Marco Polo's encounter with Kublai Khan, which Italo Calvino made the framework for his exploration of the fantastic in urban life, stands as a useful parable for the nature of the interaction of West and East in the period between 1200 and 1700, when myriads of Europeans produced journals and accounts of their journeys into the rest of the world.

This paper will attempt to compare a famous scene in Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh with an equally well-known one in Homer's Iliad. There are broadly three ways in which such a comparison can be made. Similarities and differences can be ascribed to reasons of genre, or to the nature of the underlying mythical material and sources utilized by the poets in question, or to a consciousness of, and use by, the later poet of the earlier poet's work, at whatever stage of remoteness. Elsewhere I have touched on genre as a cause for apparent similarities between the two superficially quite different epic traditions of Greece and Iran, indicating that the king/champion conflict described by W. T. H. Jackson as typical of the European epic is also a characteristic of the Iranian Shāhnāmeh.

The elections to the fourth session of the Iranian parliament (Majlis) were generally considered as the beginning of the end of factional politics in Iran. The typical journalistic analysis of Iranian politics, emphasizing the existence of two “moderate” and “radical” factions on the Iranian political scene, concluded that the “moderate” forces, led by President Hashemi Rafsanjani, had inflicted a decisive blow on the “radical” faction and neutralized the Majlis (which had been controlled by the radicals in its third session) as an impediment to the president's plan for reconstruction of the economy. Soon after the convening of the Fourth Majlis, however, the legislature challenged the authority of the Rafsanjani government either by initiating legislative bills to limit the authority of the president or by shelving the bills introduced by the government.

Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Iranian banking system and practices have changed significantly. Shortly after the revolution, according to a decree by the Revolutionary Council, banks and insurance companies were nationalized. In 1980 and 1982 legislation was passed to convert all banking practices to Islamic interest-free banking. Despite such significant developments in the Iranian banking system, this area of research has not been given its due attention by the scholars in the field. It is the purpose of this study to describe the process of post-revolutionary change in the Iranian banking system and outline the new trends in credit rationing practices after the revolution.

It will be argued here that the Islamization of the banking system did not result in the so-called abolition of interest from the financial system; in practice the banking system continues to pay interest—now called “profit“—to savings account depositors, and standard interest-bearing financial contracts continue to be utilized by the banks under new Islamic terms.

This essay is in two parts. Part I examines the dynamism and the political economy of the popular culture in Iran by focusing on the developments in the publication of film periodicals since the revolution of 1979. Part II provides a list of periodicals since the revolution that have dealt with cinema and the film industry.

Periodicals specializing in film and cinema as well as those which devote only a section of each issue to the motion-picture industry are all part of the larger cultural dynamics of what we might call the Iranian post-revolutionary popular culture. These specialized and allied periodicals cannot be considered in a vacuum since, as part of the dynamics of this popular culture, they are involved in a host of negotiations and conflicting relations with the clerical state, official censorship boards, advertisers, film producers, the publishing industry, and finally their own readers.