Table of Contents

• ʿOLAMĀ-YE ESLĀM

  Siamak Adhami

  “The Doctors of Islam,” title given to two medieval Zoroastrian polemical treatises written in Modern Persian.

• OLEARIUS, ADAM

  Christoph Werner

  (1599-1671), German author, secretary to the Holstein mission to Persia (1635-39), noted for the detailed account of his travels in Russia and Persia.

• OLIVE TREE

  Willem Floor

  (zaytun). The cultivated olive tree (Olea europaea L, Oleaceae) is a long-lived, evergreen tree native to the Mediterranean basin. It is valued for its fruit and oil.

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• OMAN, SEA OF

  Willem Floor

  the sea, or gulf, which divides Iran and the Arabian peninsula and forms the link between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

• ONO, Morio

  Ali Ferdowsi

  (1925-2001), eminent Japanese scholar and Iranologist.

• ONṢOR AL-MAʿĀLI

  C. Edmond Bosworth

  , KAY KĀVUS b. Eskandar b. Qābus, penultimate prince of the Ziyarid dynasty of Tabaristan (Ṭabarestān) and Gilān, in origin Daylamite, which ruled in the 10th-11th centuries.

• ʿONṢORI

  EIr

  (ca. 961-1039), celebrated Persian poet of the early Ghaznavid period.

• OPIUM

  Cross-Reference

  See AFYŪN.

• OPTICS

  Elaheh Kheirandish

  The science of “aspects” or “appearances” (ʿelm al-manāẓer), as optics was called in the Islamic Middle Ages, has a long and impressive history in both Arabic and Persian.

• ORANSKIĬ, IOSIF MIKHAILOVICH

  Ivan Steblin-Kamensky

  (1923-1977), prominent Soviet (Russian-Jewish) Iranologist.

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