The revolution will be blogged

March 6, 2006 | In February, Iranian student Mojtaba Saminejad, celebrated a bitter anniversary -- one year in prison for authoring a blog that enraged the country's ruling mullahs. He's not the only blogger languishing in an Iranian jail: In 2003, Iran's was the first regime known to imprison a blogger, Sina Motallebi, author of the popular site RoozNegar.com. And in January, journalist Arash Sigarchi was found guilty and given a three-year sentence for "insulting the Supreme Guide" online.

Those were trumped-up charges, according to writer and advocacy worker Nasrin Alavi, the author of "We Are Iran," a recent anthology of Iranian blogs. "When Arash was first arrested, I went through his archives and couldn't initially find the inflammatory statements," she said. In these cases, "they were just unlucky in that someone decided to make an example of them. Especially with Arash, who was being tried by a small-town judge who wanted to really make a name for himself as revolutionary. A lot of that goes on Iran. To work your way up the system there's rivalry to show off your revolutionary credentials."

Alavi, now based in London, wrote the book about bloggers to show the world an Iran beyond the familiar radical images created by the current regime and echoed by the Western media. "I wanted to show the changing consciousness of Iran and the conversations people were having behind closed doors," she said.

The attack on bloggers is the Iranian regime's latest crackdown on freedom of speech. In the last six years, more than 100 magazines and newspapers (including 41 dailies) have been shut down, and many journalists imprisoned. Those reformist papers had flourished after the 1997 election win of the relatively liberal president Muhammad Khatami. But as Khatami's powers were curtailed by the hard-liner establishment, so were the newspapers that had prospered under his government.

Young Iranians, well educated and net savvy, have turned to the Internet to get news and information -- and to discuss their society. A recent Harvard summit cited more than 700,000 Farsi blogs, mostly based in Iran, making Farsi the second-most-popular language in the entire blogosphere.

The government has now moved against Internet media. The BBC's Farsi service, which provides national and international news, has been blocked, and according to Reporters Without Borders, the filtering of Web sites considered "non-Islamic" is on the increase.

But given the technology of blogging, the government can't realistically silence every blogger in Iran -- so it's also logging on and trying to get in on the act. In February, Iran's culture ministry held the "Revolutionary Bloggers Conference" to promote pro-regime blogs, such as that run by Saleh Meftah, a member of the Basij militia. In a recent post, Meftah boasted of the excitement he felt at attacking the Danish embassy in Tehran during the worldwide controversy over caricatures of the prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper.

Yet, the posted replies show how the government's plans for pro-regime blogs could backfire. "I cannot hide my hatred of you and your actions," wrote one respondent. "It's your bestial breed that give Westerners cause to insult our dear prophet and faith."

Most blogs don't just show how Iranians feel about critical issues like the cartoon controversy, nuclear weapons and the inflammatory Islamist rhetoric of hard-line President Mahmoud Amadinejad. They also give insight into the tension bubbling up in the ordinary hearts of Iran's predominantly young population. (Seventy percent of Iranians are under the age of 30.)

Spooky, 22, at My Lucid Dreams, agonized recently over an on-off relationship: "Maybe he knows that I am a swinger type gal." Rodman, a 24-year-old who authors Planet Rodmania, enjoyed the Hollywood film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and wonders whether Tehran will ever have a proper vehicle-pollution study.

Blogging in Iran took off in September 2001, when journalist Hossein Derakhshan posted a "how to blog" article in Farsi, which coincided with the regime's newspaper crackdown. "It was unbelievable," said Alavi, who was living in Iran at the time. "Journalists were being put behind bars and suddenly you could read things that you couldn't get anywhere else."

Alavi says the majority of young Iranian bloggers represent a new, nonviolent breed of activist. She believes that, having lived under theocracy, they are desperate for a genuinely accountable government. "Radical Islamic government has run its course. The revolution wasn't to become Muslims -- it was for economic growth and equality. That still hasn't happened yet."

Amadinejad was voted in as president last summer with just such an agenda but instead has fallen back onto anti-Western, Islamist rhetoric. He has called the Holocaust a "myth," declared that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and jump-started nuclear research in defiance of international regulations. On his watch, the Danish embassy was attacked by a mob, and a week later an Iranian paper launched a competition for cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust.

Even though Ahmadinejad promised to champion the little guy against Iran's corrupt elite, in Tehran, state-backed thugs have been beating up bus drivers striking for better pay. "I detest him, his party and his ideas," Tehran blogger "Mr. Behi" told Salon recently. "He is a mob kind of president and came to power with impractical slogans for the economy and radical ideas about politics."

The 28-year-old tech worker was one of several bloggers Salon contacted by e-mail. Mr. Behi describes himself as secular in his thinking, but says he also adores the prophet Mohammed. "Democracy, as I believe in it, is freedom but also respect for others," he said. "I detest the fact that some others burn the flag of countries because of their opposition to a group of citizens from those countries."

He also put forward the argument that the anti-cartoon protests at the embassy were orchestrated by the government. "I can assure you that those who did this in Tehran were not regular people," he said. Alavi agrees, saying, "There is no freedom of assembly in Iran. An attack like that is not a spontaneous process -- it's a foreign policy directive."

The protests may have been staged, but there was still genuine anger over the cartoons. "Nina," a 24-year-old university student and computer programmer in Tehran, was very unhappy at seeing the cartoons. "They were a lie," she said. Reza, 31, said he found two of the cartoons "soaked in hatred. They put Muslim violence and terrorism squarely at the door of the Prophet Muhammad. A big historical lie. The publication of these cartoons was thus irresponsible and contemptible. So were the violent attacks on the missions."

Next page: Debating a U.S. attack -- and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"