Wine in the Censorship Barrel of the Ministry of Culture

"Regarding words like wine that are said not to appear in books. There was a text condemning wine, but we said the word wine should not appear at all." This statement by Mohammad Selgi, the Director General of Book Development and Reading at the Ministry of Culture, represents the first official acknowledgment by Ministry officials of the existence of lexical censorship. Lexical censorship is a method where the mere existence of a word or phrase in all texts is prohibited, regardless of the content of the book. Mr. Selgi, who spoke to the monthly magazine Shirazeh and was quoted by the Mehr news agency, stated that the list of these banned words includes "names of animals and foreign names" and even "mentioning the name of the president of a certain country." The head of the Book Department at the Ministry of Culture mentioned, "If we consider the 72,000 book titles registered in 2014, about fifteen thousand of them have been reviewed. The remaining works have been deemed permissible due to their scientific and educational nature. Of the fifteen thousand reviewed titles, about six thousand had minor issues that we have communicated as conditional cases for the publisher to correct. Less than five hundred titles have been declared unauthorized." In response to criticism regarding the existence of books that should not be on the market, Mr. Selgi stated, "Some of these books may be from five years ago, and I may not be aware of them. My request is that if you have any of these books, please let us know so we can review them and collect the book if the claim is valid. Of course, I have been in charge of this section for six months. During this time, a report has come in about a book that received permission eight years ago and is being sold in the market." Mr. Selgi also mentioned, "There are a number of books that need to be addressed regarding illegal reproduction and distribution and forgery. Some are printed without permission, and some books have permission but are misused by others. We also face other cases that are not monitored, for example, some books that received permission for the first print but do not have permission for the second print or their second print is subject to censorship; however, the publisher prints thousands of copies under the name of the first print and sells them in the market without making corrections. If we want to open this area, several types of violations occur, each different from the other. This issue, meaning confronting the phenomenon of forgery, reproduction, and illegal sale of others' works, requires serious determination beyond the Ministry of Culture. For instance, we are facing unauthorized copying of other publishers' books in universities, which has seriously harmed the academic publishing economy and requires support and cooperation from the ministries of science and health." If we place Mr. Selgi's statements alongside the recent remarks of the Minister of Culture and the Cultural Deputy, we see signs of a crisis that the book censorship system in Iran is facing. Smuggled and Underground Books Mr. Janati said on Wednesday, January 13, 2016, that in the past, book smuggling was low, but today, with the state of cyberspace and underground publishing, this issue has increased. In February 2015, Hossein Noosh Abadi, the spokesman for the Ministry of Culture, said: "Regarding books that lack printing permission, we will deal with the publisher who printed that book without permission. The Cultural Security Police, based on an order received from judicial authorities, will act to collect books that lack legal permission." Mr. Noosh Abadi stated: "Books printed abroad have no possibility of being offered through official book networks, and those who distribute them inside will be dealt with." Azerbaijan and Afghanistan have been two main sources of Persian books that cannot obtain permission in Iran. However, the possibility of printing books without the Ministry of Culture's permission is not limited to printing abroad. According to reports from Iranian media in recent months, the number of unauthorized offset books available for purchase from street vendors and through telephone sellers of rare and second-hand books has increased. Some of these books are offset prints of books that received publication permission in previous years but were not granted reprint permission by the Ministry of Culture in later years. Other books are printouts of books that have been published online or in PDF format on the internet. Financial and Human Limitations in Censorship The Cultural Deputy of the Ministry of Culture explained on December 29 this year about the latest status of book censorship: "We also have other problems in the book administration and human financial resources that if they change, perhaps our conditions will improve." Mr. Salehi did not provide details about these financial and human problems but stated that the average review time for a book has reached about one month, and daily between 600 to 700 new books are added to those that need to be reviewed. The statistics provided by Mr. Salehi about the vastness of book censorship differ from those of Mr. Selgi. If we accept Mr. Salehi's statistics regarding the necessity of reviewing at least 40,000 books annually, it implies that 660 reviewers (or, in administrative terms at the Ministry of Culture, book review experts) must be active each month so that each of them reviews about five books within a month. This amount of expert work means that the Ministry of Culture must pay 660 million tomans monthly (based on the minimum wage for experts), which amounts to nearly 8 billion tomans annually. Meanwhile, the cost of expert book censorship at the highest payment levels during the reform years was less than 100 million tomans. The increase in financial and human problems in censorship is a direct result of expanding the scope of book reviews to include books printed in previous years and intensifying scrutiny in areas beyond social sciences and literature while formalizing the policy of word censorship. Word censorship has led to the review process encompassing books that typically did not require scrutiny due to their non-sensitive subject matter. The prohibition of forbidden words, which expanded during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration through the designation of forbidden words, continues in the Ministry of Culture's censorship policy, albeit with a more limited scope. Mr. Salehi has stated in this regard: "In the past year and a half, with the formation of a supervisory board, there are cases where sometimes the words are ambiguous, and discussions take place. Sometimes during the review, experts may have differing tastes because they have different interpretations. These cases are referred to the supervisory board." The Continuation of the Cycle of Taste Differences and Banned Authors The issue of determining forbidden words and phrases is not the only factor that perpetuates the cycle of taste differences in censorship. The problem of differing tastes remains. Mr. Salehi has stated: "In content reviews, we may encounter differences in taste, and mistakes may have occurred, but we work based on the law of censorship oversight, and our reviews are content reviews." However, this is not the sole factor of censorship. Mr. Salehi says: "Currently, there are no banned authors in the country, and in reviewing books, we only pay attention to the books themselves." However, he simultaneously acknowledges that "some authors who have not succeeded in obtaining permission for their works believe this is due to their own banned status." The Cultural Deputy of the Ministry of Culture has explicitly stated: "What creates a gap between the existing reality and the desired reality is that, of course, the reviewers of the books have a perspective and background that is not uniform. Naturally, when these individuals review a book, it differs from when another individual reviews that book, leading to differences in how the law is applied to the case. We have tried during this time to reduce the gap between these tastes to come closer to what should happen. However, one of the things that creates a gap between what exists and what should be in the book administration is these differences." This statement implies that, given the vast diversity and abundance of texts, it is practically impossible to reach a consensus within the censorship organization regarding the boundaries of censorship. Thus, the cycle of differing tastes that leads to political controversies continually and informally produces banned authors, gradually pushing them to the margins of official publishing, namely underground and smuggled publishing, and not only revealing the limitations of the censorship system but also significantly excluding a considerable portion of Iranian authors and translators from the publishing market. The economic and cultural damage directly affects publishers who must limit themselves to working within the official and licensed publishing sector, which is increasingly facing a crisis of declining circulation. Thus, in recent years, book censorship has become more than any other factor a source of crisis in Iran's publishing economy. The Dominance of Margins Over the Text Just as the prosperity and new technologies of production and distribution and satellite broadcasting challenged cinema censorship in Iran in the late 1980s and 1990s, and as home and private distribution of censored audiovisual products has recently challenged and marginalized censorship in state media, it now seems that the development of unofficial, underground, internet-based, and easy-to-smuggle book publishing has challenged the official book censorship policy in Iran. A policy that had managed to limit the scope of written publishing in Iran for over thirty years is now facing structural crises that make its continuation impossible.