---

Differences in people’s social, religious, and political status make them tend towards a specific way of speaking. As a result, speakers always try not to threaten the status and face of the person to whom they are speaking. Accordingly, believing that the Almighty Allah enjoys the highest status in the universe, Muslims, too, resort to specific strategies in speech to maintain His exalted status. Therefore, the question this paper is to deal with is what these strategies are and how they are applied when Muslims are praying. Thus, using an analytical-descriptive approach based on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the paper explores some of the strategies used in Shi’a supplications to maintain Allah’s face and status. The results show that, when making a request of Allah, people make use of “self-lowering” and “other-raising” strategies and try to praise Allah by mentioning His good qualities, and despise themselves by mentioning their negative qualities at the same time.      

---

Subh al-A'sha, written by Ahmad al-Qalqashandi 9 century (H.), elaborating official letter writing styles in Mamluk period is a valuable source for historical politeness studies. Based on Leech's politeness maxims and Beeman's approach to politeness, this paper tries to unravel the politeness strategies in official letters of the Mamluks, which depend heavily on power relations. The results show that strategies adopted in these letters are in line with Beeman's "self-lowering" and "other-raising" elements. They also confirm Leech's maxim 3 and 4, out of his six maxims, whereby individuals do their best to praise the other party during the communication. Thus, strategies applied in these letters include "exclusion," "raising the addressee," and "praising the addressee." Using a religious discourse, whose lack would be offensive, is another feature of Mamluk official letters. Finally, social discourse was also adopted in these letters through which the writer acquired his dependent / independent identity.   

---

Tehran province experienced one of the severest drought status during 1998 to 2000. This drought can be assessed by drought indices. Drought indices are quantitative expression of this disaster that make its spatial and temporal evaluations possible. In this research work three indices including EDI, SPI and DI have been used to develop monthly drought maps for the aforementioned period, using the information of 43 meteorological stations and geographical information system (GIS). The results show that DI has very exaggerated responses to rainfall, especially to the summer rainfall. Also SPI is not responsive enough to rainfall deficiencies. Morover, it frequently detected normal situation for this period. But, EDI is able to response properly and shows good temporal and spatial consistency in drought detection.

---

Aims: Over the past twenty years, Iran has experienced a rise in extreme temperatures, particularly in hot events like extreme temperatures, as indicated by recent studies. This research seeks to analyze the annual maximum temperatures (AMT) in the dry Province of Kerman, Iran, focusing on both stationary (S) and nonstationary (NS) behavior.
Materials & Methods: Trend, homogeneity, and stationarity tests were utilized to identify the critical characteristics of the AMTs from 1979 to 2019. Frequency analysis of the AMTs was conducted using both stationary Generalized Extreme Value (S-GEV) and nonstationary GEV (NS-GEV) models, estimating distribution parameters through a maximum likelihood estimator(MLE). In addition to the time-varying NS-GEV (TNS-GEV) investigations, soil moisture (SM) was incorporated as a covariate. 
Findings: Results demonstrate that, compared to the S-GEV case, the NS-GEV frequency analyses significantly impact the return values of the AMTs, leading to an increase. The NS-GEV estimations for 50-year return levels were significantly higher than those in the S-GEV. The study’s findings revealed that the average Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) for both the S-GEV and TNS-GEV estimations decreased from 110 to 71 across all 12 selected stations in Kerman Province. The AIC value for the NS-GEV with the soil moisture (SM) covariate was approximately 94. Thus, the TNS-GEV frequency analysis of AMTs resulted in improved AIC values compared to the NS-GEV with soil moisture as the covariate.
Conclusion: Given the nonstationary (NS) conditions caused by natural and/or human activities, it is recommended to utilize NS frequency analysis for estimating hydrologic variables across different design periods. It has been noted that NS-GEV frequency analyses lead to higher return levels of AMTs than S-GEV analyses.

---

Penal populism has affected criminal policy of many countries in recent years. Under the impact of this approach, policymakers try to pass and enforce publicly admitted crime control policies, regardless of their scientific and theoretical basis. Penal populism has rooted in many factors such as media representation of crime, rising of public fear of crimes, nothing works idea, and election competitions. Its manifestations can clearly be seen on media representation of sex criminals, tendency to punitiveness, criminal policy making based on unpopular criminal events, and infringing of basic principles of criminal law. This article tries to in addition to describing and analyzing the conceptualization of penal populism, the contexts of arising and its manifestations in the penal policy of Iran, do a comparative study of penal systems in this regard.

---

 This study investigates the price transmission in the Iranian fluid milk market. We applied a Markov-switching vector error correction model on the monthly price data from March 2003 to December 2015 to allow for multiple regime shifts in the relationship between farm and retail prices. According to Granger Causality Test, there is one side causality relation from producer’s price to consumer’s price. Due to the existence of positive price asymmetry in farm-retail price transmission, the retail prices would incline more quickly in response to increases in farm price than to its decreases, implying serious welfare losses to the consumers. Main results show existence of a positive price asymmetry in the market. In the long run, price transmission is perfect, while in the short run, price adjustment between two market levels is asymmetric. On the other hand, retailers benefit from any shock that affects supply or demand conditions.

---

 Lack of adequate credit is among the major obstacles that Iranian agriculture, like many other developing countries, is facing. This study aimed at exploring the effect of formal credit on agricultural growth in Iran, using a unique provincial panel data set during 2000-2013. Different panel data econometrics techniques were applied. The main results indicated, on average, positive association between the sector growth and formal credit provided by the Agricultural Bank. The same relation was found for labor force. Meanwhile, public investment showed an indirect impact on the sector growth, though the size of effect differed among provinces. Redistribution of credits based on agricultural potentials of provinces is recommended as a key factor for increasing growth-related impact of credit.
 

---

This study aims at annual analysis of Iranian date export, using the gravity model and cross-section data for each year from 1994 to 2013. The estimated results of gravity equation show negative effects of geographical distance, landlocked location and positive effects of re-export, political, social and commercial ties on Iran’s date export. The date export relative prices and per capita GDP of partners show that most of Iran’s date export has been concentrated at low prices and to low per capita income countries. Moreover, the calculated date export potential indicates that, on average, Iran’s export has been close to its export potential in Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East, while it has exploited 76 percent of its export potential to European countries. More than half of the export potential to Germany, Italy, Denmark and Sweden has remained unexploited. The lifting of trade sanctions, adherence to international hygienic standards and investment in packaging industries are the most important suggestions to increase the share of Iran’s date in the world market.

---

Energy and agriculture sectors play a key role in Iran's economy as the former provides considerable share of the public budget and the latter contributes significantly to employment, non-oil exports, and food self-sufficiency. Iranian government is following an energy subsidy targeting policy to increase energy (especially exhaustible ones) efficiency. Obviously, this will influence, among others, energy price and consumption, cost of production and, finally, food price. Therefore, the current study focused on the nexus between energy consumption and food price in Iranian agriculture. Since such relationships may differ as food consumption varies, the quantile regression model was applied and estimated using data for the period 1966-2017. Main findings revealed the direct and significant impact of energy consumption and globalization index on food price in the 0.75^th quantile, while exchange rate showed the same effect in 0.25^th and 0.75^th quantiles. Furthermore, money supply was explored as another driver for food price in all quantiles.

---