The Persians Are Blogging
We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs is a new book from Soft Skull Press.
Any blogger worth his or her salt is interested in understanding the possibilities of this medium. It has been a thrill for me to discover that Iranian bloggers–64,000 of them–are trying to produce a virtual political community.
Here’s an excerpt from the note on this book at the Soft Skull Press website:
In September 2001, a young Iranian journalist named Hossein Derakhshan, created one of the very first weblogs in his native language of Farsi. In response to a request from a reader, he created a simple how-to-blog guide in Farsi. With the modest aim of giving other Iranians a voice, he wound up unleashing a torrent of opinion, the likes of which had never before been seen in the Islamic world.
There are now 64,000 blogs in Farsi, and Nasrin Alavi has been painstakingly reviewing them all. In so doing she has created a remarkable document of the efflorescence of dissent in Iran, a book that not only functions as an archive of what Iranians think of their country, their religion, their culture and the world around them, but also as an alternative recent history of Iran.
Theirs is not the Iran of bearded ayatollahs and thuggish militias, but a country that has educated itself to the point where it finds the Islamist fundamentalists antiquated and laughable, where adult literacy (and computer literacy) is higher than in many European states, and where 70% of the population is under 30 and keen to usher in a new Iran. As one blogger (safsari.persianblog.com/) wrote:
“There are those such as Abtahi [Iranian Parliamentary ex-Vice President Mohammad-Ali Abtahi] who have called our virtual community too political and have put that we should use weblogs for their intended use… that is to say, for clichéd daily diaries… So what if we use our blogs in ways not intended for or defined during the distant conception of this media…At a time when our society is deprived of its rightful free means of communication, and our newspapers are being closed down one by one - with writers and journalist in the corners of our jails… the only realm that can safeguard and shoulder the responsibility of free speech is the weblogs…”
Readers interested in dissent and blogging in Iran should also read Laura Secor’s excellent report in the New Yorker (November 21, 2005).
