Anthropology of the Middle East, Vol. 11, No. 2, Winter 2016: 100–112 © Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/ame.2016.110208 • ISSN 1746-0719 (Print) • ISSN 1746-0727 (Online) Appalling Tehran Efects of the Translation of the French Serial Story on the Persian Serial Story and Related Attitudes around Social Morality Manizheh Abdollahi and Ehya Amalsaleh Abstract: his article examines French-Iranian literary interactions in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which arguably had ongoing efects in Iran on attitudes towards links between morality and social and economic inequality. Some of the earliest ictional stories published in Persian- language newspapers, in the 1850s, were French. his trend continued, through Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (1906), into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this period, Morteza Moshfeq-e Kazemi began writing the irst Persian serial story and novel, Tehran-e Makhuf (Appalling Tehran). he present study investigates the efects of the translation of French serial stories on Persian ones, with a speciic focus on the impact of the novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842– 1843), by Eugène Sue, on the Persian novel Tehran-e Makhuf (1921). Keywords: French serial stories, literary anthropology, Persian journalism, Persian serial stories, Persian translation, social morality, twentieth-century Iran To understand the complexities of contemporary life, it is necessary for scholars to draw on increasingly diverse sources. Among these sources, historical rep- resentations, both ictional and non-ictional, have retained their signiicance, as they inform us of the ways sociocultural elements have been popularly viewed and suggest implications for long-term efects on popular attitudes. In the case of Iran, its turbulent history and complicated transnational rela- tions provide complex and informative settings for these representations. his article examines an important example, the irst Persian serial story published in Iran, Morteza Moshfeq-e Kazemi’s Tehran-e Makhuf (Appalling Tehran), and the inluences on it of the translation of French serial stories into Persian. 1 Unlike the poetry that had previously dominated Iran’s literary world, this and