When Shadi Ghadirian was 21, she got a student job printing old photographs at the small photography museum here. She was so drawn by the 19th-century pictures of women with thick black eyebrows wearing head scarves and short skirts over baggy pants that two years later, in 2000, she began incorporating the imagery into her own photography.
The Iranian authorities use interrogation techniques such as intimidation, threats and blindfolding, said the husband of a detained American academic, and he is very worried that his wife could be subjected to these tactics. Shaul Bakhash, the husband of Haleh Esfandiari, who was charged with spying by Iranian authorities, said he has not spoken to his wife since her detention and is concerned about her mental and physical condition.
She has been allowed to make phone calls to her mother in Tehran a few times a week, said her husband. He said that nothing of substance is discussed on the calls, and that despite the brevity of the calls, her mother looks forward to them every day. “Her mother in Tehran is ecstatic,” said Bakhash. “She hangs on them so much.” The colleagues of Esfandiari pleaded today for her release. “Haleh is innocent. She should be set free,” said Lee Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center where Esfandiari works. Esfandiari is one of four Americans currently detained in Iran. The others are Parnaz Azima, a Radio Farda journalist, Kian Tajbakhsh, a scholar with the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, and Ali Shakeri, confirmed by the State Department for the first time today as being detained by Iranian authorities. Deputy State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the string of detentions are part of a “disturbing pattern.” Esfandiari’s troubles began as she drove to the airport in Tehran to catch a flight back to her home in Washington, D.C., after visiting her ailing mother. According to her family, she was robbed at knifepoint by masked men who took her bags and passport. When she went to get a new passport, she was pulled aside at the passport office and subjected to lengthy interrogations by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. Those interrogations continued for several weeks. A Feb. 20 letter by Wilson Center Director Lee Hamilton to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad requesting Esfandiari’s release was not answered.
Source: ABC News
Radio Fardas reports independent academic and human rights groups today are demanding the immediate release of two Iranian-American scholars jailed in Tehran on charges of spying. The U.S.-based International Society for Iranian Studies has urged Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to release jailed scholars Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh. It also expresses concerns about possible torture of the scholars by their Iranian jailers to force them to make confessions.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Human Rights, Reporters Without Borders, and Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi also are calling on Tehran to release the scholars immediately. Those groups also are urging Tehran to lift travel bans on two journalists with dual-citizenship — Parnaz Azima, a U.S.-Iranian correspondent for U.S.-government funded Radio Farda, and Mehrnoush Solouki, a French-Iranian journalism student. Ebadi, whose work for democracy and women and children’s rights made her the first-ever Iranian recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, accused Iran’s judiciary of “denying dual-nationals their basic rights” and disregarding “Iran’s laws as well as international norms.” Ebadi and her Defenders of Human Rights Center are working on behalf of two of the defendants. The groups also are seeking information about Ali Shakeri, an Iranian-American peace activist who went missing during a visit to Iran. The groups say Shakeri is thought to have been jailed by Iranian authorities. All of the groups accuse Tehran of trying to spread fear among journalists, writers, scholars, and activists.
The U.S. State Department has confirmed that an U.S.-Iranian citizen missing in Iran for more than two weeks has been detained by Iranian authorities. State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said Washington is seeking consular access for Ali Shakeri — a peace activist who was supposed to have left Iran to fly to Europe on May 13.
Shakeri is the third Iranian-American detained in Iran in recent weeks. The other two are Haleh Esfandiari, the head of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Institute, and Kian Tajbakhsh, a consultant with the Open Society Institute. Both have been charged with endangering Iranian national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners. Authorities have meanwhile prevented Prague-based Radio Farda journalist Parnaz Azima from leaving the country, and announced a charge of acting against Iranian national security against her. They are also blocking the departure of French-Iranian journalism student Mehrnoush Solouki.
Source: Associated Press
The Bush administration has dismantled a special committee that was established last year to coordinate aggressive actions against Iran and Syria, State Department officials said this week. The interagency group, known as the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group, met weekly throughout much of 2006 to coordinate actions such as curtailing Iran’s access to credit and banking institutions, organizing the sale of military equipment to Iran’s neighbors, and supporting democratic forces that oppose the two regimes.
State Department and White House officials said the dissolution of the group was simply a bureaucratic reorganization, but many analysts saw it as evidence of a softening in the US strategy toward the two countries. It comes as the Bush administration has embarked on a significant new effort to hold high-level meetings with Iran and Syria. The group had become the focus for administra tion critics who feared that it was plotting covert actions that could escalate into a military conflict with Iran or Syria. The air of secrecy surrounding the group when it was established in March 2006, coupled with the fact that it was modeled after a similar special committee on Iraq, contributed to those suspicions. A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, said the group was shut down because of a widespread public perception that it was designed to enact regime change. State Department officials have said that the focus of the group, known as ISOG, was persuading the two regimes to change their behavior, not toppling them. R. Nicholas Burns , the State Department’s Under Secretary for Political Affairs, revealed in a written statement to a senator this week that the group was disbanded in March 2007 in “favor of a more standard process” of coordinating between the White House, the State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence agencies. Burns’ statement came in a written response to questions submitted by Senator Robert P. Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat. Shortly before ISOG was shut down, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a major initiative to engage Iran and Syria in a regional effort to stabilize Iraq, reversing long standing US policy against high-level contact with the countries. For years, the Bush administration has shunned meetings with Syria and Iran because of their alleged support for militants in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, as well as concerns over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But earlier this month, Rice met with Syria’s foreign minister in Egypt, the first such high-level meeting between the two countries since 2004. On Monday, US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker is scheduled to meet his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad. That talk will be among the highest-level meetings between the United States and Iran since diplomatic ties were cut off following the 1979 Iranian revolution, during which Americans were held hostage for 444 days. Kenneth Katzman , a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress, said he did not think it was a coincidence that ISOG was disbanded at the same time the State Department began its diplomatic outreach. “I think the rationale for that group was promoting regime change and [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice is going in a much different direction from that,” said Katzman. “The regime change school within the administration has really gotten quite a bit weaker.” Trita Parsi , an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University who also heads the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based nonprofit education organization, said he also sees the dismantlement of ISOG as evidence of a change in Washington’s stance toward Iran and Syria. But he said that it is too early to tell how significantly US policy has shifted. “At this stage, these are just initial steps towards diplomacy,” Parsi said. “I think we have entered a stage in which the people who were favoring regime change are not strong enough to conduct policy but they are still strong enough to undermine policy. It is too early to count them out entirely.” Despite the group’s dismantlement and the new diplomacy, aggressive actions against Iran and Syria are widely expected to continue. ABC news reported this week that President Bush has given the CIA permission to try to destabilize Iran’s government with a “coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation, and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions,” according to the network’s website. According to ABC, the covert action was championed by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams , who co chaired ISOG. Rice and her most senior deputies appear to be charting a middle course between those in the administration who argue for tougher measures to threaten Iran and Syria and those who argue for negotiations. Burns, who oversees the State Department’s Iran policies, wrote in the May/June issue of the Boston Review that both threats and rewards are needed. He heralded tough actions, including what he called a “whisper campaign” that has caused a string of banks and countries to cut off financial dealings with Iran. Burns also championed recent US military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf as putting increased pressure on Iran. Another major war-games exercise by the US Navy began Thursday . Burns said it was important to show Iranians that the Persian Gulf, crucial for shipping oil to the world, was “not an Iranian lake.” But in the same article, Burns also urged Americans to prepare for the eventual resumption of diplomatic relations with Iran, which he described as inevitable. In a statement rarely made by US diplomats, Burns wrote that “there is going to come a point — we hope in our lifetimes — when we are talking to Iran again.” By Farah Stockman, The Boston Globe
David Ignatius of the Washington Post reports as U.S. and Iranian diplomats prepare for a crucial meeting in Baghdad tomorrow, what’s on Tehran’s mind? The normal reportorial techniques aren’t much help, since the Iranians aren’t talking publicly. But we can get a sense of what they’re thinking by using the columnist’s ancient art of mind reading. Tehran fears the same thing it has since 1979: an American plot to undermine the Islamic revolution. This suspicion of foreign conspiracies animates every Iranian decision. The Americans say they support Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, but Tehran doesn’t fully believe it.
Why would America create a friendly Shiite government in Iraq and thus give Iran more power in the region? Tehran asks: What is Bush’s real game? America’s friends the Saudis favor a coup in Baghdad by Ayad Allawi, the former Iraqi interim prime minister who was trained by the master of all secret conspiracies, the British spy service MI-6. The American conspirator in chief, Vice President Cheney, went to Riyadh this month and told the Saudis to support Iran’s ally, Maliki. The Iranians are perplexed. If the Bush administration really does support Maliki, the Iranians want to hear it from Ambassador Ryan Crocker tomorrow in Baghdad. In Tehran’s mind, there looms the larger American conspiracy of regime change. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disavowed this goal in a recent interview with the Financial Times, but she didn’t halt spending from the $75 million fund created last year to broadcast pro-democracy messages to Iran and help Iranian nongovernmental organizations. Tehran believes this money is really aimed at encouraging a “soft revolution” in Iran, on the model of the recent color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. That’s why the Iranians arrested Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian American who works for the Woodrow Wilson Center. They know she’s no spy — Iran’s own counterintelligence service concluded that she had no espionage role. But the country’s leaders want to send a message that they will imprison even a harmless grandmother to intimidate activists. The mullahs may be opening a dialogue with Washington, but they don’t want ordinary Iranians to think that they, too, can consort with the Great Satan. Iran hates negotiations. That’s another truth that mind readers can discern. Tehran was so uncertain about who should meet with Crocker that its ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, had to return home for consultations. The Iranians don’t like having to take positions before there is a consensus within the ruling elite, and on the question of dealing with America, a battle still rages. Pragmatists in Tehran quote former secretary of state Henry Kissinger about shared U.S. and Iranian national interests. But hard-liners associated with the Revolutionary Guard insist that any dialogue with America is a potential trap. For Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the overriding task is to preserve the legitimacy of the revolution — not an easy task in a country where the clerical rulers are unpopular. Khamenei wants a U.S.-Iranian dialogue about Iraq that generates enough domestic support so he can sign his name to it. In that sense, he is a follower more than a leader. Khamenei fears American attempts to play factional politics — to play off pragmatists against hard-liners — which will make his job as keeper of consensus more difficult. The Tehran rumor mill has it that Khamenei is very ill. That’s another reason not to expect any bold breakthroughs from the Baghdad meeting. It’s a moment for small steps, not giant leaps. For now, both countries would rather avoid the big, intractable issue of Iran’s nuclear program. Iranian national pride is as fragile as the regime’s sense of legitimacy. For that reason Iranians will bristle if the United States uses the Baghdad meeting to lecture them, dictate terms or make accusations. When Crocker asks Iran to stop sending deadly projectile IEDs to Iraq, the Iranians will deny doing so in the first place — and then, if they choose, halt future shipments. This is a dialogue founded on mutual mistrust. That isn’t necessarily fatal — detente between America and the Soviet Union was also accompanied by deep suspicion. Iranian pragmatists would like to explore a wider agenda with a high-level American emissary — someone such as former secretary of state James A. Baker — but keep it secret, please. Tehran doesn’t want to risk embarrassment until it has a clearer sense of America’s intentions. And what statement would Iran like to hear tomorrow from Crocker, and perhaps later from a more senior emissary? Something like this: “The United States is ready to deal with Iran in mutual respect, about issues of mutual concern.” That sentence could begin a diplomatic dance that, at once, intrigues and frightens Iran.
Asharq Al-Awsat has learned the decision to assign the head of the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations (UN), Dr. Mohammad Javad Zarif, as the head of the Iranian delegation to Iraq was cancelled in the 11th hour before yesterday’s meeting with the American delegation headed by US Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker in Baghdad. This decision was the outcome of the direct intervention of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in addition to the Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s blessing.
Dr. Mohammad Javad will be returning permanently to Iran at the beginning of July of this year. It had been Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the most influential man in Iran, Dr. Ali Larijani’s, suggestion to appoint Dr. Zarif as head of the delegation. Dr. Larijani had recently tendered his resignation, which was rejected by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as exclusively reported by Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper last Monday 21st May. The secretary of Supreme National Security Council had suggested Zarif on condition that the delegation includes his brother, Dr. Mohammad Javad Larijani, who is known for his enthusiasm to resume relations between Iran and the US. Mohammad Javad Larijani is one of the most distinguished experts in the field of physics in Iran. He had previously assumed the post of deputy foreign minister for several years during Imam Khomeini’s era. Mohammad Javad Larijani was relieved of his duties after repeatedly calling for establishing relations with the US. Unlike his younger brother, Ali Larijani, Mohammad Javad holds a doctorate degree in physics from the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is fluent in the English language, and is furthermore known to admire American society and culture. According to Asharq Al-Awsat sources in the Iranian capital, the subject of the presidency of the Iranian delegation to Baghdad is one that has occupied the Iranian leadership for several days. The leadership of the Iranian |Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is entitled with Iraqi affairs, had expressed concern that sending Zarif and Larijani to Baghdad would pose a threat to their interest and offer indirect support to the reformist and liberalist parties calling for a reconciliation with the United States. Zarif is known for his liberalist orientations and for his close ties with the media and academic circles and US research centers specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. The leadership of IRGC was able to convince President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Mohammad Javad Zarif and Mohammad Javad Larijani are not suitable to represent the ‘Iranian revolution’ before the representatives of ‘Great Satan’, moreover adding that they were ill-suited to bear such a serious responsibility. This information was affirmed by the Deputy Commander of the IRGC and supervisor of its intelligence authority, Brigadier General Morteza Rezaie, in a statement addressed to Ahmadinejad. A source close to the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani told Asharq Al-Awsat that after meeting with Ahmadinejad, the Supreme Guide expressed his objection to the dispatch of Zarif and Larijani as part of the delegation. The source pointed out that Zarif himself had not been eager to chair the delegation and that he had informed the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki of that. This is based on his belief that the talks would revolve around security and intelligence issues, which Zarif maintained he was not entitled with and furthermore suggested that a more suitable candidate would be someone working with intelligence or with the IRGC. Iranian Ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, is a senior officer in the IRGC Al Quds force and was appointed Consul in the Afghan province of Herat after the fall of the Taliban regime. He was summoned to Tehran at the request of the Afghan government by virtue of “his activities that were contrary to diplomatic work”, after which he was sent to Iraq as an adviser to the Iranian charge d’affaires, Mohammad Irani, but soon replaced Irani and was thus promoted to the rank of ambassador in accordance with a direct order from the Iranian Supreme Guide and amidst the surprise of Foreign Ministry officials. Asharq Al-Awsat has discovered that Kazemi-Qomi had been among the advisers to the military security committee, which is affiliated to the leadership of the Revolutionary Guard and which has been entitled with Iraqi affairs since 2004. Kazemi-Qomi has maintained close relationships with most of the Shiaa leaders in Iraq ¬– particularly militia leaders. Supreme Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, according to an Iranian source that closely observes the affairs of the supreme authority, had shunned Kazemi-Qomi since his arrival to Baghdad for a number of reasons, including the Iranian embassy’s attempts, during al Sistanti’s term, to weaken the status of the supreme authority through supporting people such as Muqtada al Sadr. Tehran has dispatched three officers from the IRGC and the Al Quds force intelligence who are involved in Iranian affairs, as well as a diplomat who is a specialist in Iraqi affairs, to Baghdad to accompany Ambassador Kazemi-Qomi in his meeting with Ambassador Ryan Crocker and those accompanying him, according to a source from Asharq Al-Awsat. The Iranian delegation will present a paper containing preliminary claims that Tehran believes need to be achieved as a serious first step towards a comprehensive settlement of the problems that have existed between the two countries since the past 28 years. The demands include: - Putting an end to all activities that aim at destabilizing the regime in Tehran, including the propaganda against the Iranian regime broadcast by the ‘Voice of America’ satellite channel, which has a large audience in Iran. - The expulsion of elements of Mujahedin el-Khalq (MEK) from Iraq as a goodwill gesture, especially since the US considers MEK and the affiliated resistance council as terrorist organizations. This is despite the fact that American forces allowed approximately 3,000 members of the MEK to remain in Iraq after they were disarmed at Camp Ashraf in the al Khales area (60 kilometers north of Baghdad) and remain under the tight grip of a Bulgarian battalion. Tehran believes that Washington might use these elements, as it did in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance forces, to stir up unrest in Iran and in preparation for its potentially possible military attack. - The release of the five detained officers of Al-Quds Corps who were arrested over four months ago in the area of Arbil in northern Iraq. Releasing dozens of Iraqis of Iranian origin who were detained by US forces in Iraq on various charges, including mediating in terrorist activities and supporting terrorists. - The cancellation of arbitrary measures against Iranian clerics coming to Iraq to study in the hawzas of Najaf and Karbala, and to allow Iranians to visit holy shrines regularly without subjecting them to interrogation or provocative procedures. Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper was informed that Iraqi Vice President, Adel Abdul Mahdi, has encouraged Iranian officials to show more flexibility than previously shown during talks with the American ambassador. This is in order to support the Iraqi government in overcoming ‘the Iranian complex’, which is a major obstacle confronting the process of strengthening the authority of the Iraqi government, in addition to the restriction of the American role in Iraq.
Arab officials and commentators appeared content that Washington and Tehran had finally started talking, but expressed concern Tuesday that the budding dialogue could cut them out of the loop over the future of Iraq, one of the region’s most important countries. Many of the Iraq Sunni Muslim-dominated neighbors fret that the U.S.-Iran dialogue would further boost Iran’s influence over Iraq’s majority Shiites.
“Iraq should not be stripped out of its Arab identity, especially as Iraq is one of the outstanding members and founder of the Arab League,” Ahmed ben Heli, the Arab League’s undersecretary general told reporters in Cairo Tuesday. The League’s chief, Amr Moussa said the group had always “called for U.S.-Iranian dialogue” and called the Baghdad talks a “reassuring and a positive step toward diplomatic dialogue instead of the military confrontations.” But the United States and Iran are “not the only sides … concerned with the situation in Iraq,” Moussa added. “Developments in Iraq should not be conducted away from the Arabs’ interests. As neighboring countries, we have interests because Iraq is part of the Arab League.” Suspicion over American and Iranian intentions in Iraq was running high in Arab capitals, a day after U.S. and Iranian ambassadors discussed the seemingly unstoppable sectarian violence that has engulfed Iraq four years after the U.S.-led invasion. The four-hour meeting in Baghdad on Monday broke a 27-year diplomatic freeze. The session, according to both sides, did not veer into other difficult issues that encumber the U.S.-Iranian relationship — primarily Iran’s nuclear program and the more than a quarter-century history of diplomatic estrangement. The Americans said there was broad policy agreement but that Iran must stop arming and financing militants who are attacking U.S. and Iraqi forces. Abdulaziz Sager, the director of Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said Iran was deftly exploiting Iraq’s chaos by using its talks with the Americans for its own ends, which differ with those of Iraq’s neighbors. “We don’t want Iraq to become an Iranian satellite,” Sager said. Gulf states fear being dominated by a resurgent Iran — and one which may be armed with nuclear weapons in a few years. Sager said there were concerns because Monday’s talks had skirted the issue of Iran’s disputed nuclear program. One Gulf government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, said his country — just across the Persian Gulf from Iran — was busy calculating how its security situation could change by a nuclear-armed Iran that stands to be allied with Iraq. The Associated Press
Azadeh Moaveni reports for the New York Times. When I moved to Iran in 2000 to work as a journalist, I aspired to belong to a literary circle not unlike that of the engaged women of Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” who found relief from their authoritarian society in the imaginative world of novels. That bookstores did not exist as such — there were only bookstore/stationery stores, or bookstore/toy stores — was the first sign my plan might not work. I initially mistook Tehran’s most popular bookstore, with its windows full of weathered copper pots and other bric-a-brac, for an antique shop.
Inside, the floor space dedicated to books was roughly a quarter of that taken up by kilims, cactuses and Lego sets. “I’m embarrassed to call myself a bookseller,” one store owner told me recently, gazing at the wall of Hello Kitty accessories that dominated his shop. In the hour we spent talking, customers came in to buy watch batteries, a condolence card, wrapping paper and a compass. Not a single person bought a book. When I failed to persuade any of the women I knew to form a book club (they found the suggestion precious and downright impractical, given Tehran traffic), I began to wonder why books figured so little in the lives of my otherwise intellectually curious friends. But during the long afternoons I spent exploring the cramped storefront shops attached to the publishing houses on Karim Khan-e Zand Street, I grew to understand their reluctance. By and large, the books Iranians seemed to be reading did not lend themselves to discussion, except with a therapist. Self-help books and their eclectic offshoots, on topics like Indian spirituality and feng shui, enjoy the most prominent position on bookstore front tables. The emergence of the genre, which did not exist before the 1979 Islamic revolution, may suggest a culture trying to cope with the erosion of traditional gender roles, or with rising rates of divorce and premarital sex. But Iranian intellectuals are quick to blame “cultural repression and spiritual crisis,” as one prominent magazine editor said to me, or as a friend who owns a bookstore put it, Iranians who have “lost their minds.” The success of translated titles like “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” has given rise to some homegrown authors’ specializing in more culturally specific advice. The title of one current best seller, Mahmoud Namany’s “Please Do Not Be a Sheep,” is borrowed from Ali Shariati, the Islamist sociologist who helped inspire the revolution. With chapter titles like “Grief Therapy” and “How to Choose Friends,” it tailors its vision of self-fulfillment to a society where you are expected to commemorate even the anniversary of the death of your paternal great-aunt. “Do you want to be an exalted human, a cud-regurgitating animal, filth or an angel?” Namany asks in one chapter. When Iranians aren’t reading about depression or the harmonious arrangement of furniture, they’re drawn to soap-opera-ish novels about family life and chaste, unrequited love, bearing titles like “The Solitude of Lonely Nights.” After the revolution, which created a caste of literate women with no more social clubs or cultural centers to frequent, the market for women’s popular fiction swelled. Demand is highest for Persian translations of Danielle Steel (with intimate scenes either blotted out or obliterated by euphemism) and her Iranian equivalents, Fahimeh Rahimi and M. Moaddabpour, neither of whom has ever been seen on television (used in Iran mainly to promote state ideology, soap and rice). The most popular novel of the last two decades, Fattaneh Haj Seyyed Javadi’s “Listless Morning,” about an idle aristocratic family under the 19th-century Qajar monarchy, has sold an unheard-of 185,000 copies since 1998 and spawned dozens of imitations. When I arrived seven years ago, writers and publishers were making the same predictions about the impending death of reading heard perennially in the United States. In a nation of 70 million with a nearly 80 percent literacy rate and a centuries-old literary tradition, they argued, book sales — 40,000 copies for a typical commercial best seller and 2,000 to 5,000 for novels and literary nonfiction — were dismal. According to Mohammad-Reza Neymatpour of the Nashr-e Nay publishing house, sales have been declining steadily since 1979. Though books are inexpensive by any standard — generally costing no more than the price of a couple of sandwiches — little in public life encourages reading. There are few public libraries, no reading contests in schools and scarce promotion of any book apart from the book. (Billboards inform Iranians that if they can memorize the Koran in its entirety, they will be awarded a formal university degree.) Even the government is growing concerned. In advance of the Tehran Book Fair, held earlier this month, the state newspaper, Iran, published a scolding article under the headline “Let Us Learn How to Read.” In April, an announcer on state radio lamented that the average Iranian spends only 16 seconds a day reading. From 1999 to 2002, during the hopeful presidency of the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami (a former head of Iran’s national library), Iran seemed to be undergoing a literary revival. The publishing houses with in-store shops invested in attractive décor, better lighting and cafes. I would meet friends for coffee, browse magazines and take home a few books, which suddenly had elegant ornamental covers — the complete Barnes & Noble experience. But much like the Khatami era itself, Tehran’s literary spring was fleeting. Independent journalists published a handful of daring books, most importantly Akbar Ganji’s “Dark House of Ghosts,” which implicated senior officials in the killings of intellectuals in the late 1990s. But as the hard-line establishment cracked down, several journalist-authors went to prison, and many in-store cafes were closed on various pretexts. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance was chastised for relaxing its standards and resumed vetting books with the same humorless strictness. The ministry checks manuscripts mainly for erotic and religious transgression. Today, if a novel has made it past the censors, most Iranians assume that it has been tampered with and that they are better off searching for the Shah-era edition or the bootleg film version. Even in fiction, all relationships must conform to Islamic law. In the most recent vetted edition of “Madame Bovary,” for example, Emma’s adultery is omitted. Characters in Western novels who drink Champagne or whiskey find themselves uniformly sipping doogh, an Iranian yogurt soda that has never made anyone tipsy. Occasionally, a work of homegrown fiction manages to be both absorbing and benign by the standards of Islamic decency. Saideh Ghods’s best-selling novel “Kimia Khatoun,” which revisits the life of Shams-e Tabrizi, the Sufi mystic who inspired the poetry of Rumi, from the perspective of Tabrizi’s discontented wife, is a case in point. Published in 2004, it stirred huge controversy for its powerful feminist narrative and bold suggestion that the women behind Persia’s great literary men might have preferred to be elsewhere. Still, for every successful novel, there are 10 that never make it past the censor or off the author’s desk. In some cases, the authorities embargo published books after they have already approved them. As a result, publishers are reluctant to commission new works and often sit on manuscripts for years. Some have turned away from contemporary literature altogether. The Western fascination with Rumi, for example, has heightened the already enthusiastic interest in Iran, and publishers are putting out new criticism and fresh translations. “The Persian classics create fewer problems,” Mohammad-Reza Zolfaghari, an editor at the Chaveh publishing house, said. For some, literary journalism offers something of a way out. Though they practice self-censorship, the dozens of small magazines that thrive in Iran find themselves less constricted. With circulations of 2,000 to 5,000, they offer a mélange of criticism, essays and sketches by accomplished, polyglot writers who in a different Iran would be writing books. “Since people don’t trust books anymore, it is the journals that are keeping literary culture alive,” Reza Seyyed Hosseini, Iran’s pre-eminent translator of French literature, said. They also expose Iranians to international authors. At a former military barracks bequeathed by Khatami to “art,” the journal Bukhara hosts a popular evening literary series dedicated to writers like Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk — the first time in recent history that literary events have figured importantly in Tehran’s cultural calendar. Still, Iranians face the sometimes difficult task of tracking down those authors’ work. Often the search leads to the book stalls around Tehran University, which do a brisk black-market trade. Like booksellers everywhere, the proprietors are brimming with recommendations. When I bought a Virginia Woolf novel not long ago, one confided, “If you give me a week, I can get you Joyce Carol Oates.”
Associated Press is reporting U.S. academic Haleh Esfandiari and two other Iranian-Americans have been charged with endangering national security and espionage, Iran’s judiciary spokesman said Tuesday. “Esfandiari has been formally charged with endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners. … The complainant is the Intelligence Ministry,” judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi told reporters.
“She has been informed of the charges against her,” he said in response to a reporter’s question. Jamshidi did not say when the specific allegations had been read to Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. She has been held at Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison since early May. Jamshidi said the same charges also had been lodged against Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant who also has worked for the World Bank, and journalist Parnaz Azima. No trial date has been announced and Jamshidi said the investigation against the three is continuing. Azima, who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda, was detained but released and barred from leaving the country. It was the first time the government has confirmed the arrest of Tajbakhsh, who was believed to have been taken into custody around May 11, according to George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Esfandiari’s husband, Shaul Bakhash, said from his home in Potomac, Md., that the charges “are totally without foundation, whether it is espionage or propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Bakhash said Esfandiari is being represented by the law firm of 2003 Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, but that the Iranian government has refused access to Esfandiari in Evin Prison. Esfandiari last called her mother in Tehran on Sunday night, but the call was “extremely short” and yielded no new information about her fate, he said. Laura Silber, a spokeswoman for Soros’ Open Society Institute in New York said the organization was “dismayed at the charges” against Tajbakhsh, describing him as an “internationally respected scholar.” “The charges are completely without merit,” Silber told The Associated Press by telephone. “We are very concerned for Dr. Tajbakhsh’s safety and urge the Iranian authorities to release him immediately.” In Washington, the State Department said it had no information about any formal charges being lodged, and it repeated calls for them to be released. “These are individuals that have family ties to Iran, have done independent research and other kinds of civil society activities there for many years,” deputy spokesman Tom Casey said. “They certainly pose no threat or challenge to the regime and we continue to believe they should be released as soon as possible.” Iran’s Intelligence Ministry has accused Esfandiari and her organization of trying to set up networks of Iranians with the ultimate goal of creating a “soft revolution” in Iran, along the lines of the revolts that ended Communist rule in Eastern Europe. The ministry has alleged that the Open Society Institute, which seeks to promote democracy, was part of the conspiracy. The Wilson Center and the Open Society Institute deny the allegations. Under Iranian law, the distinction between someone being accused and charged is less clear than in the United States and many Western countries, especially in matters of national security. Security courts have wide latitude, with the option of dropping the proceedings at any time or even holding trials in secret. However, Jamshidi’s statement that specific allegations had been read to Esfandiari and the others indicates the cases have been raised to a new level under the Iranian legal system. Bakhash said the formal charges are “very worrisome.” “I think it certainly ratchets up the case against her several notches in a rather menacing way,” he said. The 67-year-old Esfandiari has for years brought prominent Iranians to Washington to talk about the political situation in Iran, some of whom have been subsequently detained and questioned back home. Her defenders say some of those she brought to the U.S. were supporters of the Iranian government who sought to explain Tehran’s stance to Americans. Esfandiari had been trapped in Iran since December, when three masked men with knives stole her luggage and passport as she headed to the airport to leave the country, the Wilson Center said. In the weeks before her arrest, she was called in for questioning daily on her activities, it said. Iran has stepped up accusations that the United States is trying to use internal critics to destabilize the government. Tensions have mounted between the two countries over Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. allegations that the Iranians have been supporting armed groups in Iraq. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government has also increased restrictions on local non-governmental organizations, particularly women’s rights groups and other critics.
