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.

The production of textiles began very early in the Near East, even before the development of settled villages and the domestication of plants and animals in the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age, the 7th and 6th millennia B.C.). Flax was one of the first fibers to be woven; it appears in an elegantly knotted net with a woven border found in the Nahal Hemar Cave on the southwest banks of the Dead Sea. “Flax also appears about the same time in Anatolia at Çatal Hüyük, a partially excavated site once covering some 32 (?) acres. The Çatal Hüyük textiles, which also included wool ormohair worked in S- and Z-spun two-ply yarns, came from intramural burials where they bound up the bones of the dead and in one case filled a skull. Unfortunately, the fires that destroyed the site on several occasions charred the fabrics so that no trace of color now remains. However, the dye plants woad, madder and weld are native to the region, and the excavator believed that they were used at Çatal Hüyük.

The aim of this article is to introduce a fine and representative, but little-known, collection of Persian woven fabrics in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. These superb specimens reflect both the chronological and technical range of textile production in Islamic Iran, from the provocative fabrics found at Rayy to the myriad of sumptuous weavings produced on Safavid looms.

The greatest number of these textiles entered the Museum's collection through the active efforts of a single person, F. Cleveland Morgan. A pioneering and avid collector, true connoisseur and art lover, Morgan founded the Museum's Decorative Arts department in 1917 and, during his fifty years’ association with the Museum, many objects found their way into the Montreal collection. Not only did he himself contribute many objects to develop then little appreciated fields, such as Islamic art, but he also encouraged other donors and advised potential patrons to follow his example. In a final act of generosity, Morgan bequeathed his own collection to the Museum, thus further enriching the department which he himself had created.

Zīlū seems to be a term of Persian origin. It refers to a type of reversible cotton floor “spread”, generally either blue and white or light brown and white in colour, which is decorated with stylized geometrical motifs and patterns. The blue cotton yarns in Zīlū are the same as those used in weaving palās, or denim cloth; the white yarns are undyed cotton (fig. 1).

Zīlū were the traditional floorcoverings in most mosques in the south, central and Khurasan regions of Iran, that is, in the country's drier areas; because the yarns used in their construction deteriorate in cold, damp environments, a/a are uncommon in otherparts of Iran. Zīlū were woven to fit the shabistān and the atvān of mosques. The names of patrons and craftsmen were customarily woven into those Zīlū presented as vaqfvo mosques and other religious institutions (figs. 2 - 3).

A Zīlū fragmentin the Islamic Museum, Cairo (figs. 1-3) is one of the oldest known carpets that can at present be firmly attributed to Islamic Iran. The Cairo Zīlū is one of three extant dated and inscribed pieces commissioned in 963/1556 as vaqf, or an endowment, for the Masjid-i Jāmi’ of the Nūrīyyah Khānāqāh in Taf t, a village approximately 26 kilometres southwest of Yazd. A second fragment was discovered in the Shah Vali Mosque in Taft; it has been described and illustrated by Afshar. Ettinghausen has discussed the third fragment, which appeared on the Tehran art market in 1954; its present location is unknown.

Metallic yarns, particularly those wrapped with gold and silver, have been used throughout much of recorded history to create fabrics and garments of surpassing beauty which exemplified splendor and opulence. Extant examples are valued not only for their beauty, but also for their historical significance. The physical assessment of these fabrics usually includes a visual examination to ascertain the weave structure and fibre colors. Optical microscopic examination can add to this information, but it is limited at higher powers of magnification by an increasing loss of depth of field.

Pre-nineteenth century Iranian history is short on numbers, or at least on reliable ones. Lack of quantitative data is perhaps the greatest obstacle confronting historians of pre-modern Iranian economy and society, and the Safavid period is scarcely better provided than earlier ages. The Safavid archives were destroyed, the Persian histories provide few hard facts, and the accounts of visiting Europeans, though often full of comment on social and economic matters, are generally unreliable when it comes to quantitative information. Safavid Iran thus presents a depressing contrast to its neighbours to East and West, where the earlier and deeper European penetration has left arich record in the archives of several European countries, while in the case of the Ottoman Empire, the survival of extensive state archives can only remind the historian of Iran of how much was lost through the destruction of their Safavid counterparts.