Iran Book Update: No More Good Reads in Tehran

Goodreads does not look like a dangerous website. Its welcome message is an innocent, "Have you ever wanted a better way to:

Get great book recommendations from people you know?
Keep track of what you've read and what you'd like to read?
Form a book club, answer book trivia, collect your favorite quotes?

Apparently, however, that is now enough to constitute a political threat. Last week, a Goodreads blogger wrote:

Last Friday, February 5, 2010, we were saddened to see Goodreads traffic in Iran plummet (screenshot above), which can only mean that Goodreads has joined the ranks of sites blocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime. One Iranian Goodreads member wrote to us and confirmed the news: "your site is recently been filtered by our horrible govrnmt. pls help us! spread it...books make no harm."

Inadvertently, there may have been a clue to Goodreads' fate in the next paragraph:

We couldn't agree more. Books make no harm. In an interview last year, Goodreads Author Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, commented presciently on the Iranian phenomenon on Goodreads: "People constantly find ways of connecting. If [Goodreads] is banned in Iran, we need support for those people who just want to connect to the world."

Nafisi's work is despised by some prominent academics in Tehran, in part because of the content of Lolita, in part because of her connections with "right-wing" US think tanks.

Still, it is not Nafisi but Becca Fitzpatrick with Hush, Hush ("For Nora Grey, romance was not part of the plan. She's never been particularly attracted to the boys at her school, no matter how much her best friend, Vee, pushes them at her.") who is Goodreads' most popular author at the moment. So I'm still thinking that the site isn't necessarily the advance force for an American "regime change".

Perhaps the authorities in Tehran could enlighten us?

Comments

[Dave]

I wonder if this Wikipedia page is blocked - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books

[Arshama]

Scott,

Thanks for posting this news.
Your assumption about Azar Nafisi being the cause for this blocking may be right, but the IRI has in fact a long history of censorship, and a special office dedicated to it within the Vezarate Ershad (Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance).
After a period of relative freedom of publishing during the Khatami era, censorship has intensified since AN came to power, as noted by the exiled editor and journalist Faraj Sarkouhi already in 2007: http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079193.html

Arresting writers, journalists and translators, banning books, newspapers, journals, and blocking websites like Goodreads is the result of a totalitarian concept of "unity", which allows no other interpretation of the world than its own.

As the IRI is going to require even the Islamic principle of "towhid" (monotheism) for itself (remember the SL's poster with the Hidden Imam), blocking Goodreads is only an irrelevant fact within this ongoing project of "unification ...

Arshama

[Dave]

My post might get deleted, but I'll stick my neck out and say it anyway -- When I hear and read about Muslim reactions to Lolita, The Satanic Verses, The Jewel of Medina, and especially historical non-fiction books causing great controversy, torture and death, I see a lack of intellectual maturity -- not just in Iran -- but in the Muslim world in general.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dashti

[Dave]

Ali Dashti was tortured, but Wikipedia is not brave enough to say so.

[Mike Dunn]

Ali Dashti was tortured, but Wikipedia is not brave enough to say so.

I think you've misunderstood Wikipedia a bit there Dave.

[Dave]

How so?

[Publicola]

Re: Ali Dashti

Dave seems to be right, as far as the English wikipedia-version is concerned, which does not mention anything about the suspicious circumstances of his death.

Different the French wikipedia-version

"Un journal iranien fit part de son décès en 1982. Il fut torturé à mort par le régime islamique."
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dashti
[An Iranian journal reported his death in 1982. He had been tortured to death by the Islamic regime]

and the German wikipedia-version

"1979, im ersten Jahr der Islamischen Revolution, wurde Ali Dashti verhaftet und in ein unbekanntes Gefängnis verschleppt. An den in der Haft erlittenen Verletzungen erlag er 1981 in einem Krankenhaus."
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dashti

[In 1979, the 1rst year of the Islamic Revolution, Ali Dashti was arrested and deported into an unknown prison. Having fallen victim to injuries inflicted on him in prison he died in hospital in 1981]

[Mike Dunn]

Well nobody's really making those sorts of editorial decisions on Wikipedia- if you think something's missing from an article you can just add it.

[Publicola]

@ Mike Dunn

Thanks, Mike,

indeed, it is exactly as Sherlock Holmes pointed out

"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear." (in Conan Doyle. A Scandal in Bohemia)

and emphasized

"Elementary, my dear Watson" (in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes)

Apologies !