Historical writing on modern education in Iran has changed in the past few decades. Earlier works that focused on the top‐down feature of modern education were very much influenced by modernization theory, nationalist historiography, and the dichotomous notion of reform and reaction. First, this article suggests that one should analyze the view of specific individuals or groups on modern education rather than simply dividing them into reformists and reactionaries with clear‐cut attitudes. Then it surveys the shift from these earlier approaches to new ones that have taken various directions with generally more attention to state‐society relations and culture, including such issues as modern education as a site of nation‐building and constructing the new social order.
This article examines the making and unmaking of an infrastructural system in the Indo-Iranian borderlands, an area that is often overlooked in an area studies paradigm. In particular, it focuses on the infrastructural network that developed following World War I with the Iranian border town of Dozdab/Zahedan as a nodal point. The article explores two interrelated issues. First, it looks at the role of British strategic interests in shaping infrastructural development, which significantly influenced the direction and kind of movement promoted in the borderlands. Second, through the case of the rise and decline of Sikh migrant communities in eastern Iran, it examines how the borderlands came into being in the absence of strong state authorities. It argues that the prosperity of Sikh migrants depended on the new infrastructural system, which in turn depended on the precarious codependency between the Iranian state, the British authorities, and Sikh drivers and traders. During the 1920s, despite the British and Iranian ambivalence toward border crossers, Sikhs thrived while participating in global networks of Indian anticolonialists. Albeit temporarily, they managed to invite the interventions of competing state authorities as they saw fit, illustrating how erratic narratives marked the emergence of territorialized nation-states in the borderlands.
This article analyzes Japan’s efforts to reach out to the Islamic world, particularly the Middle East, in the first half of the twentieth century. It pays particular attention to the hajj by Japanese Muslims from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the 1930s because the hajj encapsulates the changing ways in which the Japanese interacted with state and nonstate actors from the Islamic world. Existing works on Japanese-Islamic interactions before 1945 have provided detailed analyses of Japan’s strategic and geopolitical interests in facilitating its interactions with Muslims. Building upon these works, this article stresses the significance of economic motives and the need to strengthen commercial ties in the cross-cultural encounters. In fact, Japan’s economic motives in the Middle East were closely intertwined with its strategic motives, and the two motives supplemented each other in fostering Japan’s desire to reach out to the Islamic world.
While participating in the discourse of world religions, Japanese biographers published accounts of Muhammad’s life in many genres of academic and popular books during the Meiji and Taisho eras (1868–1926). This article unravels how these biographical accounts played a crucial role in facilitating a geographical imaginary of Asia/the East which incorporated both Japan and West Asia. Situated in a radically different context from the Victorian biographers who inspired them, Japanese biographers constantly compared Muhammad to historical figures familiar to them, most notably Buddha and Nichiren, and reinterpreted the life of Muhammad, relying exclusively on European-language sources. In particular, in contrast to another strand of pan-Asianism that stressed peacefulness as an inherent quality of the East, the biographers identified Muhammad’s perceived militancy and the miracles he performed as signs of the values shared by Japan and Islamic civilization. Using the person of Muhammad as a concrete piece of evidence, Japanese biographers reimagined an Eastern civilizational space that could stretch from Tokyo to Mecca.
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