Iranians imprisoned for playing indie-rock

There's an oldish clip from 2009 of British late-night news show Newsnight about the Iranian band Font going to the UK to play music. They had previously been imprisoned in Iran playing their style of music.

Iranians imprisoned for playing indie-rock

Nazanin Rafsanjani explains ta'arof on This American Life

Nazanin Rafsanjani was a guest on popular NPR radio show This American Life with Nancy Updike, during which Nazanin explained ta'arof. Someone took the time to put together a slideshow of Iranian scenes to accompany her words. It's both funny and insightful at the same time.

Politeness, pretence and ta'arof in Iranian culture

Here's a nice extended quotation that gives some great examples of ta'arof in Iranian culture. It explains the pretence of being humble and the complicated bluff and counter bluff that can ensue. This is the kind of dilemma that leaves foreigners, and even Iranians, not knowing whether their taxi ride was really free, are they really being invited to dinner and if so, will they be able to get through an evening meal without causing offence to their host.

Good Persian culture is peppered with politeness and a pretense at least of being humble. Iranians have a complicated list of things that are considered good and polite in social situations, and not different from those of other cultures. Generally, you want your child to marry into a good family. You want the families to be educated and wealthy and you want your children to be upstanding and polite. You also want to be looked upon by family, friends, and neighbors alike as a gracious, hospitable and welcoming host. “Taarof” has deep roots in the Iranian tradition of treating your guests better than your own family and being great hosts. 

Taarof is a verbal dance between an offerer and an acceptor until one of them agrees. It is a cultural phenomenon that consists of refusing something that has been offered to you even though you want it, out of politeness. On the giving end, it is offering something that may cost a lot in order to be polite, but not really wanting to give it away for free.
Some examples may clarify taarof. You go over to your aunt’s place and she makes a great Ghormeh Sabzi dish for lunch, which is your favorite. You help yourself to a healthy serving and at the end of it find that you are still hungry. Your kind, loving aunt will offer you another serving and you politely refuse. In this case you are taarof’ing because you would really like to eat more but you are too polite to say yes. But, alas, the Iranians have a solution for this. Your aunt will offer the food a second time and you refuse and then on the third try you can accept without looking like a glutton. Iranians tend to be very sensitive of what others will think of them so this sort of behaviour is expected, although annoying and perhaps antiquated, it is an inherent part of the culture. 

Another example is when you go to buy a dress at the store and ask for the price. If it is a small boutique in Iran, the shopkeeper will inevitably, out of politeness, say it is worth nothing. What he is trying to say is that you are worth so much more than the dress and have put him to shame for asking. In reality, he would like to be paid for the dress and is just being polite. After a second or third inquiry, the shopkeeper will probably give you the correct price and offer to accept payment. 

The art of taarof in the end becomes a ritual or a game that both participants are aware of playing. Some find it annoying, stupid, and a waste of time, asking the guest not to Taarof (“Taarof Nakonid”) when he refuses something. This is a double-edged sword because maybe the offerer is taarofing himself. This is where taarof can be misleading and land you in very sticky social situations. You never know the true intention of either party and you may not be sure if they really want to offer/take something or not. For example, if you are full and your aunt thinks you are taarofing, you are left having to eat the second serving of her food. And if you don’t eat it, you may insult her and her cooking. 

... It is truly one of the greatest distinctly Persian social behaviours that we can think of and is worth experiencing first hand.
From: Persian Mirror

Hey Ayatollah, leave those kids alone!

Classic Pink Floyd song Another Brick in the Wall remade as Hey Ayatollah, leave those kids alone! by Canadian band Blurred Vision:

U.S.-Iranain power relations, politics and conflicts in the early 1970s

Andrew Scott Cooper, author of a the book The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East, was interviewed on the excellent Conversations With History series.

The hour-long interviewed covers a range of interesting topics and sheds light on some previously unknown aspects of the U.S.-Iranian political alliance at the time.

• just how essential the Shah (personally) and Iran were to U.S. foreign policy goals in the Middle East and Asia from the late 1960s through the 1970s
• how Nixon personally gave the green light for Iran to raise it's oil prices
• how the OPEC oil embargo and rising price of oil shifted the balance of power in the Shah's favour
• the Saudi role in worsening Iran's economy and weakening the Shah's position
• the personal relationships between the Shah, Nixon, Kissinger and surrounding figures

Reza Abedi's greatest escape

Wrestler Reza Abedi's life story is full of escapes - from wrestling moves, tricky situations and ultimately, death at the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran. OC Weekly has a 4,000 word feature, Reza Abedi's greatest escape that describes how he got into wrestling, found himself at the front line of the Iran-Iraq war, outsmarted his enemies and escaped to freedom.

He eventually found his way to American and became a high school wrestling coach running one of the toughest wrestling programmes around. His full life story is coming out in a new book American Wings, Iranian Roots by Kristin Orloff.

American Wings, Iranian Roots
by Kristin Orloff

Hichkas - Iranian rapper

Here are a handful of videos from Iranian rapper Hichkas. You might know him from the film Nobody Knows About Persian Cats

Hichkas - Ye Roozeh Khoob Miad

Hichkas - Bunch of Soldiers

Hichkas - Ektelhaf

It's great to see that rap music in Iran, as everywhere else in the world, involves standing around on street corners in large overcoats. However, Hichkas looks great, has some interesting lyrics and certainly shows some of the real Tehran in his videos. Some of his homies look distinctly baby-faced/like they're wearing their sister's coats/they're bank clerks or engineering students.

صفر دو یک

Mohsen Sazegara on BBC's Taking A Stand

Mohsen Sazegara (محسن سازگارا), Ayatollah Khomenei's press attache, former head of Iran Radio and Revolutionary Guard founder, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Taking A Stand. He made the journey from revolutionary true believer and regime mouthpiece through to reformist newspaper publisher. In the interview though, he fudged a few of the hard questions: particularly those around why he did nothing when political opponents were being executed in prisons.

Interviews like this are supposed to be where people say how sorry they are, if they could go back they would change things, etc. Maybe it is better for people to show no remorse, to avoid giving a straight answer and to simply move on to the next question.

The interview was reminiscent of "Abu Jandal" in I Was Osama Bin Laden's Bodyguard. Jandal is quite clearly still in agreement with al-Qaeda/Bin Laden's critique of the West, goals and up to a certain point, attacks on military targets, methods.

Iranian ambassador to the USA... 100 years ago

From the Library of Congress Flickr page.

Google adds Yiddish translation - is it good for the Jews?

Some time ago Google Translate added Yiddish to their list of supported languages. Try it out with the Yiddish version of Forward. This potentially opens up troves of Yiddish history and literature to people with a limited grasp of the language. But is it good for the Jews? Or for anyone to have this happen to their language? Does machine translation help preserve a language or does it amerliorate the demise of a language?

Language preservation online

There are two interesting takes on this issue. The first, entitled The Challenges of Language Preservation, gives a good background to the problem and explains how globalisation is merely a step along a long path towards homogenisation of language but the author hopes the internet will be a useful tool for preserving minority language.

The second is a presentation from the TEDx conference, embedded below.

Language Use And Preservation Online

View more presentations from Tadej Gregorcic.