President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government is cracking down on Iranian writers in a new government censorship purge. The books granted permission to be published during former President Khatami's rule are to be checked once again by the cultural ministry of Ahmadinejad, otherwise the permission will be dismissed. Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance vets all books before being published.
Many world classics, contemporary literature, and dozens of international literary bestsellers have been banned consequently, including a Farsi translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's masterpiece The Gambler, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Tracy Chevalier's bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring. After the completion of six print runs in Iran, Chevalier's novel is now being denied permission for reprint.
The ban also covers other books, such as A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, La Musica by Marguerite Duras, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and some books by Heinrich Böll, Woody Allen, Federico Garcia Lorca and Hermann Hesse. The books featuring lyrics by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Black Sabbath, Queen and Guns n' Roses are subsequently blacklisted.
Persian books are not even exempt from the crackdown. The Cock, a novel written by Ebrahim Golestan, an Iranian renowned writer and filmmaker based in Britain, is banned even though the book had been vetted and granted permission by the ministry before Ahmadinejad came to power in Iran. Golestan is among the most important intellectuals Iran ever has seen; he founded documentary films in the country before the Islamic Revolution and has influenced many Persian writers, especially the prominent Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
Meanwhile, almost all of the books by Sadeq Hedayat, the influential Iranian and internationally renowned writer of The Blind Owl, are banned from publication. The Blind Owl contains a great deal of Buddhist and Hindu imagery. Exploring the lack of meritocracy in Iran, "Haji Aqa" is another Hedayat story on the banned list. Hedayat is considered Iran's foremost modern writer of prose fiction and short stories. He died of gassing suicide in 1951 and is buried in the Père Lachaise in France.
Recently, an Iranian novelist named Yaghoub Yadali was illegally imprisoned for forty days by the government for dialogues cited in his novel Mores of Unrest, even though the book had the ministry's permission. He was accused of insulting an Iranian minority, and his family was asked not to make the issue public. When a friend of his, Seyed Reza Shokrollahi, posted a piece in his weblog on the matter, the issue was spread over the Internet and the day after that, in newspapers' headlines. In the face of the Iran blog community and domestic press coverage of the issue, the government was finally forced to release him from prison.
"It seems that we must be always afraid of any words that we write," says an Iranian novelist who asked not to be named. "There is a possibility that the government can put us in jail at any time they feel unhappy with any phrase in our works. They are somehow dictating what to write and what not to write ? this is the death of imagination."
Today, the publishing industry in Iran has come upon a flood of difficulties that have plunged book publication into crisis.
"They [the governmental authorities] have not only made the publishers stop working but have also put writers in a condition in which they have no inclination to write," says Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, an Iranian novelist who wrote the ten-volume Persian bestseller Kelydar, and who refuses to give his next book to publishers as a sign of complaint to the government's strict crackdowns.
Writers, fed up with the restrictions, have lost the inclination to publish new books. They have found the Internet an easier way to publish their works. Unfortunately, the Internet is also subjected to government filtering. Consequently, the risk of being arrested and accused of committing an act against the country's security is a very real one.
Reza Ghassemi, a renowned Iranian novelist based in France and a literary prize winner for The Nocturnal Harmony of Wood Instruments, recently published his new novel The Abracadabra Murmured by Lambs on the Internet in a free e-book PDF format instead of facing government censorship and formal permission procedure. He published his e-novel on his six-year-old website which is now filtered by the government. Regardless, his e-novel has been reviewed and welcomed by the huge Iranian blog community much more than if it had been published in paper. Iran's blog community is among the world's top ten most active blog communities and Persian is listed by Technorati as among the world's top languages on the net. Ghassemi's webpage was hit more than 6,000 times per day before being filtered; it now receives around 300 to 400.
Imposing fresh rules requiring renewed permits for previously published books and the government's new censorship purge has put much more pressure on writers and encouraged some of them to leave the country.
"I see many more young and serious feminine writers today in Iran than I could find before the Islamic Revolution, but they are facing too many obstacles," says Soudabeh Ashrafi, an Iranian literary prize winner for Fish Sleep at Night. She traveled to Iran after 24 years of living in California.
"A writer in Iran can't afford to support herself by writing," she continues. "Book publication is not a money-making job and the government is hindering us through different means, so how can I continue here in Iran, especially as a woman writer? I can't have a normal life here and it seems that living in Iran is unbearable for me," she adds, complaining about the government clampdown. Her new novel has not been granted permission and one of the stories in her short story collection See You Tomorrow was completely censored by the ministry.
The government clampdown and censorship purge over book publication has led to an outcry among Iranian writers who believe that the literary community of the country is suffering from an epidemic depression and lack of freedom of expression