The real Iran

I noticed that the Varsity has published the draft version of my article. Here is the final version which is a little different with the published version.

The real Iran

How weblogs can change the way the world sees Iran

By Hossein Derakhshan*

Having lived almost all my life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I've always wanted to see the West and why Islamic clerics in Iran dislike its values and lifestyle so much.

Before I came to Toronto as an immigrant in Dec. 2000, I was working as a tech journalist in one the so called reformist papers in Iran. A daily column named "Internet" with a simple, straight-forward language had attracted a lot of readers whose emails were making my yahoo email account full every day. The pleasure of helping people discover new things and cross new borders is the most satisfying experience anyone can have.

But then everything suddenly changed when the hardliner-backed judiciary closed down all reformist papers in one night.

After a few months, I received the visa and came to Canada, completely disconnected from a rapidly changing society that I cared—and still care about.

You have no idea how much a high-bandwidth Internet connection helped me at the time. Having worked –or been tortured, better put- by slow modem connection, I could finally see and feel the real potentials of the Internet. Through all that pointless but joyful surfing, I came across to a website that later changed my work and life: Blogger.com

I started my own weblog in Persian a few days later and started to attract dozens of old readers of my column again. Then many people asked me to show them how to do the same thing, therefore, on 25 Sep. 2001 I wrote a simple step-to-step guide on how to build a weblog in Persian. Suddenly in less than a year, weblog became one of the hottest issues among Internet savvy Iranians all over the world.

Weblogs are powerful bridges in a widely divided society. Bridges between immigrants and homeland inhabitants, girls and boys, parents and children, and especially between journalists and writers who were not able to publish their works freely in the politically closed atmosphere in Iran and their thirsty readers.

Tens of thousands of Persian weblogs now attract millions of readers everyday, but the language barrier has prevented the world from seeing the real Iran and its people through them. A quick study of the contents of these weblogs displays a whole new set of attitudes and values among Iranian young people, absolutely different with what mainstream North American media tries to sketch.

New generation of Iranian young people are more tolerant, self-expressive, independent, and individualistic than ever. In an increasingly anti-American--and to some extent anti-Western--region of Middle East, where fanatic Islam has the most fans among middle-class population, Iranians embrace extremely different values than their neighbour countries, and surprisingly, than their fanatic leaders.

Salam pax, the Iraqi blogger who was the only genuine and direct voice from inside Iraq during the foggy days of war, could change many people's mind about the life in Baghdad. Now while Iranian fundamentalist regime is under serious pressure by the world community for it's nuclear programs, human rights issues and support of terrorism, Iranians who write their weblogs in English provide the best tools for the world to separate the fanatic government from a rarely educated and rational society in the Middle East.

Luckily, aside from tens of thousands of weblogs in Persian, there are over a hundred of weblogs in English language, many of them written by people who live inside Iran.

As for my own personal experience, I can't be happier as I see thousands of people log on to my Persian weblog, Editor: Myself. By reading their emails and comments on my posts, I have re-discovered my faithful readers that I had missed for a long time, this time without having a printed newspaper or even someone who edits my writings. I'm my own editor. Every blogger is his or her own editor.

For more on weblogs by iranians check out blogsbyiranians.com

* Hossein Derakhshan is an undergrad student in department of Sociology. He maintains uoftblogs.com, a directory of weblogs by UofT students and staff.