Pearl Harbor Movie Controversy Builds (in National News) Judy Chu Wins Assembly Seat (in California News) Will Sunshine Work With the Two Koreas? (in Business) Penn Masala: Cutie crooners bring Indian style to a-capella singing (in A&E) Emil Amok: My International Incident, Part I (in Opinion)

Iranian.com: A Special Virtual Community

By Zara Houshmand/PNS

Iranians in the United States are finally relaxing enough to poke fun at themselves. So what do they joke about? Iranians who are still trying to pass as Italians.

Until recently, being Iranian in America has been no laughing matter. Since the hostage crisis in 1979, many have kept a low profile to avoid hostility.

This has made it difficult to organize or speak out as a community. Add that to the fact that Iranians are notoriously individualistic, and that many came here for political reasons and have strong feelings about the situation they left behind. They are also ethnically diverse, and come disproportionately from religious minorities. Iranian Jews, Christians and Ba’hais are hardly eager to claim an identity that links them to stereotypes of Islamic fundamentalism.

But out of this fragmented group, a voice is emerging — or rather, a chorus of voices. It’s happening on the Internet, thanks largely to the patient efforts of one unassuming but very persistent man, Jahanshah Javid, editor of Iranian.com.

Six years ago, Javid put out the first edition of a bi-monthly magazine for Iranians in the United States. Today, Iranian.com is updated every weekday and reaches about 100,000 readers (roughly 10 million hits, in Internet-speak). Those numbers have nothing to do with venture capital or dot-com marketing. Javid is still the only staff member and content is created almost entirely by the readers.

Who contributes? Unpaid professional journalists and photographers, poets, academics, high school kids. Submit an article and you’re likely to hear from friends you lost touch with 20 years ago. Content ranges from news and analysis to relationships, soap operas and serious literature. A complete archive shows, among many others, stories about new Iranian cinema, first-hand accounts from the war with Iraq, poems by Rumi and Persian pop songs. The lively letters section and provocative opinion pieces can spark debates that continue for weeks — and act as threads in the fabric of a community.

Although most of Iranian.com is in English, there’s a substantial amount in Persian, even serializations of books banned in Iran. Javid orchestrates all this from a garage — amidst debris of books and CDs, laundry, and empty tea mugs — at his computer at least 12 hours a day. He once had a respectable job as a Washington correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation, though his first work as a journalist was in Iran.

His own writing, marked by a gentle, bitter-sweet humor, and his candid photo essays are a mainstay of the magazine. But his real genius is as an editor, or agent-provocateur for the virtual community. The motto on Iranian.com’s masthead is “Nothing is sacred,” and officially, Javid takes no position other than defending freedom of expression — in itself a radical stance in a community with indelible memories of censorship and totalitarian government, whether the current regime or that of the Shah.

Javid is as ready to poke fun at die-hard royalists as at the mullahs, but as often as not, he’ll simply offer a contributor’s view and let readers respond. He argues that a virtual community offers a safe space for practicing the kind of dialogue essential to civil society, pluralism, and democracy that Iranians have had little opportunity to practice at home.

The talk can translate into action. When Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., insulted her Iranian American constituents with a careless comment, Iranian.com mobilized readers to demand a public apology. They got it.

For at least some immigrants, cyberspace has become a place to put down roots and redefine identity.

As one young reader wrote to Iranian.com: “I have finally put on my prêt-a-porter Iranian diaspora frock. Why so late? I didn’t know I owned such a beautiful, richly-textured, brightly-colored dress. Who knew? You did. You opened the closet door and let all the bogeymen out, and there it was, hanging patiently, waiting to be seen.”