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Popular Culture Review
avant-garde cultural and esthetic nature, m ade a partial but deep, m ostly
n egativ e, im pact on the Iranian populace. For instance, during the last Shiraz
A rts F estiva l in 1978 w hich coin cid ed w ith the h o ly m onth o f Ramadan, w hen
observant M u slim s fast and abstain from both eating and drinking from daw n till
dusk, in a p la y called “The Pig, The K id, and the Fire,” a com p letely real “rape”
w as en acted b efore the ey es o f the p op u lace in a street in Shiraz, w hich sparked
the ire o f the p eo p le and clerics, in a m anner that ev en the notorious Pahlavi
secret service, S A V A K , w as drawn to it.
An issue of the popular weekly, Ettela’at-e Haftegi ( W eekly N ew s)
In sum , w hat cam e above constituted the core o f the Pahlavi cultural
p o lic y in its final decades. N ev erth eless, bringing these factors up in this article
is not m eant for putting forward a proper “art” critique o f them , w h ich certainly
ca lls for discrete and com p reh en sive essa ys on the resp ective subjects. Rather,
b y b ringing them up here I intend to broach the broader question o f dem ocracy