Credit: Internet and Democracy Blog, Harvard

Following our reports HERE about the plight of SOAS (ex-)student Hossein Derakshan the plot around his imprisonment now thickens even more.  Now Newsweek is accusing him being a spy behind the current Iran trials aimed at arresting many of the opposition figures.  I quote:

A central figure in what is supposed to be a vast international conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian regime has been officially invisible until now. The information he provided has been key to the confabulations presented in the Stalinesque show-trials in Tehran. An American scholar, a British embassy employee, a prominent economist, and leading members of former Iranian governments have been given long jail sentences. A young French researcher now languishes under house arrest in her country’s Tehran embassy, and Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari passed four grueling months, mostly in solitary confinement, before finally he was released. All because of their alleged roles in the surreal narrative presented by the regime. Yet the key witness is described by the lead prosecutor only as “this arrested spy, whose name we do not mention out of security considerations.”

Credibility problems are the more likely reason. In truth, we know who this guy is, and he’s not the kind of character that even the hallucinatory conspiracy theorists of Tehran should want to build a case around. The regime’s description of the so-called spy’s travels, contacts, and opinions make it unmistakably clear that he’s the mercurial, maddening Hossein Derakhshan, a.k.a. Hoder, a.k.a. The Blogfather. He is the man who started the Persian-language explosion on the Web in the earlier part of this decade that led directly to the blogging, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube phenomenon that helped bring huge protests into Iran’s streets last June and get the protesters’ message to the outside world. Yet without Derakhshan—or at least without what he’s alleged to have said and what he previously posted on the Web—the Iranian regime, even by its own lights, would not have much of a story to tell (full article HERE).

So given the amount of mis/dis-information going around today with Iran and this, I am somehow slowly reminded of Agent Mulder / Scully and the X-Files (if not the X-factor): “The Truth is Out There.”   Or perhaps a quote by Baudrillard would describe this better:”the discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. …But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.”

For seven years, I used to read Editor: Myself, while sipping on my morning coffee. Hossein, had chosen this name for his blog to reflect his protest to the censorship he had known in Iran. Once landed in Canada, he had started his blog in Persian and English, opening the way for an impressive wave of socio-political movements in Iranian recent history. Iran is one of the rare countries where blogging is the most influential way of communicating among its youth. Through blogs, otherwise imprisoned minds are set free and ideas flow with no constraints.

Hossein understood the power of blogging very soon. He used all sorts of media forms such as recorded interviews, photo streams, and films to communicate with his audience. Although the layout of his weblog resembled that of a newspaper, his writing style was far different from it. He chose to adopt spoken Persian for his posts, breaking the barrier between the writer and the reader. His simple language combined with his provocative remarks made his blog one of the most read Persian blogs of our times.

In the heydays of his weblog, Hossein covered all sorts of subjects from politics to social event, to music and even his daily life. We followed his “metamorphosis” in his political views, enjoyed his taste in music, admired his boldness in tackling taboos, traveled with him to Israel, and why not we were entertained with his various adventures.

For Iranian bloggers, his weblog was a hub and he himself was a reference. At the right side of his blog, Hossein had made a list of most of the blogs held by Iranians, sorted by language, to facilitate access to them. Whenever he would find a blog that he liked, he would do the promotion. Many of today’s famous Iranian blogs got their debut in Editor Myself.

I met Hossein after many years, when our paths crossed in Paris. At that time he had already lost his spotlight. His political views had taken a different orientation than that of the Iranian “intellectuals” and he had become the ugly duckling of the Persian blogsphere. He was not happy about the situation but his beliefs were stronger than the desire to be popular. I admired him for his honesty, his transparency, and his ability to question the mainstream opinion. Even if I was not always in agreement with his analysis of the political situation in Iran, it was stimulating to read his posts and ponder about his point of view.

These days, Iran is traversing a hard period in time. Many things have changed inside the country since Hossein has been imprisoned. Many innocent people have lost their lives and many more imprisoned. I always wonder, what would Hossein write if he were free. Indeed, we are missing him in our virtual as well as real world.

Karineh is a researcher working in Paris since 2006. She was born and raised in Iran, and completed her studies in the United States. Reading weblogs has been one of her favorite activities over the years. In 2007 she started her own blog called “Between the lines” (http://clarinetteblog.net/), where she sporadically posts her writings.

PREVIOUS STORIES:

http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/mind-medium-message-part-ii/
http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/mind-medium-message/

Matti asked me to write something personal about Hossein for Project Carousel. After the first few articles, I realize that what I have to say is from a different perspective and not the objective political angle that most people are taking.

One of the first times I noticed Hossein was during our weekly seminars put on by the Media and Film studies department.  I don’t remember the details of the presentation, but I do remember a smarmy smooth talking woman presenting ways in which to frame the Israel/Palestinian conflict on news programs.  Her presentation made my stomach turn and encapsulated everything I find immoral about the mainstream media industry.  Again, my memory is fuzzy on the details, but I remember that when the floor was opened for questions, and Hossein posed his, it made the woman so angry that she demanded he leave the room and refused to continue the Q & A.

Hossein is a mind to be reckoned with: this wasn’t the last time he would make a visiting scholar feel years of study and careful construction of worldviews shattered by a simple question.  At first I found his style a little jarring: how impolite to rip the rug out from under this settled media practitioner.  But the more time I spent in conversation and in classes with him, the more I realized that there was absolutely nothing vindictive in his motives, on the contrary he always comes from a place of innocent curiosity. He spends his life transgressing boundaries and breaking taboos purely for the pleasure of learning.

At this point you know that he set in motion Iran’s blogging revolution, that is an activist, journalist and a son and a brother. He is also a good friend, and interested listener, has a soft-spot for dark, thick hot chocolate, is fascinated by French New Wave cinema, and loves Iran with all of his heart.  The last day that I saw Hossein was a gorgeous sunny day in London.   As we shared a lunch in Russel Square, he waxed poetic about Tehran being a beautiful city and how happy he was to be going home.  Hossein knew better than anyone that he had made a lot of enemies over the years.  He knew that going home to Tehran meant risking his freedom, but Hossein is as dedicated to his country as he is to his cause.  I hope he knows how much I admire the choices he’s made, and how much I miss him.

Barrie McClune got an Masters in critical Media and Cultural Studies from SOAS in 2008. She now works for California Newsreel, a non-profit educational film distributor in San Francisco.

PREVIOUS STORIES:

http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/mind-medium-message/
http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/hossein-and-his-readership/

In an ongoing effort to reinvent itself, Project: Carousel is launching a new monthly feature to acquaint its readers with interesting and important people/organizations working in the field of global media and cultural studies. These people/organizations have, through their work, made some kind of a difference to the lives of people around the world – a difference that has made a difference.

A great idea.
A new technological tool or invention.
A new way to perceive the world.
Something that, we believe, simply needs to be heard and seen.

The series called Mind.Medium.Message will consist of three-part exposes:

Part 1 will offer biographies and background information and explain why these people/organizations are interesting and important.

Part 2 will look at the more general influence and contribution these people/organizations have made to the field they work in – academically, theoretically, artistically, technologically, politically.

Part 3 will provide them with a voice, featuring interviews, guest writers and artists, and offering a platform for their work.

(However, please note: this will not be an exercise in idolatry. The perspectives we provide to our chosen ones will be as multifaceted and critical as the people/organizations we profile. We will provide a platform; not an altar.)

While the list of people/organizations we have lined up is as eclectic and diverse as the contributors to Project: Carousel we believe there is no better way to begin than with somebody who – technically – is still one of us. Iranian blogger Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakshan pursued an MA in Global Media and Postnational Communication at SOAS and, as he has yet to submit his dissertation, technically remains a SOAS student.

Hossein, however, has been detained in Iran without charges and under uncertain conditions since late last year. Therefore, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of his imprisonment, we are launching our Mind.Medium.Message series with a profile of Hossein and the difference he has made. We want to use this launch as a platform to highlight issues around his confinement (as well as that of other prisoners) in Iran and to get SOAS students to pressure the SOAS administration to issue a formal statement on his behalf. (EDITORS NOTE: because of changes in circumstances regarding Hossein’s current status, we have withdrawn this part of our project.)

We encourage you to all get involved.  We will shortly tell you how.

**

Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakhshan is a journalist, Internet activist, and blogger, nicknamed the Blogfather for spawning Iran’s spectacular blogging revolution. Since the mid-1990s, he has been advocating the use of the Internet as a means for social and political reform in Iran.

Born in Tehran in 1975, Hossein is the oldest of three siblings in a religious family. Hossein spent most of his primary and secondary school years at Nikan Institute, a private religious school whose strict dress code and lack of humanities surely irritated him: ‘I never do things I have to do. I’ve always resisted what’s forced on me. I’m a rebel.’ Hossein transferred from Nikan to a public school before his final year in 1992, trading religion classes for the pop culture of Tehran.

In 1995, his brother’s friend introduced him to the wonders of a computer connected to a modem. This may not have been the Internet (yet), but it was a fascinating new world with forums and chat rooms that supported Persian.

Hossein started out as a journalist writing about Internet and digital culture for a popular reformist newspaper, Asr-e Azadegan, in 1999. When his paper was closed down by conservative judicial authorities in 2000, Hossein moved to Canada and started working for the BBC Persian service in Toronto.

In September 2001, Hossein set up one of the first blogs in Persian, having, according to Wired, ‘figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com’s free tools to handle Persian characters’.

In response to a request from a reader, Hossein created a simple how-to-blog guide in Persian. As Nasrin Alavi writes in We Are Iran, ‘with the modest aim of giving other Iranians a voice, he set free an entire community’. In 2003, the Guardian wrote that Hossein’s ‘step-by-step guide to creating a Persian weblog should take much of the credit for inspiring thousands of Iranians to start their own blogs.’

And so the Blogfather was born.

For several years his blog, Editor: Myself, written both in Persian and English, was the most popular blog in Iran but in 2004 it was blocked as Hossein broke one of the iron rules of the Iranian press and criticized spiritual leader Khamenei.

By that time Hossein had immersed himself in the politics of Iran and the Internet: he had founded Stop censoring us, a blog to watch the situation of Internet censorship in Iran; he spoke repeatedly about Internet censorship, methods to get around filters, and the use of wikis to aid political reform and the growth of democracy.

It was breaking taboos like these that got Hossein in trouble with the Iranian police who detained and interrogated him when he visited Iran for the first time since emigrating in 2005. He was allowed to leave Iran only after being forced to sign an apology.

Hossein remained a passionate critic of (not only) Iranian politics and publicly broke yet another big taboo when he visited Israel, a country off limits to Iranians, in 2006 : ‘As a citizen journalist, I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there.’

In the fall of 2008 Hossein returned to Iran before completing his MA Global Media and Postnational Communication at SOAS in London and was arrested at his family’s home on 1 November 2008. It was not until late December 2008 that Iran confirmed that Hossein was in detention.

Today, one year after his arrest, official charges have yet to be laid, a trial date has yet to be set, and the conditions under which Hossein is being held remain uncertain.

Part 2 of this expose will look at the Blogfather’s controversial and turbulent career which has split the blogging community he has helped spawn right down the middle.

Part 3 of this expose will look at some of the controversies and conspiracy theories surrounding Hossein’s disappearance, highlight the Free Hoder campaign, and offer a platform to Hossein’s family, which has only very recently broken its public silence.

Stay tuned for more.

A talk between filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, artist- turned-filmmaker Shirin Neshat, and Sina Motalebi from BBC Persian discussed the current and future  state of Iranian filmmaking.  I suppose we all know that making films in Iran wasn’t the easiest, but I had  never realized how difficult it actually is.  Furthermore, under Ahmedinejad’s regime, obstacles  have gotten harder to get through. 

The talk was an hour long, but brought up a number  of issues faced by filmmakers in terms of censorship and the basics of obtaining filmmaking permits.    

The most vocal of the panel was Ghobadi, whose  recent release No One Knows About Persian Cats is  ”an underground film about an underground music  scene”.  The idea of the film was to be able to talk about the creative repression through a means different from  the usual allegorical Iranian style.  Ghobadi was very  expressive during the debate probably due to his  recent change having been self-exiled to New York.  ”Since I started making films,” he said, “I was forced to tell lies.”  His dealings with the government were clearly far from pleasant; he explains the way the government officials he has to deal with are constantly giving him the run-around when it comes to getting signatures.  He explains that at one point, he decided to grow a beard in order to be able to communicate with officials at all.  Having to get permit signatures is a must within the process of making films because everything else is set up to fall on that; that is, without a permit from the government to make the film, no body will help with anything else (equipment, studio rentals, location shooting becomes difficult, etc).  The filmmaking process in Iran, he explains, starts to become very different than that of the rest of world where people having to cut out certain parts of it just to get things moving (nobody makes storyboards, was his example.)

The recent situation in Iran has caused quite a lot of debate amongst intellectuals and academics about how they should respond and react to it and what the role of the public intellectual should be when faced with such “events.”  The revolution in Iran has a long history of fascination amongst Western intellectuals; Foucault’s infamous writings some 30 years ago come to mind.   Below is a selection of some of the recent commentaries – including a piece by Zizek that has been making the rounds.  How do they compare?

[This piece, not published anywhere else as far as I know, apart from here, was forwarded to me by Ali Alizadeh. It's Zizek, very recently, on Iran]

Slavoj Zizek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% – can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough – they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Also see HERE, HERE and HERE.

As some of you may recall a few months back when we set up the website, I said that at least a familiarity of new social media such as Twitter should be mandatory for all students interested in understanding the contemporary global media landscape. The Iran elections have shown this again.  So while I settle back into to hyper-connected world once again after a few weeks grazing in the mountains, here is a rather good video about the use of media in Iran’s current situation. As Twitter has become mainstream, my tentacles are now out to what shall be the next “emerging” media to emerge out of the silicon mix.   I am in the process of figuring out how to use and set up “anonymity networks” to avoid censorship so I think this will become a mandatory element of tactical media activism in the near future.  Will keep you posted … below the video:

Ghost by Kader Attia

Unveiled: New Art From The Middle East

Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Rd, London, SW3 4SQ

I visited this exhibition with fellow Global Media students Rounwah, Osama and Fazilet. I went with a completely open mind, intrigued as to what art from the Middle East actually looked like. I whole heartedly accept that it is not possible all the art that originates from the Middle East come under one label. Geographically, the Middle East is a diverse terrain and the same analogy can be applied to the art produced by Middle Eastern artists. So it would be redundant of me to use terms such as “Arabic”, “Islamic” or even “Middle East” to a certain extent.

Nevertheless, I entered the exhibition filled with trepidation. While touring the exhibition, I felt a mixture of emotions. Some art pieces I was able just to appreciate for the use of colours and shapes as they were visually stunning (very simplistic I know, but I am a self confessed newbie when it comes to the art world!) and the emotions invoked by the pieces. These pieces were done by artists Sara Rahber, Laleh Khorramian and Halim Al-Karim. However, there were some art installations which invoked a combination of surprise, anger, confusion and disbelief. One such installation was Kader Attia’s “Ghost” in which a group of Muslim women in prayer are depicted as having their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. When I first saw this installation I was genuinely confused. I could not understand why the artist would want to depict women as empty when they are praying to God. I understand that the artist may wish to convey a message but I felt that this installation was distasteful, which ultimately led me to feel anger towards the art piece. However, after I had left the exhibition, I came to the realisation that the artist may not have meant to convey any message pertaining to the religious use of that position. The artist may have simply used this shape in order to convey a completely different message. Nevertheless, I would have to say that my first thought was that it was indeed trying to convey a message about Islam as Islam is what I immediately associate this position with.

To talk about the rest of the exhibition, I felt that the majority of the pieces did truly imbue “contemporary” as none of the pieces retain any classical designs or styles. As I have mentioned, some pieces were not to my liking, but then again this is “art”!

I have to mention the gallery itself, it seemed to be the perfect setting for these pieces to be “unveiled”!

I would recommend people to visit this exhibition and to go with open minds. If you are a complete novice to art from the Middle East, like myself, you will find the exhibition extremely interesting and thought-provoking.  I cannot speak on behalf of the people who have a more in depth knowledge of Middle Eastern art, but I still urge you as well to visit!

commentary on the article and translation by BBC Persian

http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/sport/2009/01/090129_ba-ft-yusef-ahmadinejad.shtml

source of the article

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ttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/02c7e234-eda7-11dd-bd60-0000779fd2ac.html

Copyright

The Financial Times Limited 2009