Having lived almost all my life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I always wanted to see the West and why Islamic clerics in Iran were so against its values and lifestyle.
Before I came to Toronto as an immigrant in Dec. 2000, I was working as a tech journalist in one the so called reformist papers in Iran. A daily text column named “Internet” had a lot of readers whose emails were filling my yahoo account every day. The pleasure of helping people discover new things and cross new borders is the most satisfying experience anyone can have.
But then everything suddenly changed when the hardline judiciary closed down all reformist papers in one night. I lost my connection to the people who had encouraged me by their questions and comments.
After a few months, I received my visa and came to Canada, completely disconnected from a rapidly changing society that I loved.
You have no idea how much a bandwidth Internet connection helped me at the time. Having worked-or been tortured-by a slow modem connection, I could finally see the real potentials of the Internet. Through all that pointless but fun surfing, I came to a web site that changed my work and life: Blogger.com.
I started my own Weblog in Persian a few weeks later and found dozens of old readers of my column again. Then many people asked me to show them how to do the same thing. I wrote a simple guide on how to build a Weblog in Persian. Suddenly Weblogs became the hottest issue among Internet savvy-Iranians all over the world. It was a powerful bridge between immigrants and homeland inhabitants, girls and boys, parents and children, and especially between writers that could not publish their works freely in Iran, and their thirsty readers.
Tens of thousands of Persian Weblogs now attract millions of readers every day, but the language barrier has prevented the world from seeing the real Iran and its people, without the filters of Western media. A quick study of these Weblogs shows a completely different people than you might expect.
New generations of Iranian young people are more tolerant, self-expressive, independent, and individualist than ever. Iranians embrace extremely different values than their neighbouring countries, and surprisingly, than their fanatical leaders.
Salam pax, the Iraqi blogger who was the only real voice from inside Iraq during the foggy days of war, changed many minds about life in Baghdad. Now, while the Iranian fundamentalist regime is under pressure from the global community for its nuclear programs, human rights issues, and support of global terrorism, the only way the world can separate the fanatical government from the most educated and modern population in the Middle East is through Iranians who write their Weblogs in English
Luckily, aside from tens of thousands of Weblogs in Persian (http://persianblog.com), there are more than a hundred Weblogs in English (http://blogsbyiranians.com)-many of them written by people inside Iran.
As for my own experience, I can’t be happier when I see the thousands of people who log on to my Persian Weblog (http://i.hoder.com). I have regained the faithful readers that I had lost-and this time, without censorship. I’m my own editor.
Hossein Derakshan is an undergrad student in the department of sociology. He maintains uoftblogs.com.
