by MARINA FORTI
The Iranian monthly magazine Zanan-e Emruz (“Today’s Women”) had barely reached its tenth issue when it was forced to stop publication following a ruling by the Tehran courts’ Office of Press Control. The announcement was made in April and the news itself is nothing new; over the past fifteen years dozens of newspapers have had authorisations issued and then revoked on the basis of changing internal political events. In the past two years, following the election of President Hasan Rouhani, the social and political atmosphere has certainly changed drastically. Books once censored are now given an imprimatur, banned films have returned to theatres and new newspapers are published. Censorship, however, has not disappeared although the ‘red lines’, the boundaries of what is permissible, have been moved.
The media has always been the theatre of political clashes; government pressure on news desks has lessened, but there is still that of other powers. In Iran’s peculiar institutional organisation, the judiciary (and state television or the secret services) is a power that the elected president does not control. It may happen that a government might speak of free speech while a judge closes down newspapers or arrests human rights activists. The more a government attempts to implement democratic policies, the more extremist currents attack human rights and freedom of speech, the preferred battleground of the revolutionary “orthodoxy”.
The events surrounding the women’s magazine, however, indicate something new about Iranian society.
When Zanan-e Emruz appeared on newsstands in June 2014, it seemed to be a tangible sign of the Rouhani’s government’s opening-up. The new magazine is in fact a republication of the one founded in 1992 by a brave journalist called Shahla Sherkat. At the time it was called Zanan (“women”) and broke many taboos. In an Iran undergoing mass reconstruction after the long Iran-Iraq war of the eighties, that magazine addressed issues such as equal rights in marriage and divorce, discrimination in the workplace, violence against women, relations between men and women as well as political participation. Films and literature were discussed and articles were published by intellectuals and political activists such as the jurist Mehranguiz Kar, the publisher Shahla Lahiji, film director Rakhshan Bani-Ettemad and many other important personalities in the emerging Iranian women’s movement. Zanan placed women’s issues at the top of its political agenda while also trying to find interlocutors in parliament. It also produced a new generation of female journalists who then changed the media’s panorama.
That initial experience ended in January 2008, the third year of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, when the judiciary closed Zanan, accusing its journalists of portraying the world of women in a “dark light” that “threatened the spiritual, mental and intellectual health of readers and society’s psychological safety.” It was a sign of the times; many other newspapers linked to reformist currents defeated by Ahmadinejad had already been closed and civil society’s independent organisations were targeted, in particular women’s associations, a famous women’s documentation centre, as were the groups that had promoted the campaign for “a million signatures” to abrogate family laws discriminating against women.
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