Next February’s elections in Iran have already begun. After announcing he would stand again for Majles-e Khobregan (the Assembly of Experts), the body that...
Last month’s nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers was an achievement for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and President Hassan...
In early May a young Kurdish woman plunged to her death from the Tara hotel in the city of Mahabad, western Iran. Social media posts suggested Farinaz...
One of the most powerful images in the book of Exodus is God parting the Red Sea for the fleeing Israelites and then drowning the pursuing Egyptian army. This...
Late in 2013, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that Iran risked becoming a land of elderly people in the “not too distant” future and suggested...
The Council of Guardians, Iran’s constitutional watchdog, has set Feb. 26, 2016, as something of a day of reckoning. It will see an election not only...
On Feb. 24, 1955 – 60 years ago today – Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Britain signed a defensive military agreement soon known as the Baghdad...
A Turkish diplomat in Tehran once told me the ambassador’s residence had several centuries earlier been a dowry gift of a princess in a dynastic marriage...
Hassan Rouhani has caused a surprise in Iranian politics by raising the possibility of a national referendum. The president was referring to a poll on any...
During several elections in Iran I took the political temperature in Mahallati, a housing estate for Revolutionary Guard in northeast Tehran. In the 2005...
In a seminar last month at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, the author and professor Abbas Milani mused over why the...
Sunday’s wobble in the Iranian rial – which dropped nearly 6 percent against the dollar in apparent reaction to OPEC’s decision not to increase production –...
Sir Richard Dalton, a graduate of the Middle East Center for Arab Studies in Shemlan, Lebanon, was British consul general in Jerusalem from 1993 to 1997 at an...
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has called for Muslim unity many times in recent months. He told Iranian hajj officials last week that the...
In his first year as Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani has proved himself a capable operator, carrying forward an agenda of renewed diplomacy and tighter...
In the 2005 presidential election, young women on roller skates whizzed round north Tehran with “Hashemi” headbands campaigning for Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani....
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei became Iran’s supreme leader in 1989, when the country faced recovery from the eight-year war with Iraq without Ayatollah Ruhollah...
A decade ago, Ali Larijani said that Iran’s nuclear negotiators had “swapped a pearl for a candy” in agreeing to suspend uranium enrichment for the duration...
In a forthcoming book on nonviolent revolution in the Middle East, Lebanese law professor Chibli Mallat argues against secession as a solution to instability....
Speak to a friend in Tehran and you’ll immediately hear the unease. “It’s been a shock, definitely,” one told me. “It’s all been so quick, and of course we...
In April 2003, a few days after Saddam Hussein’s statue was brought down in Baghdad, I went into Mosul with Hoshyar Zebari, a leading Kurdish official who...
Visitors to Tehran are often struck by the city’s smog. It can be especially bad in the winter, when a temperature inversion caused by warmer air from the...
In 1993, northeast of Halabja in northern Iraq, I saw a pickup truck coming the other way along a mountain road. It was driven by a member of Iran’s...
Taftan, at 4,042 meters the highest peak in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province, is a partially dormant volcano and a metaphor for Iran’s poorest and perhaps...
Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, remains in a Berlin hospital some 16 months after suffering a stroke in...