18 Aug 2011 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa
Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Guidance has this week refused publication of Nezami’s Khosro and Shirin, a love story read by generations as a classic of Persian literature.
Writers and publishers in Iran are well-versed in the language of the censors, but this latest incision has come as a shock to all, with members of the literary community voicing their outrage and concern. One can only guess that it is the beautiful depictions of Shirin’s “embrace” of her husband Khosro that have been deemed unsuitable or even “indecent”, according to the regime’s tapered view.
Thousands of books await the censor’s eye with huge backlogs arising from the number of applications from some 70,000 publishing houses, but also the time that censors devote to assessing existing publications. Omid Nifarjam, himself a translator of books by Nabakov and other non-Iranian writers into the Persian language, provides an excellent insight into the situation.
Perhaps the spoken word is all that can remain untouched, delivered clandestinely by the brave. In this clip, prolific contemporary poet Hila Sedighi recites a poem of protest against the atrocities of the Islamic republic (begins at 0:41 seconds). She refers to Rustam and Siavosh, heroes in classical epic poetry, and declares, “of a country of philosophy and poems and piety, we’re left with ignorance and anger and denial”.
18 Aug 2011 | Index Index, minipost
Zhao Lingmin, one of the top editors at Window on the South, a Guangzhou-based news and current affairs magazine, has been suspended from her duties. In a letter to colleagues, Zhao wrote that an article called “China Has Risen, We Must Say Goodbye to the Foreign Policy of Revolution” , which she wrote for a recent edition of the magazine, featured “errors of political guidance”. The article, which is still available on a number of blogs and chatrooms, has been deleted from most other sites. The original link at the Window on the South website now results in a 404 error message.
17 Aug 2011 | Index Index, minipost
Vanuatu‘s Minister of Ni-Vanuatu business, Pastor Don Ken, reportedly visited the newsroom of the state-owned Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Corporation demanding that a story covering his arrest and jailing on the eve of Vanuatu Independence day celebrations in July 2011 be censored. Media watchdog the Pacific Freedom Forum (PFF) and reporters at the broadcasting station alike have expressed concern over the minister’s interference and pressure.
17 Aug 2011 | Index Index, minipost
Local papers in Albemarle County, Virginia, have reported that Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, has been removed from sixth-grade reading lists after a parent complained that it was “our young students’ first inaccurate introduction to an American religion.” In the book, in which a father and daughter are rescued by Mormons on condition they adopt the Mormon faith, Conan Doyle wrote that Mormons were “persecutors of the most terrible description”.
