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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONWe Are Iran: The Persian Blogs
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Over the Internet, voices are emerging from Iran. A woman writes about what types of clothing attract men. A mother debates whether to let her daughter get her nose pierced. A young man loses faith because the mosques are filled with “hypocrites, thugs, and oppressors.” This is not the Iran we read about in newspaper headlines, but the everyday Iran experienced by its citizens and chronicled in the new book We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Soft Skull Press), by Nasrin Alavi.
A blog (short for “weblog”) is someone’s online journal, a sort of public diary that can be read on the Internet. In Iran, where the ruling clerics have placed severe restrictions on freedom of speech and the press, blogs offer a way for people to circumvent the state-controlled media and communicate directly with one another about their lives. Since the first Iranian blog appeared in 2001, Farsi, the predominant language in Iran, has become the fourth-most-frequently-used tongue for online journals, more common than Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, or Russian.
An expatriate Iranian journalist, Alavi spent her formative years in Iran but attended college in Great Britain, where she lives today. Her English translations of Farsi blogs give Westerners unprecedented access to the people of Iran and provide an alternative recent history of the nation. “When so much of the attention directed at the Islamic world is focused on violence and terrorism,” Alavi writes, “blogs offer outsiders a fresh perspective on the lives of ordinary men and women, relaying their experiences — their fears, dreams, disappointments, and insecurities — and allowing us to eavesdrop on the clandestine conversations of a closed society.”
The following excerpts are taken from We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. © 2005 by Nasrin Alavi. They are reproduced here by permission of Soft Skull Press, Inc. The e-mail addresses and websites given belong to actual Iranians. Some blogs are signed only with a pen name, because the author wishes to remain anonymous for his or her safety.
— Ed.
November 17, 2004
I keep a blog so that I can breathe in this suffocating air. In a society where one is taken to history’s abattoir for the mere crime of thinking, I write so as not to be lost in my despair, so that I feel that I am someplace where my calls for justice can be uttered. I write a blog so that I can shout, cry and laugh, and do the things that they have taken away from me in Iran today.
E-mail: lolivashe@yahoo.com
Website: lolivashaneh.blogspot.com
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, honest self-expression carries a heavy price. Over the last six years, as many as a hundred print publications, including forty-one daily newspapers, have been closed by Iran’s hard-line judiciary. In April 2003 the Islamic Republic became the first government to take direct action against bloggers. Many more bloggers and online journalists have been arrested or intimidated since.
October 30, 2003
Islam is compatible with democracy.*
*Subject to terms and conditions.
E-mail: weblog@ksajadi.com
Website: ksajadi.com/fblog
In recent years the Iranian people have demonstrated their desire for change by overwhelmingly voting for parliamentary candidates who promise democracy. In the 1997 presidential election, 70 percent of voters voted for the little-known cleric Mohammad Khatami, giving his reform agenda enormous backing. Khatami won the next election with a similar majority. He even carried Qom, the religious bastion of Iran.
But substantive change has been blocked by the hardliners who hold the real power through the judiciary and the Guardian Council, a conservative supervisory body. They have abolished the reformist press, forbidden reform candidates from running, and arrested, tortured, or assassinated many liberals and student activists.
The unelected Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the conservative clerics and lawyers control the courts, the army, the media, the political councils, and the powerful Islamic foundations that very nearly run the economy. In February 2004 the conservatives banned more than two thousand candidates from running in parliamentary elections, dropping any pretense of democracy and reasserting full control over the state. In the 2005 presidential election, conservative candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner.
The Islamic hard-liners have a single mission: to uphold the principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which began as a pro-democracy movement to overthrow the shah, an absolute monarch. Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini spoke of freedom and democracy, and initially his government was dominated by liberal figures who promised an end to political repression. Only days after the fall of the shah, however, Iran’s new regime hurriedly established revolutionary tribunals, where many figures from the previous regime were sentenced to death after summary trials. Within two years, Iran was a theocracy governed by severe Islamic law, with Ayatollah Khomeini established as Supreme Leader. Iranians had traded one unaccountable regime for another.
August 9, 2003
As your average five-year-old boy, I was crazy about toy cars of all varieties and colors. During an ordinary outing to the shops, my father refused to buy me a toy car; I threw your run-of-the-mill temper tantrum and was carried kicking and screaming into a taxi.
I hated my father and wanted him hanged like all the people that they were executing on our television screens. There were no children’s programs on TV. Everything was suspended, and we would sit and watch as they hanged and hanged.
Even at the tender age of five I knew who the Savakis [the shah’s secret service] were. I believed every bad person was a Savaki, and at that moment in time, that included my father.
I started talking to the taxi driver, who acknowledged me with a smile.
“Hey, Mister.”
“What is it?”
“My dad is a Savaki!”
The driver abruptly placed his foot on the brake and started cursing my dad. Thank God my father could talk to people, and soon they were both laughing at me.
How many Savakis do you know? When will we stop hanging people who don’t give us the toy cars we want?
E-mail: daftaresepid@yahoo.com
Website: daftaresepid.blogspot.com
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