Table of Contents

  • KERMAN viii. HISTORY IN THE AFSHARID AND ZAND PERIOD

    James M. Gustafson

    Between the fall of the Safavids and the rise of the Qajar dynasty (ca. 1722-94), Kerman maintained a measure of stability and security under local rulers despite the rise and fall of dynastic states across the Iranian plateau.

  • KERMAN ix. HISTORY IN THE QAJAR PERIOD

    James M. Gustafson

    Kerman's geographical position on the periphery of the Qajar empire (1795-1925), was at the center of numerous significant developments in this important transitional period in Iran's history.

  • KERMAN xiv. Jewish Community of Kerman City

    Nahid Pirnazar and EIr

    In the late 18th century, according to the account of the Jewish community of Yazd compiled by Molla Aqābābā Damāvandi a century later, severe drought caused its members to move to Rafsanjān and Sirjān and the villages around Kerman. Thus the Jewish Quarter of nineteenth-century Kerman became mainly an offshoot of the community in Yazd.

  • KERMAN xv. CARPET INDUSTRY

    James M. Gustafson

    Since the late 19th century, Kerman’s hand-woven, knotted pile carpets are widely regarded as among the finest in the world by art historians and collectors for the quality of their materials and workmanship. 

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  • KERMAN xvi. LANGUAGES

    Habib Borjian

    The province of Kerman is characterized by two indigenous languages, Persian in the mountainous north and Garmsiri in the lowland south, supplemented by the Median-type dialects spoken by the Zoroastrian, Jewish, and possibly Turkish residence of the city of Kerman.

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  • KERMANSHAH

    Multiple Authors

    a province in western Iran; also the name of its principal city and capital.

  • KERMANSHAH i. GEOGRAPHY

    Habib Borjian

    Kermanshah Province, situated in western Iran, spreads over an area of 25,000 km² (9,560 square miles, roughly the size of Vermont), or 1.5 percent of the total area of the country.

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  • KERMANSHAH iv. HISTORY TO 1953

    Jean Calmard

    The town and province of Kermanshah are located on the strategic travel route, later known as the “Khorasan Highway,” linking Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau. This route was militarily and commercially important even in antiquity.

  • KERMANSHAH vii. LANGUAGES AND DIALECTS

    Habib Borjian

    Kermanshah is linguistically characterized by a triad of Kurdish, Gurāni, and Persian within a multifaceted, areal-tribal-social setting; supplemented by Neo-Aramaic spoken in pockets by area Jewry, as well as an isolated Turkic dialect spoken in the Sonqor valley.

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  • KERMANSHAH viii. THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

    Nahid Pirnazar

    Surviving the obscure period of the Middle Ages, the Jews of Kermanshah were not affected by the forced conversions under the Safavids.

  • ḴERQA

    Erik S. Ohlander

    term for the tattered cloak, robe, or overshirt traditionally worn by the Sufis as a symbol of wayfaring on the mystical path.

  • KEŠ

    Pavel Lurje

    (Kešš, Kašš), an important ancient and medieval city, located in the upper Kaškā-daryā valley, now Shahrisabz, Uzbekistan.

  • KEŠAʾI DIALECT

    Habib Borjian

    the dialect spoken in the village of Keša, near Naṭanz, in Isfahan Province.

  • Kesāʾi Marvazi

    J. T. P. de Bruijn

    (also vocalized Kasāʾi), 10th-century Persian poet.

  • ḴEṢĀLI ČELEBI

    Osman G. Özgüdenli

    Ḥosayn, Ottoman poet and writer born in Budapest at an unknown date.  His divān is the only source of information about his life.

  • KETĀB AL-ʿĀLEM WA’L-ḠOLĀM

    David Hollenberg

    (The Book of the sage and the youth), a work attributed to the Ismaʿili missionary Jaʿfar b. Manṣur-al-Yaman (d. ca. 960).

  • KETĀB AL-EṢLĀḤ

    Shin Nomoto

    an early Ismaʿili work in Arabic by Abu Ḥātem Rāzi (d. 933-34).

  • KETĀB AL-FOTUḤ

    ELTON L. DANIEL

    an important early Arabic historical text by Ebn Aʿṯam Kufi (d. 314/926?), which was translated, at least in part, into Persian towards the end of the 6th/12th century.

  • KETĀB AL-NAQŻ

    Kazuo Morimoto

    a Twelver Shiʿite polemical work in Persian produced in Ray in the third quarter of the twelfth century by Qazvini Rāzi.

  • KETĀB AL-RIĀŻ

    Faquir M. Hunzai

    a book by Ḥamid-al-Din Kermāni (d. after 411/1020), an Ismaʿili missionary, analyzing two other Ismaʿili texts, the Eṣlāḥ of Abu Ḥātem Rāzi (d. after 322/933-4) and the Noṣra of Abu Yaʿqub Sejestāni (d. after 360/970).

  • KETĀB-E IQĀN

    Sholeh Quinn and Stephen N. Lambden

    a major work of Mirzā Ḥosayn-ʿAli Nuri Bahāʾ-Allāh (d. 1892) in defense of the religious claims of Sayyed ʿAli-Moḥammad the Bāb.

  • KETĀBḴĀNA-YE MELLI-E TĀJIKESTĀN

    Evelin Grassi

     the National Library of Tajikistan. With its 28-stack rooms, the library has a capacity for ten million books. Manuscript holdings span seven centuries (13th-19th centuries) and include the works of outstanding Persian classical authors.

  • ḴEṬĀY-NĀMA

    RALPH KAUZ

    “Book on China,” written by Seyyed ʿAlī Akbar Ḵeṭāʾī in Istanbul.

  • KEYVĀNLU TRIBE

    Pierre Oberling

    a Kudish tribe of Khorasan. It was one of those Kurdish tribes that Shah ʿAbbās I forced to migrate from western Persia around 1600 for the purpose of fighting off the incursions of the Uzbeks.

  • ḴEŻR

    Anna Krasnowolska

    a prophet known to Islamic written tradition and folklore, whose worship in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia is connected with local calendar beliefs and fertility cults.

  • KHACHIKIAN, Samuel

    Jamsheed Akrami

    Khachikian’s first film was Bāzgašt (The Return), a romantic melodrama that pitted a hardworking village boy serving an affluent family in the city against the family’s spoiled son in a rivalry over a young woman. The mawkish story shared formula of Iranian films of the period, but was technically more polished and fast-paced.

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  • KHADEMI, Ali Mohammad

    Chapour Rassekh

    Khademi joined the Air Force in 1938, and continued pilot training. He was the first Iranian to receive a commercial pilot license from the British Civil Aviation Authority in 1948, and in 1957 he completed a training course at the U.S. Air Force University in Montgomery, Alabama.

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  • KHADIV-JAM, HOSEYN

    EIr

    (1927-1986), Iranian translator and scholar of Persian and Arabic. His major publications range from translation of contemporary Arabic scholarship on Islamic philosophy to the critical edition of a number of major works in the fields of medieval philosophy and pre-modern history of Iran.

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  • KHAGAN

    Étienne de la Vaissière

    a title that entered Persian and was used by medieval Muslim historians in reference to various rulers.

  • KHAKSAR, Mansur

    Khosrow Davami

    poet, writer, editor and political activist. Khaksar had two eminent Persian poets, Maḥmud Mošref Tehrāni and Ḥassan Pastā, as his teachers in the last two years of high school. In 1959, his first poem was published in Omid-e Irān, a noted weekly journal published by Moḥammad Āṣemi in Tehran.

  • KHALAJ

    Cross-Reference

    tribe and language. See ḴALAJ.

  • KHALCHAYAN

    Lolita Nehru

    in Surxondaryo prov., southern Uzbekistan, site of a settlement and palace of the nomad Yuezhi, with paintings and sculptures of the mid-1st century BCE. The Yuezhi, and perhaps other nomad groups, overthrew the Hellenistic Greek dynasty which had ruled there since the mid-3rd century as successor to the post-Achaemenid governments of Alexander and the Seleucids.

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  • KHALESI, MAHDI

    Omid Ghaemmaghami, and Mina Yazdani

    (1860-1925), a leading, outspoken, Kāẓemayn-based Shiʿite jurist from Iraq, whose close involvement in anti-British politics and opposition to British occupation in Iraq resulted in his exile to Iran.

  • KHALILI, Abbas

    Cross-Reference

    (1895-1971), political activist, journalist, translator, poet and novelist. See ḴALILI, ʿABBĀS.

  • KHALKHAL

    Multiple Authors

    southeasternmost district of Azerbaijan. 

  • KHALKHAL i. The Town and District

    Marcel Bazin

    Mentions of Khalkhal and of some of its subdistricts and localities appeared relatively late in medieval geographical and historical chronicles. 

  • KHALKHAL ii. Basic Population Data, 1956-2011

    Mohammad Hossein Nejatian

    Khalkhal has experienced a high rate of population growth, increasing more than sevenfold from a population of 5,422 in 1956 to 41,165 in 2011. 

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  • KHAN

    Gene R. Garthwaite

    (ḵān), a Turkish high title indicating nobility.

  • KHANLARI, PARVIZ

    ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn Āḏarang and EIr

    scholar of Persian language and literature, poet, essayist, translator, literary critic, university professor, and founding editor of the periodical Soḵan.

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  • KHANLARI, ZAHRA

    Zahra Khanloo

    (1913-1990), author, translator, literary scholar, and university professor. She was among the first women in Iran to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1939.

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  • KHANSARI, MOHAMMAD

    Alvand Bahari

    (1922-2010), Persian logician and scholar and a permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature; his works range from Manṭeq-e ṣuri to translations of Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories and a critical edition of Mollā Ṣadrā’s Iqāẓ-al-nāʾemin.

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  • KHARG ISLAND

    Multiple Authors

    an island and a district of Bušehr Province in the Persian Gulf.

  • KHARG ISLAND i. Geography

    Habib Borjian

    situated in Persian Gulf at about 30 miles northwest of the port of Bušehr and 20 miles west of the port of Ganāva, stretches about 5 miles longitudinally and half of that at its widest point.

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  • KHARG ISLAND ii. History and archeology

    D.T. Potts

    island in the Persian Gulf, situated at about 30 km northwest of Bandar-e Rig and 52 km northwest of Bušehr.

  • KHARG ISLAND iii. Developments since the 1950s

    G. Mirfendereski

    In the years following World War II, Kharg was sparsely populated and Ḵārgu was uninhabited. Its preeminence as Iran’s principal oil export terminal began in the early 1950s when the island was connected to the Gačsārān oilfield on the mainland by way of the coastal town of Ganāva.

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  • KHARGA OASIS

    Henry P. Colburn

    (Ar. Ḵārja), largest oasis in the Egyptian Western Desert, under Persian control during the Achaemenid Period.

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  • KHARIJITES IN PERSIA

    C. Edmund Bosworth

    sect of early Islam which arose out of the conflict between ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb (r. 656-61) and Moʿāwiya b. Abi Sufyān (r. 661-80).

  • KHATLON

    Habib Borjian

    one of the three provinces of Tajikistan, located in the southwestern part of the country. It was created in 1988 and consolidates the former provinces of Kulāb and Kurgan Tepe.

  • KHAYYAM, OMAR

    Multiple Authors

    (ʿOMAR ḴAYYĀM, 1048-1131), celebrated polymath and poet, author of the Rubaiyat (Robāʿiāt).

  • KHAYYAM, OMAR vi. Illustrations Of English Translations Of The Rubaiyat

    William H. Martin and Sandra Mason

    The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam contain some of the best-known verses in the world. The book is also one of the most frequently and widely illustrated of all literary works. The stimulus to illustrate Khayyam’s Rubaiyat came initially from outside Persia, in response to translations in the West.

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