Shadowland: 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 cliche 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."

This is not-so-subtly subversive stuff, as far as the mullahs are concerned, and much more interesting for the rest of us than anything the Bush administration could think up in its plodding, one-dimensional campaigns to undermine the ayatollahs. Nor is it literature meant to explain Iran and the frustrations of its people to the outside world, like Azar Nafisi's 2003 American best seller, "Reading Lolita in Tehran" (Random House). These online journals are written by Iranians for Iranians as they open up to each other.

In fact, the guy who's usually credited with launching the Persian blogging phenomenon is a 30-year-old self-described geek named Hossein Derakshan. When I first met him about five years ago in Tehran, he was working as the Web editor of a local portal and writing a daily newspaper column about the Internet. Everything was primitive and slow by the tech standards of the day. Iran's Internet community, he told me, was "like a city with no electrical system, where each house has its own generator and makes its own electricity."

In those days, the reformist movement led by President Mohammed Khatami was actually at its height. There was a tremendous sense of excitement and defiance on the street, and even in parts of the regime. Several intellectuals were murdered or were disappeared, but their ideas endured and their families refused to be silenced. Newspapers would be shut down one day, then reappear under different names the next, with the old Web sites linked to the new.

The Islamic government had encouraged a population explosion and put a huge emphasis on education, hoping to create a growing class of revolutionaries. Now more than 70 percent of the population is under 30, and literacy is more than 90 percent for both men and women. But these newly educated masses did not embrace the rigid teachings of the conservative ayatollahs, and they could not and would not be cut off entirely from global communications. The pent-up desire for freedom was so great that even many of the firebrands of the Islamic revolution in 1979 had become, 20 years later, firebrands of democracy. "I was an Islamic leftist, a Revolutionary Guard, and I worked at the Ministry of Islamic Guidance," columnist Akbar Ganji told me in 1999. "We wanted to change everything. We wanted to create new kinds of human beings. I can tell you I don't have any desires like that any more." Ganji was always in and out of jail, and his publications were banned one after another "This is the price you have to pay to achieve a modern democracy," he told me confidently. But he was imprisoned again soon after we talked and has just spent six years behind bars. (After beginning a hunger strike, he was released for medical reasons yesterday, returning to a hero's welcome from bloggers who'd taken up his cause.)

By 2000, in fact, my friend Hossein the Geek and many other young Iranians came to the conclusion they had to emigrate. "We see that our future is canceled if we want to stay in Iran," he told me then, and a few months later he moved to Canada. In September 2001, after the shock of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Hossein started reading the commentaries on U.S. blogs, and decided to start his own (http://hoder.com/weblog) in Farsi. Soon afterward he posted a how-to guide. By 2004, according to a survey cited in Alavi's book, there were some 64,000 Persian-language Weblogs: more than in Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese or Russian. "The Internet," writes Alavi, "has opened a new virtual space for free speech in a country that Reporters sans Frontieres has dubbed 'the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East'."

But let's not put too much emphasis on the purely political content of Iran's Weblogs. There is plenty of that, especially with controversial parliamentary elections approaching on June 17, and, yes, the "mutant Islamists" continue trying to block sites that are too outspoken. But when Hossein dropped by my office in Paris a few weeks ago, and walked me through several blogs, it struck me that the real subversive power of the Web is more the medium itself than the specific messages. As he pointed out, many Iranian kids use their sites like calling cards, to show off for the men or women they'd like to date in a society where courting in public is severely curtailed. They express themselves, and their humanity, in "this unique space which is totally out of the monopoly of the government," as Hossein put it. It doesn't really matter what they say, but that they say it--whether personal, political, sexual, silly, angry, funny or sad. They write online what they used to write on bathroom walls, in fact, and in a literate, sophisticated society like Iran's, that may be about as revolutionary as any writing you can find.