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Internet
Allows Real Iranians to Build a Virtual Community
By
Zara Houshmand, Pacific News Service,
May 14, 2001
Iranians in the United States have kept themselves out
of the spotlight since the 1979 hostage crisis for a variety
of reasons. But one man with an idea has allowed Iranians
living here -- despite their extraordinary disparities --
to begin thinking of themselves as a community. PNS Commentator
Zara Houshmand is an Iranian-American writer living in San
Francisco whose work focuses on cross-cultural issues.
Iranians in the United States are finally relaxing enough
to poke fun at themselves. So what do they joke about? Iranians
who are still trying to pass as Italians.
Until recently, being Iranian in America has been no laughing
matter. Since the hostage crisis in 1979, many have kept a
low profile to avoid hostility.
This has made it difficult to organize or speak out as a community.
Add to that the fact that Iranians are notoriously individualistic,
and that many came here for political reasons and have strong
feelings about the situation they left behind. They are also
ethnically diverse, and come disproportionately from religious
minorities. Iranian Jews, Christians and Ba'hais are hardly
eager to claim an identity that links them to stereotypes
of Islamic fundamentalism.
But out of this fragmented group, a voice is emerging -- or
rather, a chorus of voices. It's happening on the Internet,
thanks largely to the patient efforts of one unassuming but
very persistent man, Jahanshah Javid, editor of Iranian.com.
Six years ago, Javid put the first edition of a bi-monthly
magazine for Iranians in the United States. Today, Iranian.com
is updated every weekday and reaches about 100,000 readers
(roughly ten million hits, in Internet-speak). Those numbers
have nothing to do with venture capital or dot-com marketing.
Javid is still the only staff member and content is created
almost entirely by the readers.
Who contributes? Unpaid professional journalists and photographers,
poets, academics, high school kids. Submit an article and
you're likely to hear from friends you lost touch with 20
years ago. Content ranges from news and analysis to relationships,
soap opera to serious literature. A complete archive shows,
among many others, stories about new Iranian cinema, first-hand
accounts from the war with Iraq, poems by Rumi and Persian
pop songs. The lively letters section and provocative opinion
pieces can spark debates that continue for weeks -- and act
as threads in the fabric of a community.
Although most of Iranian.com is in English, there's a substantial
amount in Persian, even serializations of books banned in
Iran. Javid orchestrates all this from a garage -- amidst
debris of books and CDs, laundry, and empty tea mugs -- at
his computer at least 12 hours a day. He once had a respectable
job as a Washington correspondent for the British Broadcasting
Corporation. though his first work as a journalist was in
Iran.
His own writing, marked by a gentle, bitter-sweet humor, and
his candid photo essays are a mainstay of the magazine. But
his real genius is as an editor, or agent-provocateur for
the virtual community. The motto on Iranian.com's masthead
is "Nothing is sacred," and officially, Javid takes no position
other than defending freedom of expression -- in itself a
radical stance in a community with indelible memories of censorship
and totalitarian government, whether the current regime or
that of the Shah.
Javid is as ready to poke fun at die-hard royalists as at
the mullahs, but as often as not, he'll simply offer a contributor's
view and let readers respond. He argues that a virtual community
offers a safe space for practicing the kind of dialogue essential
to civil society, pluralism, and democracy that Iranians have
had little opportunity to practice at home.
The talk can translate into action.. When Sen. Barbara Boxer
(D-CA) insulted her Iranian-American constituents with a careless
comment, Iranian.com mobilized readers to demand a public
apology. They got it.
For at least some immigrants, cyberspace has become a place
to put down roots and redefine identity.
As one young reader wrote to Iranian.com: "I have finally
put on my pr’t-a-porter Iranian Diaspora frock. Why so late?
I didn't know I owned such a beautiful, richly-textured, brightly-colored
dress. Who knew? You did. You opened the closet door and let
all the bogeymen out, and there it was, hanging patiently,
waiting to be seen."
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Pacific
News Focus: Palestinian-Israeli Relations