ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author challenges the claims of anti-modernism made about filmfarsi and its audiences by looking at the cinema's cosmography. Many filmfarsi titles took up, for one, well-known descriptions and especially the vocabulary of fate from the Koran. Iranian popular civil religion in its various representations in film and other media from the late Pahlavi era would in turn conceive of a national fate in dialogue with the idea of fate as divinely decreed, which has perhaps found its most recent manifestation in the Khomeinist vision. Popular civil religion largely rejected the ethical and regulative concerns of the Khomeinists in favor of a worldly aestheticism closer to the Sufi. Some filmfarsi features made explicit reference to fate and its operation, with it even appearing in the title. Given the concern of popular civil religion for the family, fate as the God of the nation in such films invariably worked to constitute a family or bring together family members.
