June 01, 2018
On May 8, Tehran police carried out a series of coordinated raids on some bookstores on Enqelab Avenue (former Shah Reza Avenue) and seized a large number of books that had not been approved for publication by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the semi-official Fars news agency said.
The report added that the Publishers Associations and many bookstores in Tehran had worked closely with the police on the operation to identify shops that sold “underground publications with problematic content that glorified the Pahlavi era and attacked the State.”
The director of the Publishers Association, Mahmoud Amouzegar, and many bookshop owners have been urging the authorities for a long time to seize “banned books” and tackle illegal printing, publication, and distribution of books.
“Police have arrested the main culprits in the illegal printing and distribution of these banned books,” the commander of Tehran’s Law Enforcement Force (NAJA), Alireza Lotfi, said. “A handful of shops were selling these books in direct violation of legal and religious laws. We have confiscated 20,000 books, the majority of which promote subversive ideas and attack the state. Police have arrested three people.”
The police raids coincided with the Tehran International Book Fair 2018, which was held at Grand Prayers Grounds between May 4 and 12.
“It is forbidden to own and read such corrupt books,” Tehran Friday Prayer leader Ayatollah Ali Movahedi-Kermani said in a sermon. “I’m not against reading books. But I cannot condone books that corrupt the minds of our young people.”
The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance routinely refuses to issue publication permits to books that fail to pass its vetting guidelines. As a result, many authors are forced to publish their books on the internet or by using an offset printer. NAJA has made a concerted effort in recent times to seize books that have been released without the government’s official seal of approval. But the regime cannot prevent writers from publishing their books online.
The recent confiscation of banned books by NAJA reminds one of the desgtruction of the Persian libraries by the invading Arab armies in the 7th century, the burning of scientific and literary works by the church in medieval Europe, and Nazi book-burning in Germany and Austria in the 1930s.
French director Francois Truffaut’s 1966 classic science fiction film “Fahrenheit 451,” based on the 1953 novel by American author Ray Bradbury, depicts an authoritarian regime which dispatches firemen to destroy all literature to prevent revolution and thinking.
