"Nothing Is Sacred": An Interview with Jahanshah Javid

Jahanshah Javid founded Iranian.com in 1995, at a time when the Iranian community in the United States was sizeable and its presence online was increasing steadily. One of the first online Iranian communities, the website has become a forum for literary expression, personal memoirs, and political debate. Currently considered the largest Iranian magazine on the internet, the site is viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors every month, of whom many become regular contributors. (1) Javid describes Iranian.com as a community site for "the Iranian expatriates who care about their identity, culture, music, history, politics, literature and each other, as well as friends and family living in Iran" (http://iranian.com/main/about-us-0). Iranians from around the world visit the website, yet North American readers constitute 65.5% of all visitors--40% of whom are concentrated in California, the home of the largest Iranian immigrant population. Iranian. corn is blocked by most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Iran. (2) At the time of its inception, Iranian.com fit into a growing interest in online communities in the Iranian diaspora. Previous generations of Iranian immigrants have been active in creating community publications, as well as local and satellite television programs, but with the wider accessibility of the internet, many outlets for community mobilization and expression were increasingly taking place online. Unlike many of these publications and television programs, Iranian.com's content is almost completely in English, and it accepts most of its material from non-professional writers. As Javid explains, non-trained writers are not concerned with being "fair and balanced." Many contributors express themselves in literary form here for the first time, and their different--often opposing--perspectives are posted side-by-side. Pre-dating the emergence of Persian-language weblogs, Iranian.com serves as a powerful archive of Iranian online history and the stories of Iranians in the United States. Not every article submitted is published, and Javid decides which contributions are posted. Recently, however, writers are able to post blogs, letters, and comments to the website with no editing or censorship and receive direct feedback. Women writers have a strong presence on Javid's site, which he attributes to the fact that they write often and "write a lot about personal experiences, which I find more interesting than politics." Javid began his journalism career at the Iranian News Agency, and later worked for the BBC Persian Service, following his graduation from the City University of New York, Hunter College, in 1995. Javid believes that no topic is too sacred for discussion. The hundreds of thousands of contributions to the site suggest that this possibility has inspired Iranians living in the United States, and that Iranian.com has become a catalyst for Iranian self-expression. This interview was conducted by telephone in August 2007. Janet Alexanian: What was the inspiration for Iranian.com? Jahanshah Javid: When I was very young, in Abadan, Iran, I had a scrapbook [in which] I used to stick newspaper articles and all sorts of knick-knacks, and even a lock of my sister's hair ... all sorts of things. Unfortunately that has been lost somewhere ... but that is what Iranian. corn looks like, because it's not really a magazine, it's not really a blog, it has all sorts of things. It's a kind of pastiche. I try to collect anything interesting about Iranians, whether good or bad. Both my parents worked for an oil company in public relations and journalism; my mother also published an English journal and my father occasionally wrote for newspapers and public relations. In a way this has always informed my background in media. JA: And you yourself have a background in media as well? JJ: Yes, I went to the States for high school and when I finished in 1980, the revolution happened and I was all in the midst of the demonstrations here and wanted to go back. …