About Soroush (magazine)

Soroush (magazine)

Overview

Soroush was a Persian-language weekly magazine published in Tehran, Iran, as the weekly title of Soroush Press, the publishing house affiliated with Iran's national broadcasting organisation. Before the revolution of 1979 it had been published as Tamasha, the official weekly of the National Iranian Radio and Television organisation, and under the name Soroush it continued as the broadcaster's own magazine in the Islamic Republic period. A study of the Iranian press between 1979 and 2004 listed Suroosh — spelled Soroush in other sources — among the eight weeklies still publishing in Iran at the beginning of the 1980s, when the number of newspapers and periodicals in the country had fallen sharply, and identified it explicitly as the weekly affiliated with IRIB, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting organisation known in Persian as Seda o Sima.

The magazine's position was therefore unusual in the Iranian press landscape. Most Iranian periodicals were produced by independent licence-holders, newspaper groups or political movements; Soroush was the print voice of the state broadcaster itself, published by an organisation whose parent controlled the country's radio and television services. Its history connects two eras of Iranian media: the pre-revolutionary broadcaster's magazine Tamasha, which presented television and radio to the public in print, and the post-revolutionary Soroush Press, which grew into one of the three main players in Iran's press market alongside the Kayhan and Ettelaat publishing houses.

Origins in Tamasha and Soroush Press

Soroush Press began its activity in 1966 as an affiliate of the National Iranian Radio and Television Organization, the body that later became Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. According to the scholarly account of Iranian media by Gholam Khiabany, before 1979 Soroush Press published only one title: the weekly, entertainment-oriented Tamasha. The British Library's Endangered Archives Programme catalogue, which holds digitised material from the magazine, describes Tamasha as the official publication of the National Iranian Television and Radio organisation, a weekly whose first issue was published on 18 March 1971 and which continued until 23 December 1978. It covered political, cultural and artistic events as well as reviews and previews of television programmes.

Tamasha was, in other words, the broadcaster's shop window in print: a weekly that told the Iranian public what was on television and radio, and carried cultural and artistic coverage around the broadcast schedules. Its run ended in the last weeks before the fall of the monarchy, with the final issues catalogued in December 1978. When the broadcasting organisation was reconstituted after the revolution as IRIB, its publishing arm continued under the Soroush name, and the weekly that had been Tamasha reappeared as Weekly Soroush — the direct continuation, under a new title, of the broadcaster's magazine tradition that stretched back to the early 1970s and, through Soroush Press itself, to 1966.

The revolutionary period

The renamed weekly was publishing in the midst of the revolution itself. An academic study of the thought of Ali Shariati, the influential Iranian thinker who had died in 1977, reproduces a sketch of Shariati from Surush magazine and describes the publication as one that began in the midst of the 1979 revolution in Iran; the particular issue discussed, number 8, dated 31 Khordad 1358, or 21 June 1979, was dedicated to Shariati and reflected the commemoration of him that followed his death. The detail captures the magazine's position in that moment: a broadcaster's weekly, newly renamed, devoting an early issue to the revolutionary intellectual whose lectures had helped shape the movement that brought the Islamic Republic into being.

The early 1980s then brought a severe contraction of the Iranian press. The analytical study of the Iranian press from 1979 to 2004 records that, following bans imposed in 1981 on newspapers affiliated with opposition groups, the number of newspapers and periodicals in Iran decreased to sixty-two by the end of spring 1981, with only four daily Persian newspapers continuing in Tehran. In that reduced landscape, the study lists eight weeklies still publishing: Suroosh, affiliated with IRIB; Javanan-e Emrooz, the weekly of Ettelaat; Rah-e-Zainab, successor of Ettelaat-e Banovan; Zan-e Rooz, affiliated with the Kayhan Press group; Ommat; Ettehad; and Ettehad-e Mardom. Soroush's presence in that list demonstrates the institutional protection that came with broadcaster ownership: while independent and opposition titles disappeared, the state broadcaster's weekly continued.

The publisher: Soroush Press and IRIB

To understand the magazine, it is necessary to understand its publisher. Soroush Press was the publishing operation of the national broadcasting organisation — first the National Iranian Radio and Television Organization and, after 1979, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the state-controlled corporation that held the monopoly of domestic radio and television services in Iran and ranked among the largest media organisations in the Asia-Pacific region. The broadcaster's head was appointed directly by Iran's supreme leader, and its publishing arm shared in the resources of that institution: news bureaus across the country and abroad, and regular access to state and governmental sources.

Khiabany's account identifies Kayhan, Ettelaat and Soroush as the three main players in Iran's press market, and notes that the expansion and consolidation of Soroush's position pointed to a wider pattern in which large organisations such as IRIB, with their massive resources, were the main beneficiaries of the rapidly expanding Iranian communications industry. Soroush the weekly magazine was the original title around which that publishing house was built: before 1979 it was the press operation's only publication, and the later growth of Soroush Press into a multi-title publisher grew out of the broadcaster's magazine tradition that the weekly embodied.

Expansion of the Soroush titles

From the late 1980s, Soroush Press expanded beyond its weekly. Khiabany records that Weekly Soroush, previously published as Tamasha, was joined by a family of related titles: Soroush-e Nowjavan, a monthly for adolescents published since 1988; Soroush-e Koodak, a monthly for children which began publishing in 1991; Soroush-e Javan, a monthly for youths published since 1999; Soroush-e Banovan, a monthly for women published since 1999; and Soroush-e Andishe, a quarterly review of philosophy also published since 1999. The flagship title of the firm, in the same account, was the daily newspaper Jam-e Jam, which received its licence in 1997 and began publishing in April 2000 with a print run of 480,000.

The dates of that expansion are themselves part of the magazine's story. The cluster of Soroush launches in 1999, followed by the Jam-e Jam daily in 2000, coincided with the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, whose more open and tolerant policy towards the press in Iran Khiabany explicitly credits: the launch dates, he writes, make clear that IRIB was one of the main beneficiaries of that opening. The broadcaster's publishing house thus grew in the same years in which independent reformist newspapers were also multiplying — but from the opposite side of the political divide, as the print arm of the state broadcasting establishment. Soroush Publications, the same house, was also a major book publisher, described in human-rights documentation as a major publishing house owned by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

Content and character

As Tamasha, the weekly had been entertainment-oriented, covering political, cultural and artistic events together with reviews and previews of television programmes. That inheritance defined the space Soroush occupied after the rename: it was a general and cultural weekly attached to a broadcasting institution, not a political journal of opinion. Where independent magazines of the 1980s and 1990s in Tehran defined themselves by their stance towards the system, Soroush was the system's own magazine — the publication through which the broadcaster presented itself, its programmes and its view of cultural life to the reading public.

Scholarly writing on Iranian media consistently places the magazine in that institutional frame. A doctoral study of women and media in Iran, citing Khiabany and Semati, notes that although print media could provide a space for alternative views in Iran's state-controlled broadcasting context, the state broadcasting organisation always had its own printed press — giving Soroush, described there as its monthly magazine, as the example. Whether catalogued as a weekly, its original and best-documented frequency, or referred to as a monthly in later secondary literature, the defining fact recorded across the sources is the same: Soroush was the broadcasting organisation's own periodical, the print companion of IRIB.

Place in the post-revolutionary press

The analytical literature on the Iranian press of 1979 to 2004 gives Soroush a fixed point of reference: it was there at the start of the period, in the small group of weeklies that survived the closures of 1981, and it was backed by the institution that dominated Iranian broadcasting throughout the period. In a press system where independent titles were licensed, warned, suspended and closed in large numbers, a magazine owned by the broadcaster faced none of those existential risks. Its continuity is precisely what the record shows — a weekly that changed its name at the revolution and carried on.

That continuity also makes Soroush a useful marker for historians of Iranian media. Its predecessor Tamasha documents how the pre-revolutionary broadcaster presented television culture to the public between 1971 and 1978, an archive significant enough to be included in the British Library's endangered archives digitisation of Iranian performance arts journals. Its post-revolutionary form documents the counterpart story: how the Islamic Republic's broadcaster maintained its own voice in print alongside its radio and television services, and later built a publishing house whose titles for children, adolescents, young people, women and philosophy readers, and whose Jam-e Jam daily, all carried the Soroush name into new markets.

Legacy

Soroush's significance in the directory of Iranian magazines is that of an institutional survivor. It began as Tamasha, the official weekly of the National Iranian Radio and Television organisation, first issued on 18 March 1971; it was renamed at the revolution, was devoting issues to Ali Shariati by June 1979, and it stood among the eight weeklies still publishing in Iran in the early 1980s when most of the country's periodical press had ceased to appear. Behind it stood Soroush Press, founded in 1966 as the broadcaster's affiliate, which grew into one of the three main players in the Iranian press market.

For readers of this profile, the essential facts are the magazine's identity and lineage: a Persian-language weekly from Tehran, published by the publishing house of Iran's national broadcaster, descended directly from the pre-revolutionary television weekly Tamasha, and documented in the scholarly and analytical literature of the Iranian press as IRIB's own magazine. In a national press history crowded with brilliant, short-lived independent titles, Soroush represented the opposite model — a magazine whose longevity came from the institution behind it.