PhotoDude.com

Wed. Sep 04, 2002

The Sullen Majority

The Sullen Majority – "Iran is a country with two faces. There are the public face of conformity with Islamic rules and the private face, which as often as not shuns, ignores or even despises those strictures [...] Today, two-thirds of Iran’s 66 million people are under 30. But many members of the generation that was conceived as warriors for the ayatollah are now chafing under his restrictive laws, more interested in checking their e-mail than in dying for Islam."

"The Lennon look-alike is Farman Fath-Alian, a musician whose latest CD has been blocked, for the last five months, by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (known as Ershad). Fath-Alian, who is 31, did succeed in getting his first album released, and he has held some concerts. But this time it is another story [...] O-Hum got fed up with waiting, so they put their music on the Internet. Now anyone who wants to can listen."

"For the time being, the conservatives at the helm of the Islamic republic have no solution to such easy technological loopholes. And whereas two years ago only 500,000 Iranians had access to the Internet, today that number is estimated at 1.75 million and is expected to grow to at least 5 million in the next five years."

"The computer has become particularly important in the lives of urban girls, often confined at home by traditionalist parents who, by the same token, have absolutely no clue what their daughters are doing online. A lot of what they’re doing, it turns out, is blogging [...] But in Iran, bolstered by the anonymity their computer screens provide, female bloggers are catching attention for their daring and articulate mix of politics, dirty jokes and acid comment."