Mirza Saleh Shirazi, who was sent to the UK in 1815, brought back the technology to establish the first Persian-language newspaper, Kaghaz-e Akhbar (literally “News-Paper”), “the first in a long series of periodicals designed to represent the government’s official point of view on matters of politics and policy.” 

From Afshin Marashi, an overview of “Politics and the Press in Iran”:

At the same time that the state was working to establish an official press, dissident and radical groups in Iranian society were beginning to recognize the usefulness of the new technology of print to disseminate ideas and shape public opinion. Significantly, this early Persian-language radical press was almost invariably published outside of Iran. London, Calcutta, Cairo, Istanbul, and Baku were all important cities with sizable communities of Iranian expatriates, and during the second half of the nineteenth century these expatriate communities became the home for an emerging radical Persian-language press. 

Even today, the leading chroniclers of Iranian media take on the subject not just from the distance of the UK, but the perch of academia. 

Hossein Shahidi’s doctoral thesis at Oxford, revised and co-edited with Homa Katouzian, was published by Routledge in 2007 (and later translated into Persian). Though a valuable resource, the title, Journalism in Iran: From Mission to Profession, offers too optimistic an assessment, presupposing a climate in the Islamic Republic where such a transformation might be possible. 

Comparing university education in journalism before and after the Revolution, Shahidi himself notes: 

The pre-Revolution College of Social Communication Sciences had been highly selective in its admissions policy and very demanding in its academic programme, with BA students required to complete 36 credit units in English as well as French, German or Italian. MA students were supplied with “the best resources” and had to perform to very high standards of achievement. Students admitted to the mid-1990s BA communication programme at Allameh Tabatabaee University had had communication among the lowest of the 75 choices they could make when taking the general university entrance examination. Most had had high school grade averages of between 10 and 12 out of 20, with the highest achievers among them reaching 14.00.

Shahidi’s own journalism background was shaped at the BBC World Service in London, where he spent nearly two decades (1983–2001), including as a trainer of other journalists. BBC Persian, now a subsidiary of the World Service, was established in 1940 as a radio program to broadcast wartime propaganda. Through the 1953 coup, the 1979 Revolution, and the 2009 launch of a satellite television station shortly before that June’s contested presidential election to accusations today that it is too closely associated with the discredited line of the so-called Reformists, the role of the BBC has been controversial in Iran. For all its faults—real or imagined—the BBC has played a leading role in professionalizing cadres of Iranian journalists, generation after generation.

In The Persian Service: The BBC and British Interests in Iran (2014), Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh take on this often fraught history. Examining the relationship of the BBC to the Foreign Office, they come to the conclusion that it advocates “fair and balanced journalism as the best agent of British values and influence.” 

“That does not mean this was always achieved,” adds Sreberny, who has taken on the brunt of documenting the contemporary Iranian media landscape. 

In addition to her many scholarly articles and deep dive into the BBC, she has two other books to her credit on the topic: Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (1994), with Ali Mohammadi, and Blogestan: The Internet and Politics in Iran (2010), coauthored with Gholam Khiabany. 

Despite the decades between the phenomena of “small media,” from the pulpit and a fistful of cassettes in 1978 to the proliferation of independent voices on blogs and the ongoing disruption of a succession of social media platforms, there is a profound sense of déjà vu, if not actual progress. 

In The Man in the Mirror (1987), Canadian journalist Carole Jerome recounts events as they unfolded behind the scenes in the Paris suburb where Ayatollah Khomeini took refuge as a last resort once he was ejected from Iraq. Though it may not have been to his taste, his temporary Western exile gave him wide-ranging access to the international media headquartered in bureaus nearby. He may not have been so lucky in Najaf. 

As Jerome tries to cover Khomeini and his men, she gets harassed by Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a close aide to Khomeini, who was also her secret lover, to don the hejab and be respectful of their religion. 

On a first-name basis with other foreign journalists as well, Ghotbzadeh would go on to become the first managing director of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT) after the Revolution, and then foreign minister, before facing Khomeini’s firing squad in 1982.  

From The Man in the Mirror:

Day after day, I joined the milling reporters at Neauphle le Château. Sadegh and two others, Abolhassan Band Sadr and Ibrahim Yazdi, formed a kind of magi—a trio of wise men—around the Ayatollah. Because they had had Western education, they translated Khomeini’s daily pronouncements into either French or English. They took turns in the spotlight and the media ignored the powerful figures in turbans who came and went in the shadows. What no one knew then was that the Ayatollah’s men—Sadegh, Bani Sadr and Yazdi—also took turns writing the Imam’s speeches. 

I watched them with both concern and amusement. These three were made for television. They provided endless spectacle—in our own language. But almost always Yazdi’s English translation differed widely from Bani Sadr’s French, and the next day Sadegh would say something completely different in both languages. 

Meanwhile, Khomeini’s speeches in the original, unadulterated Farsi, calling for sacrifice and martyrdom, were captured on cassettes and smuggled into Iran, or played over the phone and recorded in inferior quality there. The tapes were broadcast in the bazaars and the growing number of mosques built, ironically, by the Shah, in numbers “unprecedented in the history of modern Iran,” particularly from 1970 to 1975, according to Abbas Milani. “A great historic strategic mistake in the sense that he assumed that the clergy are his allies.” 

Ghotbzadeh was also used as a back channel to Khomeini by Western powers who thought there was room to negotiate with him. 

“I have a message from American president Jimmy Carter,” Claude Chayet, the French chief of consular affairs, said to Khomeini during one of Chayet’s numerous trips to check up on him. “He says to tell you that the United States will not oppose any new government in Iran as long as representative elections are held.” 

“We in the French government are concerned about the safety of religious minorities and about such people as Amir Abbas Hoveyda, if you come to power,” Chayet added. The former prime minister had been cut loose by the Shah in one of his last-ditch efforts to appease the revolutionaries. Hoveyda, who was in prison at the time, would soon be executed by Khomeini after the ayatollah came to power. 

“But, my dear sir,” Khomeini is said to have replied through Ghotbzadeh, who was translating, “I have fought to put an end to the regime that tortures, terrorizes, spills the blood of opponents. Do you think I would take over only to put on the same boots?”

Kelly Golnoush Niknejad
Editor in Chief

The post Out of Iran: The State of Journalism in the Islamic Republic (A Short Reading List) appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Three customers can fit inside if none of them makes any sudden move. In the middle of the floor-to-wall stacks of books, a gas heater perilously close to both customers and age-dried pages fights the cold winter air that rushes through the sliding door each time a customer shuffles in. The owner, Soheil Dehkordi, stands barricaded behind a desk covered with more books.

A man comes in asking for a book of poetry and Dehkordi vaguely waves him in the right direction without lifting his glance from a special customer, the owner of a photo gallery in north Tehran, who is collecting Iranian photobooks for her gallery’s library. Today she is looking for a set of what were originally five books from the 1980s titled The Imposed War: Defense vs. Aggression about Iran’s conflict with its neighbor Iraq, produced by the national War Propaganda Council. “There was a time when these books had no takers and you could find them cheap here and there, especially in the provinces,” says Dehkordi. “Now suddenly there are more people asking for them. And even the provincial shops say they have their own buyers.”

The transformation of these books over the past 35 years, from unapologetic tools of propaganda to collectible objects sought by art aficionados, traces a change in the nature of remembering the war, which lasted almost a decade and caused as many as 600,000 deaths in Iran. From the start of the Islamic Republic to today, the fate of the photobooks, which include graphic photographs of death and injury, reflects judgments about the visual history of the regime as it established itself, consolidated its power, and, for the past decade or more, as it has faced internal rumblings from its citizens. Following the trail of the photobooks also provides a view of the circumstances that spurred the growth of documentary photography in Iran, as the state worked to monopolize and control the country’s visual culture.

In a symbiotic relationship, photography has helped make and maintain the Islamists’ vision of the Revolution in Iran, and the Revolution helped push the boundaries of documentary photography in the country. The Revolution, followed by the taking of American hostages and then the eight-year war with Iraq, propelled Iranian photographers into the fray, transforming them into serious practitioners of new genres.

By the time of the Revolution in the late 1970s, Iranians had been exposed to photography for nearly 100 years; it wasn’t uncommon for ordinary middle-class people to own cameras. An established cadre of photojournalists followed the royal court and provided news photographs for the daily newspapers and numerous weekly magazines, while Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi employed foreign photographers to produce glossy coffee-table books celebrating the glories of Persian culture.

The Revolution that toppled the Shah relied on this photographic technology, just as it employed other late 20th-century technologies to advance its cause. Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrine had been smuggled into the country on cassettes that were reproduced for furtive circulation. Media-savvy revolutionaries also recognized the power of images, and even invited Western photographers to travel on the airplane for Khomeini’s triumphant flight back to Iran. 

Media anthropologist Roxanna Varzi of the University of California, Irvine, argues that the Islamists expertly exploited the value of images in creating an identity for the new state. “Almost every mural, stamp, and piece of currency produced graphically and in painting derives its image from a photograph that is doctored to create a billboard, poster or postage stamp,” she writes in Warring Souls: Youth, Media and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran. Photography was becoming one of the most useful instruments in the Islamic Republic’s toolbox.

Photos published daily in newspapers helped fix the inevitability of a new Iran in the eyes of the world and the psyche of the Iranian nation: Ayatollah Khomeini sitting under an apple tree in exile in France, his descending the steps of the Air France aircraft that carried him back to Tehran, the crying Shah leaving the country, executed generals’ and ministers’ corpses lying naked on mortuary slabs. Such images forged the country’s collective memory. Ever since, the regime has continued to shape that memory—often through photographs. 

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When Maryam Zandi heard about the protest march, she had to go out to see it for herself. National Iranian Radio and Television, where she was a staff photographer, was on strike in sympathy with the anti-Shah uprising of 1978 and she was at home. These were strange new times, she thought, and they had to be recorded. There was no one to look after her two-year-old daughter. So she threw her camera bag on her shoulder and her baby girl on her hip, and headed out.

Crowds already filled the streets and the square around the University of Tehran, punching their fists in the air, shouting slogans against the Shah and dictatorship. Zandi decided to climb upon a bus shelter to get a better view, but couldn’t do so while holding her daughter in her arms. She asked a woman standing nearby if she would hold her child for a little while. “On one condition,” said the woman. “If you shout, ‘Long live Khomeini.’” Zandi passed the child into the stranger’s arms and yelled, “Of course, long live Khomeini!” as she climbed atop the shelter. She doesn’t remember how long she stayed there, but she does remember being scared when she saw the crowd from above. She had never seen so many people in one place.

The more than one million people who came onto the streets of Tehran that day demanding change created the turning point in the fortunes of the Shah and the country. It was Monday, December 11, 1978, the day of Ashura, the second of two consecutive holy days of mourning. On Ashura, processions of black-clad men take over the streets of the capital to mark the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, one of Iran’s holiest saints, by flagellating themselves with chains to the sounds of beating drums. The revolutionaries, well aware of the immense symbolism of these days, had called their second march for the mourning period. The Shah had ordered the army to stand down in respect for the religious ritual. 

Numerous photographs of the Ashura demonstrations show the multitudes marching with their banners. But two of the most memorable images of that day depict a half-finished five-story building overrun by onlookers seeking the perfect vantage point. Filling every floor, men and women flesh out the spaces where walls should have been. Two photographers captured that scene, the Iranian Bahman Jalali and the Frenchman Michel Setboun, who was in Iran to cover the events for the Paris-based agency SIPA. Mere minutes separate Jalali and Setboun’s images, but the atmospheres captured through their viewfinders differ considerably. In Jalali’s photo, the crowd at street level seems to be waiting for the action to begin. In the right of this image, a cluster of photographers perches precariously on a platform facing the tree-lined boulevard where the march is approaching—a testament to the number of photographers on Tehran’s streets those decisive days. In Setboun’s more animated image, people are more clearly engaged with the scene in front of them. Some wave their fists in the air in support of the marchers, who seem to be close by. 

In both cases, shot from a middle distance, the photographs of the half-finished building on the corner of Khosh Street close to the Azadi Tower suggest a striking metaphor: the country’s incomplete project of modernity. The photos are even more searing as a symbol of the Revolution: tiers of people, hopeful and excited, with merely a skeletal idea of what they want. None of them knows how this half-finished structure will look when the project is complete.

Bahman Jalali wasn’t a photographer by training. Before the Revolution, he had studied politics and economics at the University of Tehran. He traveled with the architecture students on their many road trips around Iran, taking photos of traditional houses. After graduation, his hobby became his profession; beginning in the early 1970s, he worked as a photographer for Tamasha, the magazine of National Iranian Radio and Television. When the unrest began in 1978, he and his wife, Rana Javadi, who had picked up the photography bug from him, joined the throngs in the streets to photograph the events. She moved freely among the women and provided a different point of view.

Setboun, an architect by training, had come to Iran in May 1978, almost too early, looking for a subject and sensing that something was about to happen. “Remember this was only ten years after the events of May 1968. Only [a few] years after the end of Vietnam. This was my chance to be part of something that I had missed,” he says. He ended up with time to get to know the country and its people and to record Iranian life at an important juncture in great detail, from the poorer sections of southern Tehran to Turkeman fishermen and all the way to photographs of royal birthdays at the court. His extensive travels around the country in the monarchy’s final year made him a street expert on Iran’s finer social cracks.

After the victory of the Revolution, Iran experienced a euphoric atmosphere of freedom. The Shah’s system of censorship had disappeared, and the Islamic Republic’s was not yet set up. Jalali exhibited his photographs of the street protests at Tehran’s Farabi University, an institution created by the Shah’s wife, Farah, in the image of Les Beaux Arts de Paris. (Under the Islamic regime, it would be amalgamated into the Tehran University of Art with two other schools.) Seeing the exhibit, Karim Emami, who had just been removed as head of Sorush Publications at National Iranian Television, suggested that Jalali publish a book of images documenting the Revolution. People like Emami, who had been educated in the West and had worked as managers in the Shah’s regime, were not regarded as loyal to the Revolution’s Islamic ideals and were purged en masse. Jalali was also at loose ends as Tamasha was in limbo during the changeover. Along with his wife, Goli—purged as the head librarian of Farabi University—Emami set up a shoestring publishing house called Zamineh from their home, specifically to publish Jalali’s photos.

Days of Blood, Days of Fire was published in June 1979, only four months after the conclusion of the Revolution, under Jalali’s name. The publishers also used photos by Jalali’s wife, Javadi, and a handful of friends to fill the gaps in the narrative. The book is likely Iran’s first documentary photobook depicting the turbulence of the Revolution—and it is an artistically experimental one as well. Instead of captions, Emami accompanied the photos with popular slogans of the Revolution and quotes from landmark speeches by the leaders of the uprising. This creative book gave the reader not just visuals, but also a sample of the sounds of those tumultuous times. Emami already had an eye on the historical record, Goli recounts, predicting that some years later, “people will want to know on what basis and slogans this Revolution happened.” Instead of using high-gloss paper, Emami chose an inexpensive thick paper that made the images look grainy and kept the book affordable at about 170 rials (US$2.50). To this day, it holds the record for the highest-selling book of its genre. The book’s first print run of 22,000 copies was sold out within a handful of weeks, so a second run of 15,000 copies followed. 

Around the same time as Jalali’s publication, Kaveh Golestan, who had begun his career as a photojournalist in Belfast in the early 1970s, self-published Uprising, a photobook presenting his chronicle of the days of the Revolution. He printed 2,000 copies and sold them outside the University of Tehran in the impromptu book bazaar that popped up during the censorship vacuum, when books that had been banned for 30 years were printed and sold next to revolutionary tracts and pamphlets in an intellectual free market. Clearly, Golestan, Jalali, and their colleagues recognized a tremendous rupture in the history of their country that warranted such speedy production of records that would be more permanent than newspapers.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Michel Setboun just as quickly created his own photobook based on the year-long assignment that he credits with making him a photojournalist: Iran: L’eclatement (The eruption), published by Le Sycamore in September 1979. The range of photos suggests that Setboun was everywhere, from the Shah’s palace to the transitional government’s meeting with Yasser Arafat to recording the armed revolutionaries and the street protests. In the last chapter, titled “La fête est finie” (The party’s over), he calls the Ayatollah’s Islamic Republic “a monstrosity of intolerance and stupidity” and predicts that “Iran will not sing, not laugh, not rhyme, not love, but pray and obey the barking of the Guardian of the Revolution.” He wonders what will happen to the minorities he photographed, as if anticipating the uprising by the Kurds, who were dealt with punitively by the new Islamic government from the start. His images of armed groups in the streets include a photograph of a young woman guerilla fighter in combat trousers, loading her weapon, with a cigarette in her mouth and no hejab on her head. 

Setboun could afford to include such comments and images in a book distributed in Europe, but soon, inside Iran, the far more modest material in Jalali’s book began to seem risky to its own producers. Among its many images, the book depicted members of the Mojahedin-e Khalgh (MEK), a group that had participated in the Revolution, but had fallen afoul of the faction supporting Khomeini. It also contained photographs of women protesters from all walks of life, many of them without hejab—which, within months of the Revolution, Khomeini had insisted that women wear. (His “recommendation” acquired the full force of law in 1983.) Loath to set themselves up for censorship, the Emamis decided not to pursue a permit for a third print run for Jalali’s book. In fact, having published seven books, including a second photobook by Jalali, they shut down their press altogether.

The Revolution had provided a fertile ground for photojournalists—both Iranians, who were learning how to photograph a conflict for the first time on their home turf, and for experienced photographers working for foreign media. Both groups produced compelling work. And the Islamic regime was beginning to control the use of images to tell the story they wanted to project.

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On November 4, 1979, another event propelled the growth of homegrown photojournalism and created a new opportunity for the regime to use visual media to convey its independence from the West and, specifically, its anger toward the United States (already deemed “the Great Satan”), which had propped up the Shah: A group of hardline students supporting Ayatollah Khomeini climbed over the walls of the US embassy compound in Tehran and took 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. They paraded the hostages, blindfolded, with arms tied, to be photographed by the international press. As Amy Lyford, an art historian specializing in photography, writes: “These students understood the media’s power to disseminate information, and they took full advantage of this to broadcast their activities to the world: they distributed photographs, held news conferences, and made the hostages they had taken, visually available to the press surrounding the embassy.” 

One such image became the logo for the US television news program Nightline, created to follow the hostage crisis on a nightly basis: Behind anchor Ted Koppel’s left shoulder, a screen shows a yellow map of Iran ripped out of geographic context, floating against a black background without neighboring countries. To the map’s right is a photo of a man—a hostage—in a white shirt, and a thick white blindfold wrapped in layer after layer around his head. It looks as though he is being readied for execution. 

After the embassy invasion and hostage-taking, many foreign journalists, including Setboun, left Iran, and the job of covering the still volatile country fell to locals who stepped in to supply the foreign media with the images they needed. Setboun handed his SIPA mantle to Reza Deghati, whom he connected to the agency. “There were these young Iranian photographers that grew up with us. It was time to let them take over. They could speak the language; all they needed was a connection to the outside media, which they didn’t have before,” he says. The hostage-taking was not just good for Iranian local photographers, it was also one of the landmark events that consolidated the Islamists’ hold on the country and its future. Iran’s foreign policy took an irreversible turn into isolationism and belligerence toward the world. And it tightened its grip internally. 

Maryam Zandi continued to take photographs in Tehran’s streets until 1980. The revolutionary overseers known as the Komiteh were working, among other things, to control the story of the Revolution and define it as wholly Islamic, despite the other groups—communists, nationalists—that had participated in ousting the Shah. “If they felt that you were taking photos in support of the wrong group, they would follow and harass or even beat the photographer,” Zandi recalls. The Komiteh wielded batons. “I saw some scuffles,” she says, and they confiscated her cameras a couple of times. Aside from being stifled by the Islamists, photographers could also get caught in the crossfire between the Khomeinists and other armed revolutionary groups vying for power. Zandi decided it was not worth the trouble—she turned to portraiture. 

On September 20, 1980, less than 18 months after the departure of the Shah, Saddam Hussein attacked and eventually occupied the southern city of Khorramshahr on Iran’s border with Iraq, provoking a war that lasted nearly a decade. Often compared to World War I for its extensive trench warfare, the use of chemical weapons, and the horrendous loss of life and capital, the Iran-Iraq War also resembles the earlier conflict in the role photography played in shaping public attitudes toward the event.

“The revolution brought out a multiplicity of voices, at times emphasizing contradictory aspirations,” writes Farideh Farhi, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii. “The war offered a univocal venue for both crushing domestic opposition to the newly emerging political order as well as ‘Sacred Defense’ against international aggression.” It also gave Jalali and his colleagues the opportunity to pursue another genre new to them: war photography. Hundreds of photographers ended up documenting the war.

Some worked for official entities like IRNA (the Islamic Republic News Agency, formerly called Pars), national television, and the daily newspapers, all controlled by the state. Another group worked for Western media and were given limited access to the front. A third were volunteer soldiers who learned the craft and became photographers at the front, covering not just the battles, but also the daily lives of the soldiers. A fourth group, a special unit of 40 young men, were recruited through two mosques in the southern province of Khuzestan, home to Iran’s oil fields and where the main fighting took place. Each was given a still camera, a 16mm film camera, and a motorbike with which to roam the front and record the war. In addition, the various sections of the armed forces had their own photographic units, and some individual soldiers took photographs for personal use as mementos.

When war broke out, Ali Fereydouni was working as an assistant in the IRNA laboratory developing and printing other people’s photographs. When one of the agency’s photographers refused to go to the front to cover the conflict, Fereydouni volunteered; he supported the Revolution and the war. The agency gave him a hefty Hasselblad camera imported specially from Germany for the lavish, infamous party the Shah had put on in 1971 for heads of state from around the world at the Persepolis ruins, celebrating 2,500 years of monarchy in Iran since Cyrus the Great. Now that Hasselblad was in the hands of a revolutionary sympathizer at the war front, but Fereydouni had to be economical with his shots. His medium-format camera took rolls of only 12 frames and there was a scarcity of film; he had to learn about light and how to use it in the middle of a battlefield. 

Fereydouni’s photographs, featuring noble soldiers, differ from those by photographers like Jalali, who was independent and, with an artistic eye, took pictures of the devastation of the war from behind the lines, or Golestan, who sent news images to the foreign press from the battle front that he visited intermittently. Their circumstances differed as well. Whereas Fereydouni and his ilk were the equivalent of embedded photographers, the men who sent their work overseas were not living the war at the front, like Fereydouni and those ideologically connected to it. While the foreigners had access to all the film they wanted and were paid substantial fees in dollars, what they didn’t have was the free access afforded to the state-sanctioned photographers. They had to secure permits to go to the front and those often entailed multiple bureaucratic hurdles.

In the summer of 1981, as the war raged, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance along with the Museum of Contemporary Art published a photobook that recounted the Revolution and began to fix its history in the regime’s preferred narrative. The cover of the square tome, titled Images: The Islamic Revolution of Iran, has a striking design in black, white, and red. It shows a blood-red handprint on a white background, and then superimposed on top of that, a negative of the same image: a white hand on a bloody background bordered by the sprockets of a roll of film. While the design echoes the graphics of the Shah’s time—the Islamic Republic hadn’t developed an aesthetic yet—in content, it expresses the regime’s entry into the cultural arena as a space for asserting its power. The design evokes the idea of martyrdom, refers to common revolutionary images of protesters with hands bloodied by their fallen comrades, and calls to mind the Shia symbol of the five saints—all linked through the representative medium of photography.

In the book’s preface, the publishers opine (in English) about the misrepresentation of the Revolution by the imperialist Western media: “Most probably no transformation has consciously been so badly introduced from the point of the media of the world as the Revolution of Iran.” Despite its title, the book also includes images of the war, which it tacitly links to the Revolution.

Being in charge of the apparatus that controls the way historical events are remembered and told is an essential part of nation-building and vital to a new system of governance like the Islamic Republic. Shaping collective memory, scholars of nationalism agree, is essential to national identity. Duncan Bell of Cambridge University refines the notion of collective memory, arguing in “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and the National Identity” that memory is intrinsically the property of individual minds and that what states create, through a ritualistic narrative of events, should more correctly be called mythology. “Myth,” he writes, “serves to flatten the complexity, the nuance, the performative contradictions of human history; it presents instead a simplistic and often univocal story.” 

The Islamic Republic has interwoven two myths—one of the Revolution, the other of the long war—in the Iranian mindset. Iranians had hardly processed the effects of the Revolution when the war began. Along with photobooks like Images, the state-sponsored propaganda effort produced new cultural material in every medium available to promote the ideals of the Revolution and, soon after, the righteousness of the Iraqi conflict, which it referred to as the “Imposed War” or the “Sacred Defense.” Documentary films brought the war front to Iranian front rooms. Music intended to rouse the fighting spirit of the nation permeated the airwaves. A new genre of war cinema emerged and city walls transformed into a giant showcase of martyrdom—murals of men, both the old heroes of the Revolution and the young who perished in the war.  

As part of these efforts to cement the Islamic Republic’s origin myth, in 1981 Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, established an archive of the reign of the Shah and the Revolution, and recruited a young photographer, Seifollah Samadian, to organize it—in the process, saving more than one million frames of negatives from the Shah’s reign from militants who wanted to destroy them. As described by scholars Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook, archives are a tool of power—“power over memory and identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been, where it has come from and where it is going.” What’s more, they write, it’s the “power of the present to control what the future will remember of the past.” In his new post, Samadian was archiving photographs that agency photographers were submitting from the war front—including those by Fereydouni, who had shot 25,000 frames by war’s end. 

In May 1982, Khorramshahr was recaptured by Iranian troops after a savage battle that gave it the nickname Khooninshahr (city of blood). Saddam withdrew his troops and indicated he was ready to end the conflict. Believing that the war was just about over, Samadian (today the publisher of Iran’s only photography annual, Tassvir) suggested that a book be produced to showcase the atrocities committed against Iran. Samadian and Mahmoud Kalari, now a celebrated cinematographer, collected pictures by professional and amateur soldier-photographers for what would become the first volume of The Imposed War: Defense vs. Aggression. Morteza Momayez, recognized as the father of Iranian graphic design, laid it out. The coffee-table book was printed in Germany to ensure a level of technical quality not then available in Iran. 

Produced by the War Propaganda Council, the photobook was taken to the UN as part of Iran’s case against Iraq. Its success paved the way for more books to follow as the war, unexpectedly, continued. “No one in their right minds would produce a photobook about an ongoing war,” Samadian says. But that is exactly what he ended up doing for the next five years, as the regime, as a matter of policy, extended the conflict. Samadian put together photobooks on various themes of the war to coincide with the anniversary of the Islamic Republic’s inception, one a year until the war’s end in 1988. 

The war was driven by a huge dose of Shia imagery and sensibility feeding on the already established mythology of martyrdom of Imam Hussein in the Iranian culture. Some of the photographs in the earlier editions of the original five Sacred Defense books produced under Samadian’s supervision, are extremely graphic. “[T]he photobook, even more than the single photograph, is essentially about a point of view,” write Gerry Badger and Martin Parr in their Photobook: A History. The War Propaganda Council’s volumes were useful in fanning an Iranian sense of injury and mobilizing new recruits. The cover of the first book, a photograph by Kazem Akhavan, a young man who learned photography at the front, shows a close-up of a dead man’s head, wearing a checkered black and white headscarf, in a pool of blood not fully congealed on the ground where he has fallen. The ashen face of the dead soldier is only partially visible, and the viewer’s eye is drawn to the glistening red stain, fixed in its wet freshness. The second book includes a full-page color portrait of a chemically wounded soldier, whose raw face is covered in white cream. Another contains a section on children, labeling them the future warriors of Iran. 

The state relied heavily on the chest-beating cult of martyrdom to depict Iran as a victim and not an aggressor. “Martyrdom is meaningless without memorialization and memorialization is not possible without a photograph,” writes Varzi. One of the most emblematic photographs of the war, taken by Ehsan Rajabi in 1986 on Iraqi soil east of Basra, six years into the war, depicts a soldier moments after his death. The blood trickling down his forehead matches his red martyrdom bandana so perfectly it looks as if it is part of the cloth. He looks like he is sleeping peacefully. The photograph could have been a fine example of Victorian memento mori had it not been for the dust on the young man’s face and his blood-soaked shirt. His posture, as he leans against a rock with his head bent slightly to his right shoulder, is saintly if not Christ-like. Photographs like this, vividly depicting death, are typical of Iran’s Shia-driven aesthetic of memorialization: The soldier finds virtuousness in death, following the glorious path of martyrdom. And in this photograph, he is beatified, frozen in his youth and sacrificed for eternity.  

In contrast, Kaveh Golestan’s photograph of a dead boy, his chin shadowed by the first signs of stubble, is taken from a kneeling position. It refuses to make an icon of the boy or venerate his death. This is a corpse of a child, lying next to the feet of another dead soldier. His thumb held between his forefinger and middle finger looks alive and tactile. His face, with its mouth set in a bitter grimace and his eyes half open, is a death mask. The picture of Khomeini in his pocket raises the question: Was he wearing it like an amulet when he was killed, or was he adorned with it like a prize afterward? One way or another, the portrait links him in death with the leader of the Revolution.

The boy’s combat shirt has fallen open to his side and we can see the geometric pattern of his underpants. Maybe his mother sewed them for him, as mothers did in poor, traditional households—the domestic intrudes jarringly into the horror of war. The way he is placed in the middle of rubble and plastic sacks has nothing in common with the angelic death of Rajabi’s soldier; the photo by Golestan, who was working for America’s Time and Life, does not make death beautiful.

By the war’s end, the War Propaganda Council had produced additional books in the Imposed War series on all aspects of the conflict, from the battlefront to the home front, that include images taken by photographers with a broad range of professional affiliations. The books are uniform in style, with unsophisticated design and high-quality glossy pages and cover sheets, but the first book, described by Samadian as a catalogue of Iran’s grievances against Iraq for posterity, differs from the following ones. It is not numbered, as Samadian hadn’t anticipated further volumes. More significantly, in the first book, the introductory text is in Arabic, the language of the enemy, and English, the language of the international community, rather than Persian. The following books include Persian text as well and are organized around themes like the bombing of the cities or the volunteer soldiers. Lacking price markings, the books clearly were not intended to be sold on the Iranian market, but were produced in runs of 2,000 to 5,000 copies as gifts for foreign and domestic dignitaries. Samadian recalls Mir Hossein Mousavi, the prime minister during the war who green-lighted the project, saying he felt these books were his greatest cultural achievement in office. 

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Saeid Janbozorgi, a volunteer soldier at age 15, discovered photography at the front. He was one of the photographers who documented the Iraqi chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988 that killed some 3,500 to 5,000 Kurds and injured as many as 10,000 more (including Janbozorgi himself, who died in 2002 of chemical wounds he sustained while covering the massacre). At the end of the war Janbozorgi went to university to earn a degree in photography. His thesis, subsequently published as Photography in War, looks at the global history of war photography and connects the genre to its emergence in Iran. In it, Janbozorgi lists 39 Iranian photobooks devoted to various aspects of the war and 218 Iranian war photographers. 

Janbozorgi describes war photography as an art, and at the end of his thesis, completed in 1997, he recommends that Iran make a concerted effort to collect and preserve the scattered photographs of the war with Iraq. In 2001, eight of his colleagues who had covered the front followed Janbozorgi’s advice and, with him, founded the Sacred Defense and Revolution Photographers’ Association. They published Janbozorgi’s thesis, which serves as an informal manifesto for their work. 

Housed on two floors in a drab concrete building behind a traffic-filled boulevard in central Tehran, famous for its jewelry shops and, more recently, hip cafés frequented by young Tehranis, many born years after the war, the Association’s work marks a shift from the duty of documenting the war to the imperative to remember it—and in a particular way. Like veterans of wars the world over, Fereydouni and his colleagues have a special bond with the war and a special stake in its commemoration. The war photographers, who come in and out of the Association’s office in the afternoons to shoot the breeze with their old colleagues over glasses of sweet black tea and freshly baked bread and cheese, did not serve as disinterested journalists, but as committed members of the troops. Fereydouni has described his camera as his “dog tag.”

The Association’s first project was to extend the series of The Imposed War: Defense vs. Aggression photobooks of the 1980s, adding three new volumes. (The last is devoted to “Martyrs.”) Funded by the Basij Mostazafin, a paramilitary group founded in the early days of the Revolution and incorporated into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Association has been able to produce expensive photobooks—17 in total, so far—and sell them at affordable prices. Some of the books focus on various provinces and their roles in support of the war, and some are monographs dedicated to the work of individual photographers. Serving the sacred war was enough for the photographers at the time; they didn’t care about credit or copyright. In the war’s aftermath and the effort to safeguard its memory, they no longer wish to be anonymous. The monographs acknowledge the person behind the viewfinder. 

“They don’t seem to have edited very effectively,” observes Magnum photographer Gilles Peress, whose own Telex Iran, published in 1984, is one of the most celebrated photobooks on the Iranian Revolution by a foreign reporter. Its fragments of the staccato telexes he sent out to his editors in place of captions perfectly capture the urgent nature of the events on the ground. Rather than carefully selecting images according to principles of composition, light, clarity, and focused storytelling, the editors at the Association sought to honor photographers for their service and to highlight the wide spectrum of images they captured as they had the front almost all to themselves. They snapped everything: the wounded, the dead, the weary, the bored, the eating, the standing around, the sleeping cuddled together in a grave for warmth and safety. Aesthetic quality was not the point. Still, the Association works meticulously to verify the time and place of every photograph.

Some soldier-photographers, like Fereydouni, became highly accomplished. His best-known image, reprinted by the Association both in its “Martyrs” volume and as the cover of Fereydouni’s monograph, is regarded as a “masterpiece” by Abbas Kowsari, one of Iran’s top photojournalists today. The photo depicts a soldier at the moment of his death. His head is wrapped in a makeshift cloth to stop his bleeding, the white of the cloth framing his face and echoing the white of his eyes as they roll into his skull. It seems he is looking up to something higher. He is held by an older soldier, who wears a helmet with the words “Ya Seyed-al-Shohada” (Hail Lord of Martyrs, referring to Imam Hussein). A motorbike lying on the ground behind the soldier suggests that he is part of the unit known as the “angels,” who outran the enemy on their fast vehicles, supplying their colleagues with support and sabotaging the enemy on the battlefield. He, too, is looking up at something way above him as he crouches next to the dying boy. The viewer follows the line of his eyes and of the boy’s death stare, and the image offers a metaphor of transcendence: The martyr, leaving behind a trench strewn with the detritus of war and surrounded by sandbags, ascends to heaven.

One might expect that the war loyalists would welcome commemoration of the war by younger photographers, who were children during those harrowing eight years, but Association members sometimes question the motives of a new generation of photographers, who are conversant in the trends in conceptual photography and have breached the sacred cordon around the war, scaling it down from epic proportions. Most of these photographers were at some point students of Bahman Jalali, who taught social documentary photography at various universities for 30 years before his death from cancer in 2002.

Among them, two women, Shadi Ghadirian and Gohar Dashti, have counterintuitively introduced the domestic element of life during the conflict in photo projects made two decades after the war’s end. Ghadirian’s series Nil Nil (2008) embeds a soldier’s paraphernalia into the private space of a home. A hand grenade sits among the fruit in a crystal bowl; a pair of combat boots rests next to a pair of red stilettos while a helmet hangs from the clothes rack. Ghadirian was 14 when the war began. “The war was a big deal in my life,” she says. “It was far, but it was scary. Even more when it came to the cities and affected us physically.” She once asked her mother why she let her and her siblings go out during the last two years of the war, when Tehran was hit by a missile a day. Her mother answered, “We had to live our lives.”

Members of the generation born in the 1970s and 1980s share a bond of war memories. They heard about it at school, watched it on TV, and, more devastatingly, felt it through the fear of their parents during urban bombardments. On Iranian social media, they sometimes post, in a nostalgic way, the sound of the bombing siren. Orkideh Behrouzan, a medical anthropologist, writes in her Prozak Diaries that “the self-identified ‘1980s generation’ in particular, repeatedly returns in its artistic and cultural expressions to the war’s sensory prompts in order to claim their cultural aesthetics, identity politics, and generational sensibilities.” Dashti, born the year the war started, is from Ahwaz, a southern city near the war zone. She remembers the sirens that warned of incoming enemy jets. “My brothers and I used to race to the roof of our house to collect the spent ammunition, which was still hot,” she says. “There was a competition with the kids in the neighborhood to see whose house got more.”

Her series Today’s Life and War (2008) stages the everyday life of a young Iranian couple in the middle of a battlefield, meshing the war front with the home front. She shot the series in Cinema City, an outdoor studio just outside Tehran, dedicated to the making of war films. After her photographs came out, the authorities in charge of the space, displeased by her version of the war, decided not to allow anyone else to use it for independent work. 

These photographers are claiming their share of the memory of war by relocating its trauma into their own experiences and working the narrative away from the official version. By placing the war in a domestic context that is modern and middle-class, they are basically saying, “We were all affected by this.” The man and woman in Dashti’s photographs differ visually from the stereotype of the typical war family promoted by the state: the lower economic strata of society depicted as the pious and the pure who responded to the call of the Imam of the Age, Iran’s messiah, to save the country and the faith. Dashti’s family comprises a modern, urban couple. The young woman is not wearing a chador. She has a mobile and a laptop, bringing the legacy of the war forward in time, commenting on its continuing and pervasive reach.

While projects like Dashti’s and Ghadirian’s were breaking taboos in the representation and memory of the war, Maryam Zandi began to sift through the negatives of the photos she had taken during the Ashura march and the days following it back in 1978, which she had moved from house to house for 36 years, for fear of their being confiscated or damaged. She first sought a permit to publish her photographs in 2008, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the censors insisted that 30 photographs be taken out of the collection. Zandi and her publisher, Mahmoud Bahmanpour of Nazar Publications, held back. When Hassan Rouhani became president in 2013, promising a more open cultural atmosphere, Zandi wrote to his office demanding to know why her book was deemed problematic (and also questioning why she had been vetoed to head the new photographic association she had helped found). It took the Rouhani government eight months to grant her the permit to go to print; there were no instructions to delete any of her photographs. In 2014, Nazar published Zandi’s monograph, Enghelab e 57 (The Revolution of ’79). 

The book uses facsimiles of old newspaper pages from crucial days of the Revolution both for its dust cover and to provide context within. Bold Persian typeface on the front page spells out a quote by Ayatollah Khomeini: “There is no dictatorship in Islamic governance”—a sentiment that can be read ironically or literally depending on how one views Iran’s trajectory over the past four decades.

The first run of 2,000 copies sold out and the book went to a second printing. Zandi ascribes its success to two factors: “It was published independently from the government and it showed the events without an agenda,” she says, adding an explanation for its appeal to different demographics. “For my own generation, it’s like revisiting their memories; for the younger generation, it was seeing things that they had not seen before.”

Bahmanpour elaborates: “The further we get from events, the more interesting they become for the reader. Qajar Iran [the 1785–1925 period of the Qajar monarchs’ rule] is like 1,001 Nights for Iranians now. The Revolution is similar because it’s a mysterious time for the youth, who are fascinated by the way people looked and dressed.” The population of Iran has more than doubled since the Revolution and the younger generation is curious about the Shah’s time, which they imagine as a paradise of social freedoms. The photographs they have seen typically portray the Revolution as conducted solely by the Islamists. In Zandi’s book, she and Bahmanpour gave a double-page to a photo of a young woman with a mass of fuzzy hair, punching her fist into the air.

To the extent that there have been some openings for multiplicity in remembering key events of the Revolution and the war, Bahmanpour credits a kind of ignorance. The regime’s attitude hasn’t really changed, he suggests, but the censors have. “They are young and they don’t know the visual codes of the time,” he says; they simply follow a given set of guidelines.

When, just last year, Nazar published The Revolutionaries, a book of photos by Kaveh Kazemi, another independent photographer who was inspired by the success of Zandi’s book, the censors objected to images of demonstrations against the hejab in 1978. They didn’t want pictures of war dead. “But then,” Bahmanpour remarks, “they didn’t notice that the MEK [arch-enemies of the regime] were shown in four different photos.” Kazemi’s most famous photograph, which shows a soldier sobbing next to the body of his dead brother, was widely circulated abroad during the war and was admired by the regime’s first prime minister, but censored by the second, who feared it would weaken war morale. It now occupies a double-page spread in The Revolutionaries.

The Sacred Defense and Revolution Photographers’ Association—which also has to submit its work to the censors—is capable of thwarting projects that don’t serve the valorous version of history that they devote themselves to. Bahmanpour recalls how the Association would not cooperate in publishing a book about the war with Ghadirian as editor, because she had not preceded the word “war” in her title and elsewhere in the book with the word “imposed.” Despite their semantic zeal, Bahmanpour sees some fundamental changes taking place in their attitudes: “The guys who photographed the war have lost their ideology and don’t want to be identified as revolutionary. They feel they were tricked, that they were not appreciated,” he says. Indeed, Fereydouni expresses some bitterness over that lack of appreciation. “From the leader to the ministers, they always say they owe everything to the war, to the martyrs and the POWs—this is the regime’s main slogan,” he says. “But factional politics takes over.”

In 2016, the Association took the big step of publishing a book by a foreign photographer, Michel Setboun, notwithstanding the highly critical remarks in the book he published in France decades earlier. The Association owns a copy of that book and the means to have translated it—one of their young researchers is the translator of Susan Sontag’s On Photography into Persian. Instead, they went through Setboun’s extensive archive to produce a book almost three times bigger than his original, with an elegiac Persian text. The result, Times of Revolution, is a generous, 330-page volume, which includes Setboun’s image of people standing on the unfinished building waiting for the big march to begin. Setboun visited Iran for the book launch in 2016 and to meet the Association’s photographers.

That same year, a game designer in Brooklyn, Navid Khonsari, was also using the French photographer’s work to create scenes of the Revolution for an interactive video game that takes the player through the Iranian uprising via the eyes of a fictional young photographer named Reza. Having worked on bestselling games like Grand Theft Auto, Khonsari, who moved to Canada with his family shortly after the Revolution, when he was ten, wanted to use the engrossing genre of the video game to engage players in documentary material. In the game he created, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, when Reza snaps a good shot, the screen shows one of 70 images by Setboun. For instance, standing on a rooftop, Reza is asked to take photos of the demonstrations in the streets below. Each time the shutter clicks, a photo by Setboun pops onto the screen. 

Khonsari’s choice of a photographer as the protagonist was not a whimsical one. The role of photographers as first-hand witnesses of events and of photographs as legitimate documents is crucial to the critical engagement he hopes to achieve for his players. “A photographer is one degree separated from the events taking place,” he said in a Skype interview. “It also gave us the chance to incorporate an in-reality aspect, so that if you take a photo as the main protagonist in the game, we can show the real one beside it.” From the outset, Khonsari intended to show an aspect of the Iranian Revolution outside the standard narrative: “That it was a people’s revolution, that it started off as peaceful, but fractured into the way that it did. Putting the player in the role of a photographer provided the narrative while the documentation aspect legitimized the authenticity of the story.” As Reza encounters people from different factions, he faces a series of choices—for instance, whether to accept from an Islamist friend a cassette tape of the Ayatollah’s rousing speeches—and the option the player selects sets the course of the action at each juncture, until Reza is imprisoned and interrogated and the decisions he makes could prove fatal. “My part is taking pictures, not choosing sides,” Reza tells an activist friend. 

Soon after the game’s release in 2016, Iran’s National Foundation for Computer Games banned it as ”anti-Iranian,” and warned Iranian families that “games like this can poison the minds of the youth about their country by means of false and distorted information, and also damage their spirits” according to the Tehran Times, Iran’s official English-language daily. For four decades, the state had propagated a singular narrative of the events that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Here was a game, with a wider reach than conventional media, especially among the younger generation, that dared tell the story of the Revolution from a different point of view. 

The contradictory uses of Setboun’s images—in the Association’s book and in Khonsari’s game—reveal a different kind of danger: that of the nature of photographs and their fluid fidelity to the truth. As Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, “The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.” What looks like the valorization of martyrdom in one decade can turn and become a testament to horror, stirring antiwar sentiments in place of military and national pride. Setboun’s photographs have ended up in the middle of the rope of memory, tugged from two sides that each wish to tell their own version of history. 

It would be an exaggeration to say that, today, history is up for grabs, but the wrangling over it is more visible than ever before. No one would have predicted ten years ago, for instance, that Fereydouni and his colleagues would consider displaying their photographs in a joint exhibition in one of Tehran’s swankiest new shopping malls or that they would have made a stir with an exhibition last year at Tehran’s Artists Forum called One Roll of War, which featured a spool of photographer Hamidreza Vali’s film that had remained undeveloped since the war. For the veterans of the Association, the exhibition presented a slice of heretofore unseen life during wartime, while young viewers saw a commentary implied by the evidence of decay and discoloration that age had inflicted on the negatives. No one could have guessed that the old photobooks from the war years would be sought after at shops like Dehkordi’s as commodity artifacts rather than as tributes to the Sacred Defense.

Even as anyone who wants to take on the photographer’s role in playing Khonsari’s 1979 Revolution: Black Friday inside Iran can manage to find a way around the ban, the regime continues to festoon the cities and towns of Iran every August on the anniversary of the liberation of Khorramshahr with posters and banners bearing a photograph by Mohammad Farnoud. This iconic war image, which has also been painted as a mural on the walls of Iranian cities, shows a group of young men, one with the barest trace of a mustache, running with their weapons held against their chests, their heads turned slightly to their right. They are wearing bright red bandanas on their foreheads with the words “No god but Allah” in Persian calligraphy. The annual proliferation of this image is accompanied by the slogan “What if we hadn’t resisted?”—a gesture meant to ensure that there is no question in the minds of today’s citizens that the war was necessary for the survival of the entire country, not just the regime.

As a new generation born after the war comes of age and will boldly take to the streets against the regime—thousands protested in January against high unemployment and inflation—the Iranian state works to shore up its power, in part by trying to mold its citizens’ memories of the Revolution and the war. According to political scientist Farideh Farhi, attenuating memories of the war pose a problem for the regime. “Fundamental fissures seem to rend Iranian society,” writes Farhi, “a society in which at least part of the population, voluntarily or involuntarily, went through a very intense experience of war. Yet it also contains a much larger segment of the population that, for good reason or bad, apparently wants to leave the war and the values propagated during the war period behind.” 

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In a scenic spot between downtown Tehran, fashionable during the Shah’s time, and the newly favored north of the city, where opulent tower blocks dot the slopes of the Alborz Mountains, sits a new museum dedicated to the memory of Iran’s Revolution and its eight-year war with Iraq: the Museum of Sacred Defense, which opened in 2012. It sprawls across 50 acres of prime real estate that includes its own hills and valley, neither visible from the nearest motorway nor easily accessible.

Unlike the old Museum of Martyrs downtown—a collection of dusty displays of personal artifacts belonging to the war dead—the new museum is equipped with the latest in digital technology, recreating history in a series of installations that rely heavily on photographs. Seven distinct halls are inspired by Attar’s “Conference of Birds,” the 12th-century poem about the seven stages of spiritual development called for in the quest for truth. Each hall is dedicated to a different stage of the Islamic Republic’s early history, from the success of the Revolution through the war years. In the first hall, giant photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini rotate in a slideshow projected on a huge slatted wall. On the opposite side of the room, small TV screens repeat, in an endless loop, the moment a tearful Shah left the country.

The museum’s extensive gardens and waterfall are used for special occasions marking various war-related or religious dates. Children and families can picnic among numerous tanks, two jet planes, and six rockets, not forgetting the blown-up remains of cars belonging to Iran’s assassinated nuclear scientists.

On a midweek day in January, the museum is empty of visitors. Six guides—the women in black chadors, the men smartly dressed in suits—sit behind a desk waiting for someone who might want to be shown around the giant memorial site. Men in overalls wander around the seven halls cleaning the installations. Asked about when the museum is at its busiest, one of the janitors says, “Groups come sometimes, a hundred people or so.” He pauses. “But honestly, ordinary people, they don’t want to be reminded of the war.”

Haleh Anvari is an artist and the founder of AKSbazi.com, a crowdsourcing site about Iran.

The post Framing Iran: The Making of Modern Photojournalism appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

In preparing for elections in June, those who now call themselves reformists and their mouthpieces are spinning their mythic narrative once again, perpetuating the idea that a real political opposition exists within the Islamic Republic and that fundamental reform is possible. And this time they are taking advantage of new social media like Clubhouse, where they frequently host rooms and insert themselves into conversations about the future of the country. 

Iran’s reformists continue to fail in their mission because they have always played by rules that were set by their adversaries and meant to neuter them—from the very beginning. By contrast, the hardliners win because they have taken a page out of the rulebook of Ayatollah Khomeini. 

Khomeini wanted to be the only one to set the rules, which he sought to define even before returning to Iran in 1979. Observers might recall that, during the Revolution, the Shah’s last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, and even some of the Ayatollah’s own political allies attempted unsuccessfully to get Khomeini to enter negotiations about reforms within the monarchy and a return to a legitimate constitutional system. But Khomeini was unwilling to engage.

For Khomeini, the merit of ideas was irrelevant. What mattered were the rules. His political aloofness was part of a modus operandi that aimed to create a framework that ultimately excluded anyone and anything that might undermine his authority.

Khomeini rose to power as the new Islamic Republic’s supreme leader and thus set the framework. His successors—today’s hardliners—carried this even further, by acting not only as the arbiters of which ideas and narratives could be discussed in the public sphere, but also as the ones empowered to adjust those rules. Instead of going through a fixed and transparent process for the changing of laws, however, the regime continues to rely on fluidly defined terms such as “expediency” and “red lines.” This approach maintains the status quo while projecting the illusion of change. Through these machinations, they’ve conditioned the populous to refrain from acting in ways that could disrupt the regime’s absolute hold on power. Maslahat-e nezam, a phrase coined by the Islamic Republic—it translates as all that is in the interest of the regime—is one such “red line,” acting as an invisible hand that keeps the reformists in check and undermines their position. Disagreeing with the regime is therefore akin to disrupting the essence of the divinely ordained Islamic state, a transgression in turn akin to blasphemy. And so the “red lines” keep changing in response to every move made by the reformists. 

It is for this reason that the reformists were doomed to fail from the start. They never seemed able to grasp the system’s inherent limitations on pushing for change or making a dent in the status quo. It did not matter that the reformists were better versed on issues that mattered, or that they presented their ideas articulately and with more empathy and relevance to the Iranian people. All that mattered was he who set the rules wins the game. And this is how the hardliners remain in power.

The fluidity with which the red lines are drawn is a survival tactic. Peaceful protests are allowed under the constitution, but often met with live rounds of ammunition as with the working-class uprising of November 2019. The frequent and seemingly inexplicable pivot by the regime to set hejab and modesty rules when it finds itself in the midst of a power crisis is another case in point. It is here, in this space of duplicity and confusion, that the ruling apparatus continues to win in the game of setting the narrative and redrawing the red lines as a distraction from the real issues at hand. 

Over time, some reformist “victories” have given Iranians an illusion of change. But inevitably, before long, old red lines are restored—revealing those “victories” to be mere vanities—and new red lines are introduced, changing the political and social terrain yet again. 

Under the rule of the ayatollahs, the use of terms such as mellat—the Persian word for “nation”—and “democracy” was deemed taboo and treacherous. These have been replaced by terms such as ommat (from the Arabic word ummah, defined in this context as the Muslim nation). Such was the regime’s attempt to dislodge Iran’s national identity from its history and redefine the Islamic Republic as part of the greater Muslim world. In the same spirit, the regime once condemned Cyrus the Great, the ultimate symbol of pre-Islamic Persian identity, as a wicked king deserving of complete erasure from Iran’s memory.

But as a whole generation of Iranians grew alienated from the Revolution, Ahmadinejad resurrected the Persian king, this time as a symbol of Iranian nationalism, literally adorning a model with its emblems and ideology. Employing an actor, Ahmadinejad resurrected King Cyrus and draped him with a keffiyeh, the ultimate pro-regime symbol. At another point in time, the regime lionized Hossein Ali Montazeri—a grand ayatollah who was once designated to be Khomeini’s successor—only to abruptly reverse course and condemn Montazeri as a traitor who defied the concept of “the guardianship of the Islamic jurist” (rule by the supreme leader), no matter that he was the one who wrote most widely on the subject. He was put under house arrest until his death.

The regime initially condemned the pursuit of nuclear energy as an example of the Shah’s waste and extravagance. Then, realizing it helped hardline negotiating, the regime began to champion nuclear enrichment as an inalienable right of the citizens of the Islamic Republic. The regime did so without bridging the cognitive dissonance between its opposing positions, a blatant hypocrisy they feel no obligation to explain. 

Reformist critics within the Islamic Republic seem to believe that they can genuinely reform this system if they continue to play by the rules and people show up to vote. That faith has been belied time and time again. And even when Iranians boycott the elections, they’re taking part in an act defined by the Islamic establishment. Would it have made any difference to Khomeini if Iranians were voting for members of the Shah’s parliament or defying the monarchical system by staying home? 

Journalists inside the country who have championed those who imagine themselves reformists may not be able to think or work outside this framework. But journalists in exile or hailing from abroad do not have to constrain themselves within this framework when they seek to illuminate Iranian politics. Yet they invariably do. Nothing will change until this thinking does, and until then the story will almost certainly remain the same.

The post The Self-Delusions of Iran’s Reformists and Why They Continue to Fail appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The post The Night It Rained appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

I excelled in the Fort Lee school, looked forward to classes, even inventing extra art projects to keep myself busy in the intervals between making shoebox fish tanks and papier mache sarcophagi. The other school I entered every day with trepidation, knowing that every ink stain I made during penmanship practice, every ball I didn’t catch in phys. ed. would have its own punitive consequences. 

In 2014, I sat in class at the Social Sciences Faculty in the University of Tehran suffering from the symptoms of a familiar anxiety. Sweaty palms, fluttering stomach, and shallow breathing are not conducive to learning. Instead of focusing on the contents of my mechanically scribbled notes, I was distracted by the elephants in the room, of which I saw two.

The first elephant was me. I was a foreign journalist working without official accreditation, masquerading as an Iranian Studies student while secretly sending dispatches to Tehran Bureau, which was based at that time in London. Logically, I had as much of a chance as getting my cover blown while in class as anywhere else in Iran. But listening to a professor describe the official rules of journalism, which I myself was consciously violating, felt like being a character in The Scarlet Letter. 

The second was the existence of the class itself. The journalism major had only recently become available to students again; authorities had been suspending courses on and off since 2009 as part of a systematic crackdown on culture and academia, and the Social Sciences Faculty was among its main targets. Compounded with the rising number of imprisoned journalists and the closure of foreign news bureaus, the odds seemed stacked against any kind of journalism in the Islamic Republic, let alone an independent and professional one. The fact that a major in journalism still interested enough students to fill up a 30-seat classroom was inconceivable. Instead of some kind of crisis powwow, here we were having a calm—even dull—discussion about how to improve the profession.

Adding to the surrealism was the mystery of the disappearing students: Of the three journalists I interviewed on the subject, none had ever met a journalism major graduate in an Iranian newsroom. The standard practice was to learn on the job, with little or no concept of how to structure a news story, let alone the ethics of the craft.

No one seemed more aware of this paradox than the London-educated professor, who voiced his exasperation with the state of the industry quite openly. 

“Your craft is to give a topic relevance by establishing the background,” he advised the students, who had been tasked with identifying errors in articles recently printed by state-run news wires and seeing what lessons could be learned from the mistakes. 

There were abundant examples:

“Don’t start with attributions,” and don’t write articles that inexplicably switch from one news topic to another in the middle of the text, he continued. 

“Using vey goft [a formal version of he said, she said] is not enough to establish connectivity between topics,” he said of another piece. 

Also, even if you do work for a state-run news outlet in an authoritarian country, don’t just blindly reprint everything a ministry sends you. “Mehr does not have any relation to the justice ministry,” the professor said, holding a printout of a particularly lengthy and unintelligible article from Mehr News Agency. “It should not have printed something from the ministry with no news value—it’s internal business.”

“The information in the headline does not appear in the article,” the professor said of a nonsensical story from Tasnim news agency. The headline advertised the latest crackdown on social media channels but failed to offer any such information in the body of the text. 

“Perhaps it’s because this article is from the countryside, and the author doesn’t understand what social media channels are,” opined one of the eight girls in the class. 

“It’s a possibility,” the professor agreed. “One would expect that those working for these institutions didn’t make mistakes, that they would be professionals. But we took examples from all main news outlets and found mistakes in all of them.”

“There are many causes,” he added, “like the lack of education and the idea that journalism is easy work—that everyone who writes in Farsi can do it. Seeing that amateurs are doing it perpetuates the problem—the editor in chief of Mehr is himself unprofessional.”

It was an interesting conundrum. How to educate a professional class of journalists when the media itself—and the hacks who ran it—were setting such a poor example? The Sisyphean task fully occupied our professor, who had even invented his own infographic to explain the problem.

On the white board, he drew several circles, each suspended from its own perforated line. The lines met at a single point called “journalism.” He called it the “Pendulum Theory.” 

In this horror scene, a swinging axe called Law oscillates endlessly between Freedom (to the left) and Repression (the right). In my notebook, I added a stick figure of the luckless journalist constantly trying to evade the blade, never quite reaching liberty and too often falling into the pit.

The professor traced the origin of this deadly machination to the years following the Revolution, when a brief postrevolutionary euphoria gave rise to a flurry of newspapers expressing various interpretations of the Islamic Republic’s new politics. Then came the inquisition of the Revolutionary Council, which fingered the author of any text it ruled to be “against Islamic principles.”

From there, the professor said, it became essential for a journalist to know “what to write and not to write, what to observe and not to observe, and other such developments.”

I should add that our lecturer imparted this last bit of information to a different audience. His overview of the Iranian media scene was part of my course at the Faculty of World Studies, where the professor taught the elective “Media of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Here, the entire class consisted of foreigners, which seemed to encourage the professor to speak more openly than at the social sciences faculty. Still, his lecture managed to bore my classmates: At one point the professor rattled off a whole list of accredited radio, print, and online media outlets, of which there were around 50. Even I struggled to stay alert for cryptic messaging, which he flung out like hot pieces of flatbread. 

We discussed gatekeeping and agenda-setting theories, the meat of every mass communications course, analyzing the process through which the media filters out information to decide what the news is, thus constructing a version of social reality. However, the professor added darkly, “beliefs are presented in a distorted and very selective manner.”

How the news agenda is set, he continued, depends on the structure of a particular society. “In the West, the media sets the agenda. It is very powerful and whatever issue it highlights affects government policy. In Iran, it’s usually the government that sets the agenda, but this cannot be taken for granted.”

Then it was on to framing and priming, the process through which the media construct a series of frames of social reality to prime the audience to accept a certain narrative. Here, he dropped a bombshell, describing a (purely theoretical) scenario in which the Iranian state TV network has to cover an election in which the defeated opposition candidate disputes the result. (Imagine!)

“You are a journalist at IRIB. The editor tells you to prepare the news. The journalist is influenced by the editorial policy, which is to promote [the views of the state]. So he must demonstrate that elections were free and fair. In the frame, he must show viewers high participation, or high voter turnout. When you repeat the frame, you have primed the issue,” he said. 

Walking through the deserted Amirabad campus after class that evening, I passed by the gates of Kooye Daneshgah, the dormitory complex where students had been killed during the protests of 1999 and brutalized in 2009. I wondered what the professor did to motivate himself to come here every day. Even if, by some miracle, he managed to elevate the level of Iranian journalism “from mission to profession,” as the textbook suggested, what was the point? At best, his students will become skilled propagandists. They will not be rewarded for original reporting—in fact, there is a good chance they will be punished. Moreover, the clear career path from J-school to internship and first reporting job is unheard of in Iran. Oddly, it is possible to earn a doctorate degree in the subject, giving rise to a scenario where a cohort of overeducated media theorists lecture to a vanishing crowd of students who never become professionals. 

I thought back to the anxiety I used to feel during my own early childhood education, and how it drove me to disengage from my classroom environment. There was a disconnect between the professor and his students, between those educated and those working in journalism, between the principles being taught and the reality of a repressive media environment, between the “frames” on TV and the truth. 

At the heart of this uniquely Iranian, Kafka-esque situation was fear. The biggest impediment to the professionalization of Iranian journalism is the structure of the society itself. If that isn’t reformed, journalists have little motivation to become better at their craft.

❧ 

“Still, Iran has a long way to go to a free as well as a responsible press.”—Homa Katouzian, introduction to Hossein Shahidi’s From Mission to Profession (2007)

The post Fear and Journalism in Amirabad appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

“FM Zarif: US economic terrorism, pressure failed to break Iranians’ ironclad resilience.”

That was the headline most often featured atop the website of Press TV, the Islamic Republic’s international broadcast service, in the day-and-a-half leading up to Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. Indeed, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, had made his comments—“[Iran is] standing up to [a] modern-day state terrorist who murdered the pioneers of our defense and scientific advancement”—in a video message intended to mark the holiday. Dedicated followers of the site might well have heard an echo. Eleven weeks earlier, Press TV had greeted the Western world’s New Year’s Eve with a banner headline highlighting comments made on camera by Iran’s president: “Rouhani: Iranians . . . will avenge assassination of Gen. Soleimani, his companions.”

On Nowruz itself, the Press TV celebration went into full swing with the headline “Iran begins ‘year of production, support and elimination of obstacles,’” quoting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s televised New Year’s address above a photograph from the event. On Nowruz 2020, by contrast, the top headline on Press TV had read, “Leader calls for ‘jump in production’ as Iran rings in new year.”

A day later this year, Press TV led with yet another speech: “Ayatollah Khamenei: US must lift all sanctions before Iran returns to JCPOA commitments.” While the supreme leader again “stressed that one of the most important steps to be taken for the promotion of domestic production was removal of the existing hurdles to production,” don’t overlook the What’s Different in This Picture? challenge: the heavy drapes behind the leader, blue on Nowruz, were now green; not only was there an alternate photograph of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, it had moved from the drapery down to the table at Khamenei’s side; and a smaller vase now held the bouquet of Mahdi-honoring narcissus there.

Whereas news involves the reporting of new and noteworthy information and propaganda involves communication meant to influence and persuade—a line habitually blurred by many self-identified news networks—Press TV seems most devoted to a third approach: boring its audience silly. This is Press Release TV.

If the service does have a clear communicative mission, it involves promoting stories in some way embarrassing to the United States and, especially, whoever occupies the Oval Office. President Biden’s recent struggles in mounting the stairs to Air Force One have come in for particular attention: “Videos of the fall have been widely shared on social media, with hilarious memes poking fun at the president.” Disappointingly, Press TV failed to share which memes it found “hilarious.”

Early in March, the website awkwardly made much of the following: “A new poll shows that over 40 percent of Americans are not willing to get vaccinated for the coronavirus vaccine.” The figure was misleading—a substantial share of that 40 percent had said only that vaccines should first go to those at greater risk—but there was a hesitancy widespread enough to be worthy of note. Over Nowruz weekend, Press TV brought a heavier hand to the topic with a featured story in the section of the website devoted to Iran’s “terrorist” adversary: “Fierce COVID shot resistance could derail mass vaccination in US.” Where there are multiple items of COVID-19 coverage on a daily basis from the United States—many of them copy-pasted from American sources—in recent weeks, the top 30 stories in Press TV’s Iran section, stretching over the better part of a week, have rarely included more than a single item on the pandemic.

Branding itself as “Iran’s first 24/7 international television news network that broadcasts in English,” Press TV has not had a traditional television presence in almost a decade, since it lost its UK broadcast license in January 2012 for violating multiple communications rules—including airing an interview with a journalist imprisoned in Iran that was given under duress. Never a significant on-air presence in North America, it lost its fringe satellite access to the US and Canadian markets in early 2013. It still, however, streams programs 24/7 on its website, accessible across most of the globe.

The shows range from BBC-style daily global news programs (always with a special emphasis on shaming the US and Great Britain) to more locally focused programs such as Iran Today and Africa Today to more overtly opinion-oriented series such as The Communiqué, in which host Richard Medhurst invites on a different guest each week to bewail Western imperialism at epic length, and The Debate. In “Racism in the US,” the Nowruz episode of this daily debate-free zone, a political organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace (“Hands Off North Korea!”) and a professor of “Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender” managed to come to the mutual conclusion that the “US capitalist settler colonialist system and imperialist government” bears primary responsibility for the recent attacks against Asian Americans.

And then there’s Press TV’s lone attempt at comic diversion, the painfully cringeworthy Cats and Dogs, which makes a quarter-hour feel like a life sentence. In this show, which streams new episodes most Thursdays, Lembit Öpik, former chief of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, savages Western leaders (and still, gruelingly, a certain orange-hued ex-leader) with incomprehensibly limp stabs at humor to canned laughs from an audience, however patently nonexistent, he is ever desperate to engage with (“Thank you, thank you, thank you very much”)—eternally forgiving of the fact that they’re always invisibly, uproariously guffawing at all the wrong moments.

Incredibly, his special Nowruz weekend episode, in which Öpik purported to “explore the strange world of sexual misdemeanors from the Royal Air Force to distant relatives of the royal family,” opened, uncommented, with Cats and Dogs’ customary, inescapably catchy theme music of “Rock and Roll, Part 2”—composed and recorded by the ’70s rock star born Paul Francis Gadd, currently serving a 16-year sentence for statutory rape, attempted rape, and multiple counts of sexual assault of girls as young as eight. Trust Press TV’s version of the news or not, but trust it to stick with Gary Glitter.

The post Press TV Rings in Nowruz, Groundhog Day–Style appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Forty-two years ago, when I was 11 years old, I bought my first book of photos from Payam bookstore near the entrance to Tehran University, a few months after the Revolution. The streets outside the university were lined with shops and stalls selling books, newspapers, and magazines, and full of energetic political debates among the passionate and hopeful supporters of different groups and political parties. The sounds of various revolutionary songs, Ali Shariati’s speeches, and the soundtrack of the Costa-Gavras films Z (1969) and État de siège (State of Siege, 1972) could be heard on every corner. The systematic and wide-scale attacks on dissident groups had yet to begin and the Bazargan government was still trying to reign in the post-Revolution chaos.

It was in such an atmosphere that the book Days of Blood, Days of Fire was published. I didn’t know the book’s editor, Bahman Jalali, but his name was etched in my memory that day. The book was not reprinted after 1979 as Iran’s new rulers viewed these photos as noncompliant with their official narrative of the Revolution’s history. After 1981, it was no longer possible to show the organizations and groups that had a hand in the victory of the Revolution and whose members were being executed en masse. A few years later, Jalali became my photography professor at university and I got to know him personally. When I was emigrating from Iran, I didn’t take the book with me, but throughout all these years, I always wanted to see the book one more time: perhaps to revive my childhood memories from the Revolution, perhaps because of its powerful photos, or perhaps, to some degree, in memory of Bahman Jalali.

I was recently able to find the book once again and purchase a copy of it that had been reprinted in Germany in its original size and format. The pictures that I was looking at with a new perspective years later appeared strange. The book is the same but the meaning is not. What were these photos telling me in those days? What are they telling me now? What are they not telling me? What was hidden from the audience then? What is hidden from the audience now, particularly those who know nothing but the official narrative of the Revolution?

Aside from the photos and a foreword written by Karim Emami, the book has no other text. The photos are accompanied by the revolutionary slogans people chanted during the era. Karim Emami admits that the book does not cover certain key moments of the Revolution. A few photos have been appended in order to add those moments he considers important to the book: Eid al-Fitr prayers 1979, the Black Friday massacre, and the Imperial Air Force technicians’ salute to Khomeini. But today, which one of those important moments represent the changes that occurred in the wake of the Revolution? Perhaps the meaning of this revolution should be sought in the things that were left unsaid: what was concealed, what was dismissed and overlooked, and what was too shameful to articulate. 

The footage that disappeared

Photos from the day Khomeini returned to the country (headlines everywhere read “Return of the Imam”) show the Ayatollah among a circle of like-minded clerics and a group of religious intellectuals and reformists. Secular forces such as the National Front were not permitted anywhere close to him. In the documentary For Freedom (Hossein Torabi, 1979), Karim Sanjabi, the National Front’s leader, was shown among the spectators and not among the welcoming party. Socialist and Marxist leftists and the religious elements sympathetic to the left were not even allowed inside Mehrabad Airport. Today, one can easily discern who was of the inner circle and who was not. All were expected to form a united front for the victory of the Revolution, which called on everyone to stand in solidarity until further notice. But even in those days it was obvious which one of these groups had no place in the small circle of insiders. Few survived, even among the small entourage around the leader of the Islamic Revolution. The rest had either been imprisoned, fled the country, been assassinated, or forgotten from the early days of the Revolution. Those who remained to feast at the banquet on the spoils of the Revolution were often the unknowns, individuals such as Mohsen Rafiqdust, Khomeini’s young, obscure chauffeur on the day of his arrival. They decided which direction to take the Revolution. 

In the photo of Khomeini deboarding the Air France plane, he appears surrounded by a group of his close associates: Morteza Motahari, who was assassinated a few months later; Ayatollah Lahouti, who was imprisoned three years later and who died in prison upon learning of his son’s execution; Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who was executed on charges of attempting a coup; Sadeq Tabatabaei, who became persona non grata; and Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran’s first president, who was forced to flee to Paris after less than two years in office. Over the past four decades, images of Khomeini disembarking have been retouched and edited in a Stalinesque manner to keep the ever-shrinking circle of regime insiders content.

In Revolution-era newspapers and Days of Blood, Days of Fire, you can find the names of various political groups, and images of Ali Shariati and Mohammad Mossadegh are everywhere. You can even see the emblems of the People’s Mojahedin Organization and the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas. Slogans and traces of the National Front, the Tudeh Party, and other political parties and groups are also visible here and there. In those days, particularly in the months leading up to the 1979 Revolution, everyone had accepted Khomeini’s leadership in order to overthrow the Shah. All of them were dropped from the official historical narrative of the Revolution. One can still find evidence of this systematic purge in newspapers and documentary films made immediately after the Revolution. In the film The Pulse of History (Asghar Fardoust, Davoud Kanaani, 1979), an Islamist activist reminds his followers that “our path and theirs is separate,” referring to the leftists. The Islamists can also be seen telling Marxists to refrain from using their own slogans. In For Freedom, a Marxist addresses the crowd bemoaning the shredding of folk hero Samad Behrangi’s photos. In another scene, an individual tries to convince a cleric that under revolutionary circumstances, everyone must unite, and “after this movement’s [victory], they can talk.” The cleric responds, “We have nothing to talk about.”

In the documentary The Footage That Disappeared (Hamid Jafari, 2010), the filmmaker searches through over 40 hours of lost raw footage, some of which was later edited to make The Pulse of History. Hours of footage about the release of 1,200 political prisoners on October 27, 1978 (a turning point in the Revolution) have disappeared. No footage of Ayatollah Taleqani, Safar Qahremani, and Gholamhossein Sa’edi shot by him and other filmmakers at Tehran University can be found anywhere. At two and a half hours long, The Pulse of History, made a few months after the Revolution, was whittled down from 40 hours of footage to create a specific narrative consistent with official portrayals of the Revolution at the time, though, once again, inconsistent with today’s official narrative of events. Events such as the arson at Shahr-e No (Tehran’s red-light district), where prostitutes were burned alive in their homes—among the forgotten parts of the Revolution—are depicted in The Pulse of History but absent from all other books and films. Why?

They did it

The 1979 Revolution manifested in mass protest and the burning down of banks, cafés, and cinemas. Why banks, cafés, and cinemas, you ask? There are those today who will not believe that the revolutionaries themselves started these fires. In the documentary 14 Aban, Day of Fire (Robert Safarian, 2008), the filmmaker sets out to find who set fire to banks and cinemas across Tehran on November 5, 1978. What I too remember is that the people themselves were setting fire to banks, cinemas, and cafés. There are those today who blame the Shah’s regime for these fires. Robert Safarian, who was present at the scene of a bank fire in 25 Shahrivar Square (7 Tir), recalls that the general perception on that day was that the protesters were responsible for the bank fires. But after seeing footage showing Capri Cinema (Bahman) burning while firefighters stood by, refusing to put out the flames, even he begins to doubt his own recollection and thinks perhaps the truth is different from that which he remembers.

On January 29, 1979, a group of protesters attacked Shokoufeh No nightclub, Shams beer brewery, liquor stores, cafés, and Tehran’s red-light district, Shahr-e No, setting them on fire. To show their support for protesters, firefighters announced that they would not put out any fire set by “the people who wish for it to continue to burn.” The homes of prostitutes burned to the ground and a number of them died in the fires. 

The next day, Ayatollah Taleqani condemned these actions and labeled them as a plot by “the regime’s filthy mercenaries.” Images of the burned bodies of women were never printed in any of the photo books about the Revolution. The fires, like the one at Abadan’s Cinema Rex, were attributed to the regime. “They did it” rolled off the tongue of anyone who wanted to put the blame for these atrocities on the Shah instead of the actual arsonists.

A few days later, revolutionaries brutally attacked another protest by supporters of Shahpour Bakhtiar. No images from those attacks were printed in any publication in Iran. In the documentary Abbas as Narrated by Abbas (Kami Pakdel, 2019), Abbas Attar, a celebrated Iranian photojournalist with Magnum Photos, says that, on that day, he was at the protest taking photos of revolutionaries attacking Bakhtiar supporters, but his Iranian friends and colleagues asked him to stop photographing and show his support for the Revolution. Censorship of the Revolution and the manipulation of its narrative began with the photographers who refused to snap the shots.

For me, the saddest photo in Days of Blood, Days of Fire is one by Rana Javadi of a group of women with clenched fists and no hejab. Among them is a woman whose silent rage has made her the focal point of the photo. I remember this photo from my youth. There was no shortage of women sans hejab who participated in the Revolution, and although their photos were later removed from the official narrative of the Revolution, this photo survived over decades. In the book, it appears alongside other photos of the Revolution, as if these clenched fists were raised in opposition to the Shah’s regime. As if these women without hejab were like the hejab-less, gun-toting, tank-mounting woman whose photo appeared on the front page of Kayhan to depict the victory of the Revolution. But the reality was something quite different: On March 8, 1979, less than a month after the victory of the Revolution, the women in Rana Javadi’s photo took to the streets to protest against the compulsory hejab and to demand their rights. These demonstrations received no support, even from the secular revolutionary organizations of the time. The photo has been taken entirely out of context, even in this book. It appears alongside photos of women clad in hejab demonstrating against the Shah. But perhaps this photo, more than any other one in the book, foretells of the devastation to come.

A bridge to the other side of “Bahman”

The victory of the 1979 Revolution, known as 22 Bahman, was no small-scale riot; it was a major revolution. It was an earthquake in both Iranian and world history. It was the end of an era, the end of the “short” 20th century.

Historians speak of “the long 19th century,” which started with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended with the opening shots of World War I in 1914. Perhaps one can say that the “short 20th century” began with World War I and ended with the Iranian Revolution, a revolution that resulted in a regime against human rights, against equal rights for women, anti-art, anti-diversity of thought among its people. The Iranian Revolution had a fundamental difference with other revolutions that have taken place in the past few centuries, from the French Revolution to the Cuban Revolution: The regime that emerged from the 1979 Revolution was the first revolutionary regime that shamelessly stood against modernity and the values of the Enlightenment. Michel Foucault, who spent time as a journalist in Iran during the Revolution, was one of the few thinkers who saw this fundamental difference in slogans and actions, despite misunderstanding them and naively placing hope in them. Others like Ahmad Shamlou, who at first viewed the Revolution as progressive and democratic, could see nothing but “a plagued haze” a few months later. This plagued haze spread to other countries in the region and swept through the world. January 1979 (the month of Bahman on the solar hijri calendar) was the beginning of a new era. Had Jalali envisioned the collapse of this avalanche? Perhaps. Maybe this photo which the book ends with is his implicit response to this question. 

“Choose your destination before reaching the bridge.”

The post Days of Smoke and Ash appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

On March 6, the hashtag #NoToTheIslamicRepublic and its Persian equivalent started to pop up on the web and within five days it was trending on Twitter and Instagram. By March 16, the hashtag had been used—in either English or Persian—over two million times.

As the campaign was taking off on social media, it became the subject of many news reports from outside the Islamic Republic, with outlets such as the BBC, DW News, and Radio Farda dedicating valuable digital real estate to the movement.

By contrast, the last time the phrase “No to the Islamic Republic” appeared in a publication sanctioned by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance was five years ago, when Abdollah Ganji, editor in chief of the IRGC-affiliated Javan newspaper, used it in an editorial that was carried by a number of other outlets. The editorial, of course, made only a fleeting reference to the phrase, painting it as a false conclusion drawn by “some” who “interpreted the whole [1997 presidential] election in Iran as a vote of no to the Islamic Republic.”

To put this in perspective, social scientists have found that trending topics in the United States typically become subjects of extensive news coverage in traditional media outlets. For example, on March 6, when #NoToTheIslamicRepublic first surfaced, the trending topic in the United States was #SuperStraight, a hashtag designed to mock the LGBTQ community. This topic would become the subject of more than 51,000 news articles. On March 11, conservative TV host Tucker Carlson was trending for remarks he made on Fox News about the US military, a topic that received widespread coverage in other media outlets. On March 16, #UnBanNairo—a movement in support of a gamer who was banned from the game-streaming service Twitch—was trending, with close to 4,500 news articles covering it.

It may not come as a surprise that negative sentiments about the Islamic regime of Iran are not expressed in Iranian media, which operate under the regime’s strict control. However, this issue goes beyond mere sentiments, political affiliations, and how an issue is framed. More often than not, the most important issues in the eyes of the Iranian public are not even mentioned in Iranian media, as opposed to other countries like the United States, where issues that appeal to the public receive media coverage even if they are covered from a variety of angles.

For example, the vast majority of people who participated in the #SuperStraight conversation on social media expressed their disapproval of recognition of alternative gender and sexual identities. At the same time, however, an even greater majority of the media coverage of the hashtag portrayed it as “transphobic,” “promoting hate,” and “anti-LGBTQ.”

So while the mainstream media’s stance on the issue is the polar opposite of those who started the movement, at the very least, both parties talk about the same issue. In other words, they both agree that the issue on people’s minds (i.e., gender identity) needs to be addressed.

This basic agreement on what issues to discuss, according to social scientists Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas and Donald Shaw of the University of North Carolina, is the cornerstone of a civic society. This agreement allows members of society and the ruling elite to identify the important issues of the day. American political scientist John W. Kingdon, of the University of Michigan, has dubbed this the “problem stream,” the first stage in progress toward policymaking and political change.

In most countries with relative press freedom, the media identify these issues or problems for the public. Social scientists call this phenomenon the media’s “agenda-setting” function. The idea behind agenda setting is that when people read or hear about certain issues over and over again, those issues become salient to them—even though they may not be immediately relevant to their personal experiences.

For over 50 years, social scientists have been able to find support for the agenda-setting function of the media through hundreds of studies. These studies typically involve a systematic content analysis of news media and public opinion surveys. Researchers compare the issues mentioned in the news with the issues that the masses have identified as important to find trends and correlations.

However, with the proliferation of social media and the relatively low cost of disseminating information, people have realized that they can be the publishers of information as well as its consumers. Thus, they write about the issues they care about most on social media rather than the issues that the media talk about most.

This phenomenon initially led many social scientists to predict the demise of the media’s ability to set the agenda for the public. However, study after study (conducted in the United States, the UK, Spain, and Germany) has found that the media retain agenda-setting power, albeit slightly weakened.

Certain countries, including Iran, defy this norm. A study published in Agendamelding: News, Social Media, Audiences, and Civic Community (2019) found that the correlation between the issues discussed in the Iranian media and the issues that the Iranian people cited as important was a meager .28—where zero would mean no correlation at all and 1.00 would mean complete correlation (the same work, by comparison, reported a correlation of .95 in the United States.)

The study, however, found a strong correlation of .83 between Iranian public opinion and Persian Twitter and strong correlations of .72 and .87 between Iranian public opinion and two Persian-language media outlets outside Iran, the independent Meli Mazhabi and Radio Farda, a division of the US’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It is worth reiterating that the study did not look at how issues were framed but whether the issues were mentioned at all.

In a different study, the authors of Agendamelding compared the agenda-setting power of the media in different countries with the Freedom in the World (FIW) index, published annually by Freedom House, and found that press freedom tends to go hand in hand with the ability of the media to set the agenda for the public.

The takeaway from these studies and the anecdotal evidence presented earlier is that the restrictions that the Islamic Republic has imposed on the press in Iran are not only creating a deep disconnect between the people and the Iranian media, but also stifling the media’s once-powerful agenda-setting ability. If the media do not address the issues that people find important, people will in turn not regard the issues advanced in the media as important.

This is why the sort of flood of headlines and other targeted media messaging that would once have mobilized the entire nation no longer have any perceivable effect on the Iranian public.

The post When Hashtags Set the Agenda appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

In the ideology of the Islamists, one term in the plural is ashab rasaneh. Introduced a decade after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, it replaced the original phrase dastandarkaran rasaneh (members of the press), transforming the role and function of the journalist. 

Ashab is an Arabic word that means friends, affiliates, or companions. It gained an additional, religious meaning when the contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad started calling four of his closest affiliates the Sahaba, known in English as the Companions of the Prophet.

It is this religious meaning of ashab (synonymous with Sahaba) that carries the ideological weight in the phrase ashab rasaneh, as if to say that members of the media have an inherent sacredness to them, a religious halo perhaps not unlike that of a holy warrior.

This new usage suggests that journalists are friendly companions; that they have a sacred duty to advance the positions of the regime. This depiction is problematic in many ways, not least of which because it implies that the raison d’être of journalists in the IR is akin to that of the Prophet’s Companions.

Another problematic term is siah namayee, meaning to reveal the darker side of events in the country. If you’re one of the “friends” or “companions” of the regime, you have a duty to emphasize the positive. When authorities forbid siah namayee, they are essentially rendering the whole field of investigative journalism a crime against the holy government. As a journalist, you have a duty—or resalat, in religious terminology as used in Iran—to remain uncritical.

Indeed, another problematic term introduced by the IR is resalat khabari, which in Arabic literally means the “newsy Message”—or some news-related Message—but in a sacred sense (hence the capitalized M).

In Shia theology, however, resalat refers to religious duty. Resalat khabari implies that the journalist has a religious duty to deliver a certain kind of message, one in line with the Islamic Republic. 

The use of the term has become so ubiquitous that it is often used nonsensically, like in the actual headline that ran on March 7, 2021: “American reporters face the challenge of stating the truth in their Resalat (khabari).”

Another case in point in IR Newspeak is hormat qalam, which means the sanctity of the pen (or penmanship).

“Hormat Qalam must be preserved […] as God has given the pen sanctity,” says the Saheb News website, followed by a supporting quote from the Quran.

Obviously these are all problematic terms, as they saddle ashab (journalists) with the ideological mandate to spread the resalat (dutiful message) of the regime, because that is the journalists’ job in the same way that spreading the Message was the job of the Companions of the Prophet. Also, all things penned by a qalam (pen) have hormat (are sacred), a reference presumably to all things disseminated by the IR and its propaganda machine. It would logically follow that a journalist who fails to spread the sacred Message of the regime is committing an act just short of blasphemy.

The Tehran Bureau Style Guide recommends refraining from the use of any of the terms above.

But what do you call a journalist? “Journalist” has crossover usage in Persian. There is also rooznameh-negar, or khabar-negar, which is more authentic to the language. Rooznameh-negar implies someone who writes for a newspaper, and khabar-negar, a reporter. But what do you think about a new, more encompassing word to capture all that is expected of journalists these days? Resaneh-gar, someone who works in media? Any takers?

The post Dutiful Scribes and Sacred Messages appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

“It was June 1943, the middle of World War II. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher, and his assistant, James Reston (who went on to a distinguished career of his own), flew into Tehran from Habbaniyah, Iraq, aboard a Boeing 307 Stratoliner that had been pressed into service by the Army Transport Command,” writes David W. Dunlap in the Times.

Reston and Sulzberger are pictured here during their tour of Europe and the Middle East in mid-1943, which led to the Tehran-based Persian Gulf Service Command Headquarters agreeing to distribute the Times’ new Overseas Weekly to Allied troops.

Here’s the full story.

The post New York Times Launch in Tehran appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Have you ever been a practicing journalist? What got you interested in studying journalism?

Well, it went back to many years ago, when I met a guy who was working for Mr. Khatami’s press team. He had a weblog and we talked about lots of things. After university entrance exam, I decided to study archeology, but he encouraged me to chose journalism. Because of my ability to write different kind of reports at that moment, I believed he was right and I did what he said (which I wish I didn’t, though!) 

Where did you study, and how would you evaluate your faculty? Was it difficult to get accepted? 

I studied communication sciences at Tehran University. As it maybe sounds, it was difficult to get accepted. However, after a while I realized that difficulty was nonsense. In fact, what was taught to us was sort of a sociology thesis about media and there weren’t any exciting practical lessons. The knowledge of professors was also dramatically out of date! 

What was your dissertation topic?

I had no dissertation topic.

Were you taught the practical basics of journalism? Is there anything you wish you were taught but hadn’t been?

After finishing university, I attended some classes about learning to do some interviews and write reports at Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA). At the end of the course, I got a certificate with a good grade. So they called and asked if I interested to work as an intern there, which I accepted. 

The point is, during the course, I found out there was no need to go to university. I didn’t learn anything there and my knowledge of work only came from the classes I passed and talking to the seniors. 

What are your impressions about the differences between the way journalism is taught in the West and in Iran?

I watched some videos on YouTube about teaching and learning various kind of journalism. I also did some online courses at some sites, like Coursera, and I could say that trying to draw a comparison between journalism in Iran and the West would be like making the comparison between guys who swim to save their lives and Olympic swimmers. 

Of course, I understand the difference in quality of work has come from the freedom of speech and freedom of media. 

In the West, journalists don’t have to face the threat from government. Their only concern would be the fight with hard subjects. In Iran, not only the subjects but also the Big Brother is the main issue for journalists and reporters, who get tracked down even on social media!

Did you ever learn about mass communication theory? If so, what stood out?

I’ve read something about that a couple of years ago but, honestly, I couldn’t remember what was the main point. 

What are your thoughts about the quality of journalism in Iran? Is it improving, and if so how? Do you believe it has a role to play beyond promoting the views of the regime?

Having freedom of speech, having a free and a spunky media/press is the fundamental thing that a journalist needs.

In fact, freedom of speech and media is like the sky. No matter if you have wings or not, without a clear, clean blue sky you have nothing to do.

Of course, there are so many social medias these days for people who have something to say. But giving information through these networks and trying to make changes [that way] is like lighting a candle in front of a storm. It may give a quick light, but it disappears as soon as it exists.

I believe the quality of journalism is getting worse. I’m talking about the quality of real journalism, that part which is dedicated to transparency, not that kind which works for the regime. The regime knows how to manipulate people in this area to get what they want. And for those who don’t want to be a puppet, things often have a bad ending.

The post “I Didn’t Learn Anything There” appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

In the old days, cooking oil was an expensive and sought-after commodity. Thus many Persian phrases referring to “grease” or “oil” imply money or luxury. 

Sibilesho charb kon, for example, “grease his mustache,” means give the guy a bribe. A slick oily beard after a meal implied the consumption of a rich oily meal, the province of a certain elite. 

Noonish to roghaneh: “his bread is dipped in oil”—he’s raking in the dough.

And so, Yek ashi barat mipazam keh yek vajab roghan dashteh basheh. Literally, “I’ll serve you up a pot of ash with a nice fat coating of oil.”

A form of doubletalk and sarcasm, this is actually a threat. Not only are you not going to get that delicious ash—a popular Persian stew made with greens, beans, and noodles—you’re going to get poisoned. Revenge is in store. 

In this cartoon, published by Ahangar newspaper on August 7, 1979 (16 Morad 1358), Nasser Minachi, the first head of Ershad, the precursor to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture, is depicted as a chef with that pot of promised ash. In shorthand here, “Press Stew.” Under the ministry’s jurisdiction, media suppression and censorship run rampant to this day. 

Minachi believed Islam should be modernized. Like his friend the late Ali Shariati, an ideologue who fired up the Islamic left in the 1970s, he was considered a reformist. Like other early reformists of the Islamic Republic, he became a victim of the political regime he helped establish. 

After the takeover of the US Embassy in November 1979, Minachi was accused of being an American agent and temporarily arrested. Upon his release, he was booted from his job and prohibited from leaving the country. 

Even after his death, he was not spared. In his will, he had asked to be interred at the Hosseinieh Ershad, an iconic progressive religious organization that was his legacy. 

He was buried in Qom instead. 

The post “Asheh Matbooat”: Press Stew appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

These stressors, all of them man-made, are localized along its coastline: desalination, pollution, overfishing, and poorly planned, excessive exploitation of the Gulf’s natural resources. If these stressors are not curtailed or made sustainable in the near future, the younger generation that lives around the Gulf will witness it lose much of the marine life to which they have been accustomed. And while the majority of the familiar sea life deteriorates, some organisms may well benefit from the new conditions. (In other parts of the world, jellyfish and mollusks have been especially able to adapt to new conditions considered hostile to other marine life.)

Iran, in particular, stands much to lose from a deterioration in regional marine ecology because it has more than 5 million people living in the coastal provinces, with around 3 million of them residing within 100 km of the shore. Iranian fishermen—both commercial and small operators—catch between 40 to 60 percent of the Gulf’s total annual catch, as explained by Abdulrahman Ben Hasan, a PhD candidate at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, during an online interview with Tehran Bureau. He and his team are studying the impact of environmental factors on the 500,000 pounds of fish caught annually in the Gulf, including Iran’s share, research that is “very challenging” because little data is available to understand the context of marine life there.

“In some circumstances, fisheries and environmental managers are flying blind because the few or [entire] lack of monitoring programs complicates the scientific guide for the policies,” he said, echoing other environmentalists who find it difficult to ascertain the best way to manage environmental stressors in the Gulf.

Many of these stressors are not unique to the Gulf. Increased levels of CO₂—due to consumption of fossil fuels—is a global phenomenon. It gives rise to water acidification, which in turn translates into less oxygen available for marine life.

Rising temperature is also a global phenomenon, including in bodies of water. Marine life around the globe has been observed to migrate north in search of cooler waters. But shifting northward is a limited option for marine life in the Gulf because the body of water is fully enclosed in the north. In addition to direct impacts on marine organisms through shifts in distribution, rising temperatures will also have impacts on food chain dynamics and habitat dependencies.

“Actual species declines may be greater than those projected . . . on the basis of climate-driven changes in temperature and salinity alone. Indeed, other habitat characteristics related to coral reefs for instance will also be important to consider,” says Dr. Colette Wabnitz, a marine scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University in California. 

Making matters worse is the fact that many of the Gulf’s reefs have already disappeared as a result of increasing temperatures and other stressors, with declines in associated species richness. “While some work has indicated that corals are likely to persist, future reefs are likely to look very different to what they do today,” Dr. Wabnitz explained.

Overfishing in the Gulf is especially problematic, and some of the blame falls on Chinese fishing trawlers, which drag huge fishing nets through the water and sometimes scrape the seabed. This method is outlawed in some parts of the world because it entraps random marine life along with the targeted fish, leading to a poorly understood domino effect of marine life (over)exploitation. Chinese trawlers and other commercial fishing boats also use stun grenades as a fishing tool, which causes harm to everything in the vicinity of their explosions. Yet fishing boats use these methods with the full awareness of local authorities along the Gulf, which issue fishing licenses. Ben Hasan says that current licensing regulations do little to restrain overfishing.

“It is just a bureaucratic thing to get a license. Once you have your fishing license, you do whatever you want. It’s just to control who has access to the fishing. After that, it’s free for all,” he says. 

Managing overfishing in the Gulf is also tricky because many of the fishermen in Iran are small operators who rely entirely on their fishing nets for sustenance. “You can’t go to the fishermen in places where fishing is the only source of income and food and say: ‘Well, you can only catch this many fish.’ It’s their entire livelihood,” said Ben Hasan, adding that through his research he aims to find optimum management options. “In cases where countries are harvesting shared or transboundary fish stocks, as is the case between many of the Gulf countries, cooperation in harvesting these stocks does matter and might help in reducing overfishing, which in turn could translate into higher catches and profits compared with the status quo,” he said. 

He adds that Iranian fishing fleets have been observed moving further offshore, beyond their traditional waters, to catch fish in the international zone, which might indicate that overfishing along Iran’s coastline is already leading to a decline in fish populations. But as long as little research is available on the Gulf, this phenomenon presents yet another poorly understood variable contributing to the transformation of the Gulf’s marine life now and in the coming years.

Desalination plants, which take in sea water then remove salts and minerals to make fresh water before dumping a salty brine back into the sea, create yet another stressor in the Gulf. The Gulf is home to 50 percent of the world’s desalination capacity. At a daily capacity of 11 million cubic meters per day, according to Ben Hasan, these plants provide enough fresh water for local populations with a surplus to export. The Gulf’s large scale desalination plants—which not only make the water saltier but also warmer, with additional concerns regarding heavy metals and declines in oxygen—present a threat to existing species diversity and richness, creating a pressing need for research to better understand impacts at scale.

Adding to the problem is the fact that both Turkey and Iran are building a series of dams along rivers, including Turkey’s sections of the Tigris and Euphrates, that have long been integral to the health of the Gulf. These rivers would normally dump fresh water back into the Gulf, but the dams limit this discharge, which further increases the salinity of the Gulf’s water.

“I’m hoping that some species will be able to adapt, but many may not be able to,” says Dr. Wabnitz. “Many are likely to experience severe declines, with some going locally extinct.” Already there is one fish—hilsa shad, a fresh/saltwater fish found in northern Gulf waters that is popular with consumers—whose Gulf population is threatened, though this is mostly due to overfishing and poor management, with climate change being an additional threat. 

Large megafauna like sharks and stingrays, which are essential to maintaining a balanced ecosystem in the bodies of water they inhabit, are especially vulnerable to the environmental factors that are stressing the Gulf. A decline in their population has adverse and unpredictable ramifications for all the other species that have evolved alongside them.

“We need to worry about important human pressures such as overfishing and habitat degradation, and we need to worry about climate change and its impact,” Dr. Wabnitz said, adding that the time to act is now. “It’s already being felt in the region and will only be getting worse. Reducing other stressors and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions are both really important to the Gulf’s future.”

The post Hot Waters: How the Persian Gulf Can Better Prepare for Climate Change appeared first on Tehran Bureau.