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Sabā, Zard-e Malijeh title Sabā, Zard-e Malijeh genre/topic   language   performer Farāmaz Pāyvar, santur; Hushang Zarif, tār; Hasan Nāhid, ney; Rahmatollāh Badi’yi, kamānča; Mohammad Esmā’ili, tombak instrument santur, tār, ney, kamānča, tombak composer  Sabā author/poet   first line of poem   recorded by   place of recording   date…

SABALĀN MOUNTAIN (Kuh-e-Sabalān; 4,740 m), the highest and spatially most extended volcano in northwestern Iran.  The mountain and its surroundings are part of the Armenian-Azerbaijan knot of mountains, where Pontus and Taurus mountain chains have their eastern roots and Alborz and Zagros their starting point.  Thus, the whole region is a…

ṢĀBER, MIRZĀ ʿALI-AKBAR ṬĀHERZĀDA (b. Šamāḵi [Shemakha], 30 May 1862; d. Šamāḵi, 12 July 1911), famous Azerbaijani satirist and poet. He came from a middle-class religious family who seemed reluctant to provide him with a modern education. However, in his early adolescence he found a sympathetic teacher in Ḥājji Sayyed…

SABET, HABIB (b. Tehran, 1903; d., Los Angeles, 1 Esfand, 1368/20 February 1990), Bahai entrepreneur and industrialist, who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Iran in the late Pahlavi period.   He owned, wholly or in partnership, some forty of the largest…

SABKŠENĀSI, yā tāriḵ-e taṭavvor-e naṯr-e Fārsi (Stylistics or The history of change in Persian prose), the title of a book by Malek al-Šoʿarā Moḥammad Taqi Bahār first published in 1942. Spanning three volumes, the work traces grammatical and literary transformations in Iranian prose literature from the Achaemenid era (ca. 700 to…

ŠĀBUHRAGĀN (Šāpurāḵān, Šāburāḵān, Šāburḵān), one of the books written by Mani (216-274/7 CE), founder of the Manichean religion, in which he summarized his teaching systematically. The title is to be translated as “dedicated to Šābuhr” (Kessler, 1889, pp. 181-83). The historians in Arabic, Ebn Nadim (936-95) and Biruni (973-1048), cite…

SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST, general title of a set of 50 volumes published between 1879 and 1910, all translated into English by some of the leading scholars of the time under the supervision of Friederich Max Müller (1823-1900), a prominent Indologist and scholar of comparative religions. The set, as…

SACRIFICE i. IN ZOROASTRIANISM Conceptual orientation. There exists a vast literature on the subject of sacrifice, much of which has been devoted to theoretical issues. At least since the publication of the seminal essay by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss much of the discussion has been devoted to a search…

SADA (Arabicized Sadaq or Saḏaq), the most important Iranian winter festival, celebrated by kindling fires. While the other seasonal festivals – Nowruz, Tiragān, and Mehragān – corresponded, at least theoretically, to the three cardinal points of the solar year (spring equinox, summer solstice, and autumn equinox accordingly), Sada fell not…

ṢADĀ-YE EṢFAHĀN, weekly newspaper published in Isfahan with lengthy interruptions from 15 Esfand 1300 until the first few months of 1323 Š. (6 March 1921 to April/May 1944). The managing director and chief editor of the paper was Mirzā Moḥammad-ʿAli Mokrem Ḥabibābādi (1887-1965), a former seminarian turned journalist. He also…

SADEQI, Bahram (Bahrām Ṣādeqi, b. Najaf-Ābād, Isfahan, 8 January 1937; d. Tehran, 3 January 1985), poet and noted modernist fiction writer of the 20th century, who explored new literary techniques with almost each piece he wrote (Figure 1). Bahram Sadeqi was the fourth and last child of Ḥosayn-ʿAli Ṣādeqi, a…

ṢADR, Arabic term (“chest, breast, bosom, foremost”; plur. ṣodur) used in the Iranian lands mainly to denote an outstanding person (scholar or otherwise); hence it was also applied as a personal title: (1) initially, for leading religious scholars in Transoxiania (Bosworth, “Ṣadr”); (2) later, also for high administrative dignitaries; (3)…

SADR, BEHJAT (Beḥjat Ṣadr Maḥallāti, b. Arāk, 29 May 1924; d. Corsica France, 11 August 2009), pioneer modernist painter and educator, notable in the development of Iranian modern art movement (FIGURE 1). LIFE Daughter of Moḥammad Ṣadr-e Maḥallāti and Qamar Amini Ṣadr, Behjat was the younger sister of Noṣrat-Allah Amini,…