The authors present a profile of Iranians in the United States. "First, the paper will review trends in Iranian immigration to the United States from 1950 to 1986....Second, all available data will be used to derive an estimate of the 1986 population size of Iranians in the U.S., and major centers of Iranian concentration such as California and Los Angeles. The rest of the paper will present a detailed analysis of the 1980 U.S. Census.... Since students made up a large proportion of Iranians in 1980, separate statistical profiles will be given for the total Iranian population, non-students, and students." Consideration is given to geographic distribution and to demographic characteristics, including economic and educational status.

Transsexuality in Iran has gained much attention and media coverage in the past few years, particularly in its questionable depiction as a permitted loophole for homosexuality, which is prohibited under Iran's Islamic-inspired legal system. Of course, attention in the West is also encouraged by the “shock” that sex change is available in Iran, a country that Western media and society delights in portraying as monolithically repressive. As a result, Iranian filmmakers inevitably have their own agendas, which are unsurprisingly brought into the film making process—from a desire to sell a product that will appeal to the Western market, to films that endorse specific socio-political agendas. This paper is an attempt to situate sex change and representations of sex change in Iran within a wider theoretical framework than the frequently reiterated conflation with homosexuality, and to open and engage with a wider debate concerning transsexuality in Iran, as well as to specifically analyze the representation of transexuality, in view of its current prominent presence in media.

In the first decade of the fourteenth century, Rashid al-D?n Fazl Allah penned a remarkable endowment deed in which he meticulously detailed his plans for the creation of a utopian community. He named it the Rab'-i Rashid. In this document, he provides socio-economic data concerning the day-to-day operations of this settlement unparalleled in comparable texts. This article focuses on the hospital ward of the Rab'-i Rashid, and provides a broader historical context for this medieval hospital and its personnel by examining the financial and monetary information in the endowment deed in order to piece together the inner workings of this community. In so doing, we are granted a rare opportunity to explore the daily lives of ordinary people whose endeavors, however significant, often went unnoticed.