In developing as in advanced economies, the pace of urbanization has continued to accelerate with the result that many less developed countries are experiencing problems in their urbanized areas which are quite similar to the advanced economies. In Iran, increased oil revenues which have aided in overall economic expansion have created differential growth rates in industries with different impacts on urban, as against rural growth, bringing along specific urban problems which require special consideration.

In Tehran, as in the major growth centers of other developing countries, population was growing at an annual rate of 6.6 percent in the period 1966-1969. Since 1969, the natural rate of growth has somewhat decreased but still remains at the high plateau of 6.1 percent per annum. As a consequence of this rapid rise in the population, the number of inhabitants of Tehran reached a level of 3.9 million in 1972, according to Iranian Plan and Budget Organization estimates.

Scholars of society and politics have over the years developed a large number of theoretical approaches to assist them in understanding their subject matter. These methodological orientations necessarily affect research findings and results. Social scientists have not always been known for their toleration of any approach that differs substantially from their own. Some, therefore, harden their own approaches into doctrines while those developed by others are treated as heresies. Dogmatism triumphs over open-mindedness.

Practitioners of the elite approach are as prone to this malady as are any other group of theoreticians. And for some very understandable reasons. In American political science, those who adopt an elite perspective have been unfairly but consistently attacked by the “pluralists,” i.e., those who adopt a group approach and in so doing disavow the existence and/or importance of elites. The attack takes on a nasty normative slant whereby elite scholars are insidiously identified as proponents of the phenomenon they study.

The most familiar of Hafez's poems in the English-speaking world is the so-called “Turk of Shiraz” ghazal, a much translated and frequently discussed poem that has been called a number of things which it isn't: A great poem, a grand philosophical utterance, a unified composition and a typical Hafezian ghazal. And it hasn't been called something which it may well be: a verse-song intended for recital with musical accompaniment.