This article concerns representations of popular Muslim belief and practice in modern Iran. Of primary interest here will be a horror film called Khvabgah-i dukhtaran/Girls' Dormitory, in which a young woman becomes the target of a crazed killer claiming to be under the command of jinn. I discuss how the film, which some have reported is of particular appeal to young girls and women, engages with elite discourses on the essentially female character of popular (religious) culture. I also examine what the ''horror'' of the film reveals about many people's understandings of cosmology and anthropology in Iran, especially with respect to the modern articulation of a ''national theology.'' Such understandings in turn problematize the film's place in horror cinema from a Western perspective and perhaps explain the genre's relative absence from Iranian screens over the years. Finally, I turn to the broader significance of this release in terms of filmmaking and filmgoing in Iran as well as its possible connections to female-centered horror film movements elsewhere. [Key words: civil religion, cosmological presuppositions, (extra-)human agency, female-centered cinema, horror, madness, popular Islam] Lives and minds in general and the condition of women in particular, as they became homebound and the prisoner of men, changed after Islam [.] Polygamy, the infusion of thoughts on fate and predestination (qaza va qadr), and a culture of grief and mourning turned people's minds to magic, talismans, intercessory prayer (du'a), and jinn and away from earnest deeds. [Sadiq Hidayat, Nayrangistan (1956:18)] Representing Women's Islam

This essay examines the television viewing habits of Iranians since 2010, when the first of a series of crippling international sanctions were imposed on Iran after diplomatic efforts to curb the country's nuclear program stalled. Like many others in the region, viewers in Iran have been swept up by the recent wave of Turkish serials, which a new generation of offshore private networks dubbed into Persian and beamed to households with illegal satellite television dishes. These glossy melodramas provided access to consumerist utopias increasingly beyond the reach of Iranians living under the shadow of sanctions. Despite the enormous popularity of Turkish television imports with Iranian audiences, the Islamic Republic's networks managed to broadcast some successful “counter-programming” during this era of economic and political isolation. The comedy Paytakht/Capital (2011–15), more specifically, eschewed the glamour and glitz of many Turkish serials for ordinary characters living rather ordinary lives in small town Iran. In doing so, the series highlighted not only the problems that the sanctions regime created or exacerbated in Iranian society but also the virtues of remaining on the margins of a neoliberal global economic order. The essay concludes by asking how Iranian audiences might enjoy both Capital and Turkish melodramas simultaneously.

This essay investigates the place of cinema in the formulation and maintenance of an Iranian popular civil religion—reworking older ideas and practices largely taken from Islam to articulate with modern social and political change in Iran. Of particular interest is the theme of martyrdom in the Iranian cinema of sacred defense, originally conceived to depict the spiritual dimensions of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). I explore the foundational role of this genre in the postrevolutionary Iranian cinema and its development in concert with television. I then argue that representations of martyrdom in the Cinema of Sacred Defense, born of a complex history, are attempts to make the divine manifest in film and in real life. While the Cinema of Sacred Defense is often claimed to be a marked departure from previous Iranian films, some of its preoccupations remain much in line with the now-banned popular commercial cinema of the Pahlavi era, often referred to as filmfarsi (Persian film). The film chosen as the case study, Layli ba man ast (Leily Is with Me; Kamal Tabrizi, 1996), is of particular interest not only because it is among the most popular releases of the Sacred Defense genre but also because it is a parody of the genre. The film also provides an incisive critique of new forms of social organization, social aspirations, and personal success (the “good life”) that the revolution and the war engendered. Finally, I turn to how Leily Is with Me and other popular titles of the past decade may indicate the reconstitution of the much-maligned filmfarsi genre.

In his contribution »Filmfarsi as Counter-Memory,« Pedram Partovi also deals with the return, or rather the hidden afterlife and survival, of a supposedly disappeared cultural heritage: the passing of actor Nasir Malik Muti’i in May 2018 spurred a debate among Iranians about filmfarsi (ʿPersian-filmʾ), the often-derogatory term that critics, industry people, and even fans have used in reference to the Pahlavi-era popular commercial cinema, and its place in ʿnational culture.ʾ The passing in the year 2000 of another banned filmfarsi legend, Muhammad ʿAli Fardin, had invited similar public reactions and similar criticisms of the state media and judiciary for their shameful treatment of a national ʿicon.ʾ Partovi’s contribution sheds new light on Iranians’ ʿfaulty,ʾ yet shifting, memories of the offcially demonized filmfarsi since the Islamic Revolution. He argues in his chapter that filmfarsi has functioned as a counter-memory, an absent presence in the minds of millions, that decades of imposed forgetting (or imposed memories) did not manage to extinguish, and as a counter-archive of images, sounds, icons, and motives »that has problematized official ideas of Iranian cinema and national culture both before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9« (p. 189).

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