Neda Agha-Soltan Graduate Scholarship the country the status of "international basket case". While the problems of Iran were no longer front-page news, it said, they still existed. In the circumstances, the editorial concluded, "A scholarship at The Queen’s College in memory of Neda Soltan is, indeed, politically motivated, and admirably so". UK diplomatic sources, speaking anonymously to "The Times", said that if the government had been asked, it would have advised against the creation of the scholarship, because Iran would see it as an act of provocation, and because it would interfere with efforts to free Iranians working for the British Embassy in Tehran
Fatima Soltan Fatima Soltan Fatima Soltan (died 1681) was a sovereign "khanbika" (queen) and last ruler of Qasim Khanate from 1679 until 1681. She was a daughter of Agha Muhammad Shah Quli Sayyid and a wife of Arslanghali khan. After the death of her husband in 1627 Russian tsar Mikhail Romanov appointed her and her father Agha Muhammad as regents of her three-year-old son Sayed Borhan. Until Borhan abdicated in 1679 Fatima Soltan resisted his marriage to a Russian princess and the policy of Christianization and discrimination against Muslims by Moscow authorities. After Borhan abdicated she remained briefly in power as the