Iran Opens New Front in War on Fun

While the young Syrian activists who use the Web to organize and document antiregime demonstrations across the country are once again counting the cost, in lives, of continuing to pour into the streets, their counterparts in Iran, who helped to pave the way for such protests, are living with a form of repression that is less violent but in some ways far more efficient and demoralizing.

As the Iranian-American Web site Tehran Bureau reported this week, Iran’s government has recently started to crack down hard on young people who use Facebook to organize even mildly subversive gatherings, like mass water gun fights.

Last week, when hundreds of young men and women responded to Facebook invitations to meet at parks in two cities, Tehran and Bandar Abbas, and spray each other with water, the authorities intervened, stopping the fun and making several arrests, even though there was no overt sign that the gunplay was at all political.

As Jason Rezaian explained in a blog post for Monocle, after the authorities broke up the gathering of about 3,000 people in Tehran’s Water and Fire Park, “Tehran’s chief of police, Hossein Sajednia, boasted … that the rule breakers had been identified and would be punished for actions that both ‘opposed Islamic values’ and disrupted ’social order.’ ”

Although Tehran Bureau’s anonymous correspondent in Iran reported that the original Facebook page for the water fight there was closed down, photographs of the event were posted on a replica page. A royalist opposition group, which seemed to endorse the view of the Iranian authorities that there must have been something subversive about such a gathering, collected several of the images and posted them on YouTube.

After they were rounded up by the authorities, some of those detained appeared, with their backs to the camera, in a report on Iranian state television, in which they appeared to confess that they had very mildly political or immoral aims.

As Mr. Rezaian explained in an e-mail to The Lede, the state television report began with a statement by Ahmad Roozbehani, chief of the local morals police, who said the young people had defied social norms. The authorities were forced to intervene, Mr. Roozbehani said, because “there were people in the park, respectable families who had gone to spend their weekend there, and they were unhappy with this situation.”

In the interviews with participants that followed, one young man confessed that the organizers’ “initial plan was to have fun and their second plan was perhaps a political one.” Another admitted that there was something racy about the whole thing. Most of the young women who took part, he said, “had imperfect hijab and maybe even their headscarves had fallen off.”

In his Monocle post, Mr. Rezaian noted that a remark by Ayatollah Khomeini might help to explain why some of Iran’s more hard-line Islamists see such events as a threat to be quelled:

No mention of water fights appears in the Islamic Republic’s constitution, but on the subject of mirth the system’s founding father was quite clear when he said: “There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humour in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”

Source: NYTimes.com