We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs
Being is this is a blog, and being as we are publishing a book about/by Iranian bloggers, it does behoove me to alert you all to the great coverage this book has been getting in the UK (where it has already been published, by a wonderful new independent called Portobello Books).
First off Boyd Tonkin writing for The Independent has the nicest things of all to say about it:
This is not the first example of a book made out of blogs; the Iraq war spawned a couple. It does, I think, count as the finest so far: an eye-opening collage of extracts from the (roughly) 64,000 Farsi-language bloggers now at work in Iran, threaded by Alavi's illuminating analysis. The title aims to tease, and to provoke. This online Iran - young, liberal, freedom-seeking and rights-hungry - sounds a world away from the electorate which, this spring, gave a presidential mandate to the Islamist hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But the blog selection does make room for many political dissidents and reforming clerics, as well as for a host of fun-starved youngsters to whom figures such as Marilyn Manson, Harry Potter and David Beckham matter more than any mullah. Though even the mullahs have moved - the clergyman Hussein Khomeini, to take one stunning example, has stated that his grandfather simply did not have the authority to slap a fatwa on Salman Rushdie.Alavi's theme-by-theme compilation, with the background filled in by her expert commentary, adds up to a vibrant portrait of a dynamic but thwarted nation - two thirds of Iranians are under 30. Bloggers may not yet rank as typical citizens, in Iran or anywhere else. Nonetheless, their energy, mischief and sheer courage - with jail a real risk - allow us to "eavesdrop on the clandestine conversations of a closed society".
The form of We Are Iran counts for as much as its content. Weaving the web material into a seamless narrative, with photos and cartoons scattered throughout, Alavi deserves to attract an audience far wider than the usual specialist readership for works on Middle Eastern affairs. Many literary folk have been quick to complain that online ventures steal from the culture of print. Yet the traffic, as this book proves and others surely will, can profitably run both ways.
The primus inter pares of Iranian bloggers, incidentally, is Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder. He's the guy that turned on Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's Middle East correspondent onto We Are Iran; Dickey wrote a great preview piece on the book earlier this summer, with the wonderful title Writing Lolita in Tehran.
A curious query from Iran: “Has everyone noticed the spooky absence of graffiti in our public toilets since the arrival of Weblogs?” I confess, this little detail of modern life in Tehran—which tells you so much about young people desperately in need of self-expression—might have slipped right by me if I hadn’t been sent a new book called “We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs.” Written by Nasrin Alavi (a pseudonym), and due for international publication this fall, it’s a survey of the personal diaries that Iranians post online. Five years ago, there were none. Now there are many tens of thousands. And you won’t get a better glimpse of the obsessions and frustrations that exist behind the imposed cliché of the black chador; ideas and passions that thrive despite the rule of what Alavi calls “mutant Islamists.”Some of the bloggers’ language is very tough: “I s--- on the whole of Hezbollah.” Some is deeply evocative: “Have you ever been forced into exile? Has it ever happened that you just can’t get the pattern of those tiles in your Mother’s kitchen out of your head (for three nights in a row), but you just cannot remember the color? Has it ever come about that you call your Mother up from far away and ask her to describe the color of those tiles—at which you both uncontrollably sob?” Many Iranian women write with brilliant bitterness from their anonymity, and about it. “In the obituary columns instead of my picture, they place a picture of a rose,” writes one. “[Because] the image of a woman can ensnare a man.”
As mentioned in a previous post, Nasrin Alavi will guestblog here around the end of November, and we'd love to have her do what Kevin Smokler calls a Virtual Book Tour, so if any bloggers out there are up for hosting Nasrin arounfd the end of November, please do give me a holler.
(Update: Nasrin reacts to the vile comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on OpenDemocracy.net. "The speech of Iran’s president calling for Israel’s destruction is a sign of domestic weakness not international strength," she says.)