IT WAS night-time in north Tehran and most offices had stopped working. But in a room on the sixth floor of an anonymous building, two young men were hunched over a mixing deck and two computers, trying to fix a problem that had evoked the wrath of Iranian government officials.
The problem was a woman. “You hear that?” asked Amir Sargazi, 29, the song’s composer. “We have to get that off the track.”
The offending sound was barely audible. On closer listening it was possible to detect the soft humming of a backing singer. It was a female voice — a forbidden instrument under Iran’s strict rules.
Nearly eight years have passed since President Muhammad Khatami was swept into power on a groundswell of support by millions of Iranians wanting social reforms. But as the campaign for the presidential election in June has begun amid talk about a possible American military strike against the country’s nuclear facilities, many of the youths who queued for hours to vote for Khatami say they are too fed up to care this time.
“We were serious advocates of Khatami but now we think it’s more valuable not to vote,” said Abdollah Momeni, 27, a student leader who has been arrested twice for his dissident opinions.
Two months ago Momeni’s organisation launched a website to gather signatures for a referendum to change Iran’s revolutionary constitution by bringing in checks on the power of the conservative mullahs led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the so-called Supreme Leader.
It has precious little hope of success but the students’ campaign has tapped into a deep cynicism among young people who believe that significant changes are impossible under the current system, no matter who becomes president.
Despite that view there are some signs of change. At the popular Jaam-e-Jam food hall in one of Tehran’s well-to-do neighbourhoods, women’s bare ankles peek out from their rolled-up jeans under coats that stop at mid-calf — all of which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
Women are still required to cover their hair in public, but the headscarves are a riot of colour and patterns these days and pink is this year’s hot fashion statement.
“I don’t think the authorities will restrict our dress again because they want to stay in power,” said Nasrin Tavanaie, 24, who was eating lunch in the food hall and wearing a deep pink headscarf pushed back to show some of her hair. “When they give freedom it’s difficult for them to take it back.”
Such freedoms are of little help to Sargazi, who has spent the past year trying to produce a record. He spent months last year composing eight songs for Mohammad Ali Zadeh, a popular singer, but only one was passed by a committee of censors in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Certain that the song with the female back-up singer was relatively innocuous, he pressed the committee to approve it.
“They kept this song for four months,” said Sargazi. “Finally they said, ‘This woman’s voice is forbidden, so we are deleting it completely’.”
Not surprisingly, the government’s rules on music ban any mention of sex or desire. But more subtle suggestiveness, such as a woman’s humming, can also spell trouble. So, too, can a rhythm that makes you want to get up and dance, since public dancing is forbidden at music concerts.
In order to circumvent the rules, some musicians travel abroad to Dubai to record. Their songs are then broadcast back to Iran on the Dubai-based Persian Music Channel, which is available to millions of Iranians who have defied the government and bought private satellite dishes.
The spread of the internet has changed the lives of young Iranians by allowing them not only to download files of forbidden music, but also to indulge in digital dating. In a phenomenon that has taken the country by storm, hundreds of internet blogs — web logs — have been created in both Farsi and English. Defying official censorship can be a perilous business, though: the police have arrested about 20 bloggers, sometimes holding them for months without trial.
Among them was Hanif Mazrouei, 25, who spent two months in solitary confinement after he was arrested last September for publishing an anti-government blog. Talking in low tones in a Tehran cafe, Mazrouei described how he was taken blindfolded to an unmarked prison, interrogated several times and accused of having contacts with dissident organisations abroad.
Also arrested was Arash Naderpour, 28, owner of the Tehran web company that published Mazrouei’s site. After the two men described their prison ordeal to some politicians, the details were published on a blog by the former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist cleric, whose online diary has become one of Iran’s most popular sites.
Abtahi’s blog is also regularly blocked by government officials. From time to time it reappears, however — a sign to Iranians of splits among politicians about how best to deal with their country’s restless youth.
Musicians such as Sargazi feel they can exploit such divisions by producing records. “Once we take out the woman’s voice we’ll resubmit the song,” he said. “Some officials will eventually approve it.”
