teacher and supervised the research of many who went on to hold professorships.

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• BOYEKAN

  Marie Louise Chaumont

  the name of a mec naxarar “great satrap,” defeated and killed at Ṭʿawrēš (Tabrīz) by the Armenian general Vasak under Šāpūr II (r. 309-79).

• BOYLE, JOHN ANDREW

  Peter Jackson

  (1916-78), British orientalist, will perhaps best remembered for his work on the Mongol period of Iranian history.

• BOYŪTĀT-E SALṬANATĪ

  Birgitt Hoffmann

  (lit. royal houses), in the Safavid period (1501-1732) departments and production workshops within the royal household serving primarily the needs of the court.

• BOZ

  Jean-Pierre Digard

  the domestic goat. The earliest evidence for domestication of the goat has been found in Iran (ca. 10,000 B.C.), as have the largest number of prehistoric sites (ca. 7000 B.C.) showing traces of the systematic breeding of this animal.

• BOZBĀŠ

  Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar

  Azeri Turkish name for an Iranian dish usually called ābgūšt-e sabzī (green vegetable stew).

• BOZGŪŠ

  Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

  the traditional reading of the name of a mythical tribe in Māzandarān mentioned in the Šāh-nāma.

• BOZKAŠĪ

  G. Whitney Azoy

  (lit. “goat-dragging”), an equestrian folk game played by Turkic groups in Central Asia. Its origins are obscure; quite probably the game first developed as a recreational extension of livestock raiding.

• BOZORG

  Jean During

  one of the modes in traditional Iranian and Arabic music, mentioned for the first time by Ṣafī-al-Dīn ʿOrmavī among the twelve šodūd, later on called maqāmāt.