Iranian Censors' Heavy Hand Falls On A Persian Classic
Radio Free Europe Liberty / Charles Recknagel
19-Aug-2011 (one comment)

Many authoritarian regimes censor books for political reasons.

But Iran goes so far in also tampering with books for self-claimed religious reasons that the Islamic republic's censors form a league of their own.

The latest example came this week, when censors refused a publishing house permission to reprint an edition of one of the country's best-known classical epic poems.

The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance decided that some parts of the epic poem "Khosrow and Shirin" by Nezami Ganjavi needed reworking, despite the fact that the book-length masterpiece has been a classic of Iranian literature for 831 years.

The news not only astounded the publishing house, which had expected routine approval when it sought to publish its eighth edition of the book, it also shocked Iran's intellectual class, despite decades of inurement to the censors' heavy hand.

Iranian poet Simin Behbahani

"This poem existed for nine centuries and...Iranians were Muslims during those nine centuries," says Iran's best-known contemporary female poet, Simin Behbahani. "No one [during that time] had any objections to [the] 'Khosrow and Shirin' poem and didn't think of censoring parts of the poem.... Nothing would... >>>

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BaronAvak

Assuming this report is

by BaronAvak on Fri Aug 19, 2011 10:18 AM PDT

Assuming this report is true, it is testament to the outrageous stupidity and anti-Iranianism of certain circles within the IRI.   However, we must note that there are a lot of reports about Iran which later turn out to be false. For example, remember Amir Taheri's disinformation article in 2006 claiming Iran's parliment passed a law for seperate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, to make them identifiable in public! Or the time when Michael Ledeen declared that Khamenei was dead in 2007, only to take it back, only to then re-declare that Khamenei was "really" dead in 2009, only to be wrong again.  

 

So let's see how this one pans out.   This poem has been legally published in the IRI in 8 previous edition for the past 32 years, so it would be odd for them to suddenly take issue with it.   However, there's been some contradictory, hair-brained policies enacted by certain IRI bureaucrats over the years, so anything's possible.


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