Dihqān, in general terms to the late Sāsānid era and the early Islamic period, this term was used to refer to a local landowner, usually of the minor landed gentry, possibly a person of greater importance in a province, but by the 19th and 20th centuries it had become the equivalent of ‘peasant’. Thus, in the glossary to her ground-breaking work Landlord and Peasant, A. K. S. Lambton gave a variety of definitions including ‘head of a village who held certain lands by hereditary right and acted as the go…