Despite growing public knowledge of global digital surveillance capabilities and practices, it has often proved hard to attract mainstream public interest in the issue. This continues to be the case in Iran where even with widespread VPN usage, there is still little real awareness of digital security threats.
With public sexual health awareness equally low, the three people behind Jensiat, an online graphic novel, saw an opportunity to marry these challenges. Dealing with issues linked to sexuality and cyber security in a way that any Iranian can easily relate to, the webcomic also offers direct access to verified digital security resources. Launched in March 2016, Jensiat has had around 1.2 million unique readers and was rapidly censored by the Iranian government.
“Our interactions with readers leads us to believe they have picked up what we’ve been discussing, and are incorporating them into their online lives,” its creators told Index on Censorship.
With a team of illustrators, satirical writers, technologists and Internet researchers Jensiat constructed a graphic novel with a unique strategy of instilling a culture of understanding and everyday practices. The first season, which finished in August 2016, was centred around six episodes. The story revolved around the main character Leila, her love interest Jamshid, and her best friend and sexual health therapist Shirin. The characters built an NGO based on counselling and advice on matters regarding relationships, sexuality and sexual health, all the while encountering cyber security concerns such as phishing attacks, unsecured networks and how to protect your social media accounts from an abusive partner.
Iranians now contact the creators of the graphic novel seeking advice on what technologies or applications to download, and to discuss and debate the many risks Iranians face online. In March 2016, Jensiat’s website was filtered by the Iranian filtering committee, highlighting the discomfort the creators bring to the Iranian regime’s attempts to control the internet.
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I’m a hand that has become a fist… I’m a Shia in Bahrain, I’m an Armenian in WWI I’m the one who is starving, with ribs obvious from starvation
They are raping someone and I am the sound of the agonised screaming When they tell him or her “relax, so that we can enjoy it, whore”, I’m that tense muscle I’m an Afghan homosexual woman that lives in Iran
Iranian rapper Soroush Lashkari, aka Hichkas, is sharing extracts from an unfinished song for his new album Mojaz, translating the lyrics into English on the spot. Hichkas (Nobody) has been called the godfather of Iranian hip-hop, which seems fitting for a man who turned the local calling code for Tehran — 021 — into song and a sign language that became the symbol of the Iranian hip-hop movement and its followers. But being a hip-hop artist in a country where the genre is banned comes with many challenges.
“When we made physical copies of our first album Jangale Asphalt in 2006, we were arrested whilst selling it on the streets of Tehran,” Hichkas, now in his late twenties, tells Index on Censorship. “You can’t just sell records in Iran, you need to seek approval from the authorities before you release anything or perform concerts. There is no structure or support system for musicians to perform freely, and in particular for hip hop artists.”
Anyone who wishes to publish, distribute or perform music in Iran is required to submit their work for review by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG), which is guided by Islamic law in force since the country’s 1979 revolution. The MCIG operates under the influence of the minister of culture, who is chosen by the president and the parliament. Even if the amount of freedom artists may experience varies under each presidency, all recordings submitted are archived to ensure the authenticity of Iranian musical culture is maintained. Exposure to Western music is also heavily scrutinised with genres such as hip-hop banned altogether. The implication is that musicians adopting traditional Iranian standards are favoured over artists incorporating external sounds tainted with “decadence”. The name of Hichkas’ upcoming album Mojaz -– meaning an album or artwork within the mojavez, the seal of approval required from the MCIG to sell records in the country.
The advent of the internet has provided an opportunity for musicians to challenge official censorship. The MCIG measures, designed with the intention to control the relationship between musician and audience within Iran’s geographical borders, often lead to long waits for recordings to be released. Digital technologies allow artists to distribute music produced in home-based studios or in secret locations, bypassing official channels. The web had a particular effect on Iranian hip-hop, helping rappers facilitate their own version of concerts through mobile phone video uploads and live streaming.
A figurehead in developing these alternative systems of dissemination, Hichkas argues the intention was not to go against the revolutionary regime as part of a political act. “Even if the laws allowed rappers to release music freely, consumers of music around the world were already shifting towards buying internet downloads,” he says. “In other words, the crisis of selling music was not unique to Iran; the real problem back home is that there is no way of making money from shows with rappers not being allowed to perform.”
But having been arrested numerous times for his work, it’s clear that even if you claim to shun politics, everything becomes political under a paranoid regime. “I’m actually a quiet person,” he said.
Hichkas doesn’t replicate American accents and maintains his typically Iranian appearance, blending in with those on the street. Most importantly, he embraces literary devices rooted in traditional Iranian poetry and turns it into conversational street talk that engages the disillusioned.
“I don’t like the blinging culture of hip-hop made in America that celebrates money and fakeness,” he said. “Me and my friends were teenagers making music that described our own culture, the society we grew up in, and challenging the clichés associated with it.”
He argues that the absence of hip-hop from the Iranian music scene is due to the lack of artists adopting the genre, rather than the association of hip-hop as a Western import. “No one had adopted rap to make music about our culture before us, so it was inevitable to be the first in finding that path for hip-hop to be heard,” he says. “We set standards through being driven by the love of what we were doing, which forced authorities to catch up and think about how investments can be made into a growing movement.”
Being a pioneer in developing a distribution network meant Hichkas’ many supporters outside of Iran began facilitating performances for him abroad in 2011, helping him get visas and opportunities to lecture at leading universities. Now based in London and juggling studio time alongside college work, he hopes his work on Mojaz “will add more substance to the poetry” and “set new benchmarks musically within the global standards of hip-hop by making it experimental but at the same time catchy”.
While he admits that rapping in Farsi is “a big barrier” to international audiences, he hopes the inclusion of English subtitles will help listeners find common ground across cultures. “Although previous songs were written in Iran and made in Iran, my lyrics were against evil deeds all around the world,” he explains. “They were against human discrimination in general. I want to continue writing something that engages my audience back home by addressing issues I have always talked about. I will use different lyrics, matching together social problems worldwide to scenes and characters that they can relate to.”
He says being in London, and having the opportunity to meet people from all over the world “helps me think about humanity through discovering common viewpoints.” The relocation also means working out new processes of distribution, from the logistics of sharing music from outside Iran, to the adoption of technological developments such as the bitcoin.
Navigating the external restrictions in his work has in itself become an art in the development of hip-hop. Working alongside long-time producer Maghdyar Aghajani, Hichkas preserves Iranian roots in his work whilst ensuring he can make his mark on the world wide hip-hop scene by making “a more complex music rather than the typical hip-hop” in his upcoming album.
“Self-censorship actually helps you to have more impact,” Hichkas argues. “Regardless of what the authorities say, if you come out in an extremely raw way in a closed society, people are not going to understand you. Also, if someone can’t go back to his or her society, how is he or she able to see what’s going on internally in his or her country? Why say something if you end up in jail for three years?”
He has tried writing about who he would be if he didn’t live under these rules, but gave up. “It just didn’t work,” he explains, “the lyrics wouldn’t flow, simply because I felt I would still be the same person, pushing boundaries through talking about whatever is going on around me from the culture I come from.” He says he wants to study psychology, “to understand how these cultures shape people, including those who choose to go into government.”
“Therefore, my music is not aimed at changing politics, but changing something at a grassroots level.”
President Hassan Rouhani is fond of rhetorical flourishes that promise Iranians freer access to virtually all forms of information, from satellite television to uncensored books to a less tightly-regulated press. While in all of the aforementioned areas his policies have failed, or failed to exert themselves, there is one domain where the Rouhani government has pushed forward seriously: securing Iranians better and faster internet connections, including mobile internet that would enable them to properly use the smartphones they buy with such enthusiasm.
In remarks to a group of clerics on Monday, Rouhani presented the internet as crucial to the nation’s progress in both science and academic research, areas that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has also identified as paramount to Iran’s development. “We cannot cannot close the gates of the world to our younger generation,” Rouhani said.
He warned that if Iran refuses to tolerate the technological needs of a savvy young generation now, “we will have to do it tomorrow. If not, the day after tomorrow.”
Though Rouhani has backtracked on a number of cultural reforms in the face of fierce hardline opposition, he has been steadfast in backing his internet ideals with hard policies. In the past two weeks, the government has granted 3G and 4G licenses to the country’s two main mobile operators, and has in recent months also permitted internet providers to increase bandwidth on home connections.
One reason why the president has been more willing to back the provision of higher speed internet is that so far, it has come at a more reasonable political price. Because service providers still implement government filters, the state censorship regime that prevents Iranians from accessing websites deemed “immoral” — everything from Facebook to many Persian news sites — will remain in place. While faster connections do mean that Iranians can more nimbly use proxy servers to get around the state filters, the speeds are still slow by developed world standards, requiring great patience from those wishing to use the internet to its full capacity. But 3G and mobile internet remain issues highly contested by hardliners made nervous by the challenges of filtering mobile devices.
Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makaram Shirazi last week issued a fatwa declaring high-speed and mobile internet haram, later comparing mobile internet to “muddy water” that requires filtering. Rouhani has sought to bypass these concerns by making the case for the internet’s importance as a research tool for scientific progress. As Rouhani joked in an 30 August press conference, the speeds that the country’s clerics are advocating are slow enough to make someone waiting to download an article fall asleep.
This framing of the issue is a canny approach, for it challenge Khamenei to back up his ardent support for Iranian scientific empowerment with policies that might otherwise make him uncomfortable. This past July at a meeting with university professors, Khamenei praised the work of the country’s “scientific movement”, saying that it “has achieved great objectives and become recognised on the international scene”.
By linking the objectives most dear to Khamenei to his own objective of pulling Iran out of the internet dark age, Rouhani is carving out a political space where his goals are seen to overlap with those of the supreme leader.
When the Committee for Determining Criminal Web Content sought to block access to the popular mobile messaging tool WhatsApp, Rouhani intervened. While this certainly endeared him to young Iranians who used the messaging service widely, Rouhani also risked riling the National Telecommunications Company, which is losing revenue as Iranians turn to cheaper foreign alternatives for messaging.
In the battle over control of the internet, there are multiple institutions across political factions vying for a role, with the competing financial interests of various mobile, 3G and telecoms providers underlaying the fray. But what’s clear is that Rouhani has chosen the internet as one of the rare areas where he will back rhetoric with clear policy.
It has been six months since Hassan Rouhani took office as the 7th president of Iran’s Islamic government. Considering his government a moderate one, in the first weeks of his tenure, as he introduced his cabinet members, the cultural industry hoped for conditions to take a turn for the better after 8 years of suppression brought about by former president Ahmadinejad and the hardliners. Although the situation seems to be neither dramatically better nor worse, Rouhani is sending mixed messages on artistic freedom.
There have been positive steps, like in September 2013 the government reopened Iran’s House of Cinema. The former government had announced this non-governmental organisation was considered an illegal entity and dissolved it two years previously. The new Ministry of Culture announced that it had been shut down by the previous government but never dissolved, “as a registered organisation has an legal identity and cannot be dissolved by the Ministry”. Many celebrated and veteran filmmakers, even those who boycotted cinema during Ahmadinejad’s time, attended the ceremony of reopening the House of Cinema to show their support for new policies towards more freedom for artists.
There was also some good news for the literary community. Cheshmeh, a major publishing house, got its licence back in January 2014. Ahmadinejad government had revoked it in June 2012 for being “insulting to Imam Hossein, the third Imam of Shiites”. Before this accusations Cheshmeh had received several notices to stop “promoting western ideas”.
Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ali Jannati, was early drawn into the spotlight, participating in press conferences about his policies on books and films. Jannati announced he would move towards removing the procedures of pre-publication licensing of books, which has sparked both new hopes and new concerns. Iranian authors saw this as a good opportunity to send their old books to publishers, but publishers were concerned that publishing books which have no guarantee of being approved, could be an expensive exercise amid paper price increases.
However, Jannati later stated that the Islamic Republic of Iran has principles that need to be upheld, and while they would need to maintain the current review and permission process, they may be able to accelerate the process. The first action of the new minister was to return books that had been in the hands of the auditing committee for an extended period of time. This did not mean that the books had been accepted, and the list of required amendments handed back to publishers and authors demonstrated that the government’s approach and attitude, at least as of yet, has not changed.
Rouhani and Ali Jannati both had meetings in the past six months with Iranian artists in both publishing and cinema, promising to pursue positive changes to facilitate the licensing procedures for books and making movies. Ali Jannati also said that artists need a secure space rather than a space controlled by security forces to be able to function. Rouhani said that art can not be commissioned or controlled. They both insist that controlling cultural industry is not the government responsibility and they suggest it would be better to shift the controlling system to the artists themselves.
Specifically regarding books, they’ve said the publishers should take the responsibility for the scrutiny of books, which diverts attention away from the government. This could pose a great danger to the publishing industry, with an increased risk that publishers could take a stricter approach to censorship than the government because they have more to lose. In a gathering with cinema industry practitioners in early January, Hassan Rouhani mentioned that now is the time to stop making sad and dark movies and encouraged movie makers to instead make hopeful and optimistic works. This seemed an official order rather than an inspiration.
The Iranian Writers Association has not been officially allowed to work or organise any gathering and event for over 15 years. In an recent interview, the cultural deputy of the Ministry of Cultural and Islamic guidance said, on the topic of the writers association resuming its activities: “Some members are dead and the rest are not into working anymore. So the Association can shed skin which is for the benefit of the Association and other writers.”
Shed skin means that the troublemakers in the eyes of the government — writers working against suppression and censorship — must leave so others could stay. The response of Writers Association was simple and clear: “If shedding skin means don’t say and don’t write, it is never possible.”
