Iran

Adam Shatz writes: At the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The Unveiling of Secrets accused Iran’s monarchy of treason: ‘In your European hats, you strolled the boulevards, ogling the naked girls, and thought yourselves fine fellows, unaware that foreigners were [...]

Roger Cohen writes: I wanted to test a theory about Iran, so the other evening I made my way to the British Museum, strolled past glass cases full of the sarcophagi and mummies of ancient Egypt, and found myself in a room whose centerpiece is a baked clay cylinder smaller than an American football. The [...]

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: In August 2012 Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi attended a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran. His presence at the conference was something of a diplomatic victory for the Iranian leadership, whose relations with Egypt, the pivotal Arab state, had been at the lowest of ebbs since the 1979 revolution. Egypt’s [...]

The Guardian reports: When the Iranian student activist Arash Sadeghi was temporarily released from Tehran’s Evin prison in November 2010, he anticipated a little respite from a year of harsh beatings and agony in jail. Instead, within a few days, security officials had raided his home in middle of the night. As they broke their [...]

The Associated Press reports: Iran’s state prosecutor confirmed Monday that a jailed blogger died in police custody last week and that wounds were found on his body, the first official confirmation of his death while being held. The U.S. State Department and a press freedom group have called for investigation of the “suspicious death.” The [...]

The Onion: According to the results of a Gallup poll released Monday, the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than U.S. president Barack Obama. “I like him better,” said West Virginia resident Dale Swiderski, who, along with 77 percent of rural Caucasian voters, confirmed he [...]

The Guardian reports: Iran was set to block access to Google and Gmail in reaction to the anti-Islam film that has triggered protests across the Muslim world. “Google and Gmail will be filtered throughout the country until further notice,” said Abdolsamad Khoramabadi, an Iranian official with the state-run body in charge of online censorship and [...]

Golnaz Esfandiari writes: “I politely [told] her to cover herself up,” said Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti, an Iranian cleric in the city of Shamirzad in Semnan Province, describing a recent encounter with a woman he believed was improperly veiled. “She responded to me by saying: ‘You [should] close your eyes.’” The cleric, who spoke to the [...]

Laura Rozen writes: Ali Akbar Velayati, the longtime foreign policy advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is likely to run for Iran’s presidency next year, and if elected would take a more pragmatic stance to ease soaring tensions with the West that have isolated Iran and hurt its economy, a former Iranian diplomat [...]

Christopher Thornton writes: Except for one day each year — the November 4 anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. embassy — the former American diplomatic compound on Taleqani Street is a lonely place. Now serving as offices of the Sepah militia, another branch of Iran’s security forces, the building is still surrounded by the [...]