About Fath

Fath

Fath, whose name meant the Conquest or Victory in Persian, was a Persian-language reformist daily newspaper published in Tehran in late 1999 and early 2000. It was published by the same team of journalists that had produced the banned daily Khordad, led by publisher Yadollah Eslami, after Khordad's publisher, former interior minister Abdollah Nouri, was imprisoned in November 1999. Fath quickly built a substantial readership and was described by Reuters, in the report of its closure, as a mass-circulation daily at the forefront of Iran's press revolution. Iran's judiciary banned it on 23 and 24 April 2000, in the largest single crackdown on the reformist press, saying it had published articles that disparaged Islam and the religious elements of the Islamic revolution, and a Tehran appeals court confirmed the ban definitively on 31 July 2001. Its short life completed the story of the Khordad newsroom: a paper created by a trial's verdict, and ended by a general closure.

Origins in the Banning of Khordad

Fath existed because Khordad had been destroyed in court. Khordad, founded by Abdollah Nouri and launched on 3 December 1998, had become one of Iran's most popular and outspoken reformist dailies, had helped force the government to admit intelligence agents' involvement in the 1998 murders of dissidents, and had published clerical critics of the establishment. In November 1999 the Special Court for the Clergy tried Nouri on charges based on Khordad's articles, found him guilty of fifteen of twenty charges, and on 27 November 1999 sentenced him to five years in prison and five years barred from journalism, ordering Khordad closed. A BBC summary of the succession captured what happened next in a single headline: Fath to replace banned Khordad headed by jailed former minister. The journalists remained, the publisher changed, and the argument continued under a new name.

The gathering that marked the transition showed the team's cohesion. Contemporary reporting preserved in a media archive summary recorded that dozens of journalists and writers gathered at Khordad's building to mark the first anniversary of the paper's print debut, in the days when Fath was being prepared as its replacement. Fath belonged, in that sense, to the same family of continuations as Jalaipour's serial newspapers Jameah, Tous, Neshat and Asr-e Azadegan, but it came from a different newsroom and a different political root: not a publisher's stock of reserve licences in the abstract, but a specific team orphaned by a specific trial, regrouping under Yadollah Eslami's licence while its founder sat in Evin Prison. Reference works on Iranian media, including Gholam Khiabany's study of the paradox of modernity in Iranian media, recorded the succession directly: Fath was published by the same team that published Khordad, led by Eslami.

Publisher, Editor and Editorial Board

Fath's publisher was Yadollah Eslami, who took on the legal exposure that Iranian press law placed on the named publisher of a daily that the judiciary was already watching. Its editorial voice was closely associated with Ali Hekmat, who had been Khordad's editor and who spoke as editor of the now-defunct Fath in interviews after its closure, telling the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat that Iranian reformist journalists did not oppose religious values and did not want radical change, that they were reformists who deemed the constitution to be the ceiling, and that the freedoms allowed within the constitution were the maximum being sought. That statement was effectively Fath's editorial creed, and it answered the charge on which the paper was later banned: the team insisted its Islam was constitutional and reformist, not disparagement.

The editorial board and contributor circle connected Fath to the wider investigative press. Emadeddin Baghi, the historian and journalist who had written the celebrated Neshat editorial advocating a modern approach by Islam to the death penalty, was a member of Fath's editorial board. Akbar Ganji, the leading investigative reporter into the chain murders, was likewise recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists as a member of the editorial board of the pro-reform daily Fath, alongside his work for Sobh-e Emrooz. A newsroom that included the successor staff of Khordad, the author of the era's most contested editorial on capital punishment and the investigator of the intelligence services' murders was, by the standards of Tehran in early 2000, a concentration of exactly the journalism the judiciary was moving to suppress, gathered under one new masthead.

Editorial Line and Reporting

Fath carried Khordad's reformist line into the new political season: support for President Mohammad Khatami's reforms, for the rule of law and for debate within the constitution, combined with scrutiny of the security institutions. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty's Iran reporting quoted Fath's analysis of the intelligence ministry in the aftermath of the chain murders, recording its argument that hardliners had sought to eliminate or capture the ministry because it supported Khatami's reforms while it was in a weakened position, and that their failure at the polls in February 2000 had removed that threat. Reporting of that kind shows what Fath did with its inheritance. It did not merely repeat Khordad's positions; it analysed, after the reformist election victory, how the factional struggle over the intelligence services should be understood, citing the public's own demand for the ministry to harmonise itself with the aims of the elected government.

The paper also refused the restrictions the authorities tried to impose on sensitive reporting in its final weeks. After the assassination attempt on 12 March 2000 against Saeed Hajjarian, the Khatami adviser and editor of Sobh-e Emrooz who was left severely disabled, Information Minister Ali Younesi forbade the press from publishing unofficial information about Hajjarian's attackers. Most reformist dailies criticised the blackout and ignored it, and on 2 April 2000 Baghi of Fath appeared before the Revolutionary Court accused of publishing information about the assassination attempt. That summons, three weeks before the paper was closed, demonstrated the working conditions of its last month: its board member was answering a court for its reporting while the paper continued to publish, in a city where the attempted murder of an editor had already shown what defiance could cost.

The February 2000 Election Season

Fath's brief life coincided with the reform movement's greatest victory. In the parliamentary elections of February 2000, reformist candidates won about three-quarters of the contested seats, and analysts of the period credited the reformist press with fostering the open climate that made the victory possible. Editors of reformist newspapers had jointly promoted favoured candidate lists, and almost all of the candidates elected from Tehran came from those lists. Fath, as a mass-circulation reformist daily publishing through that campaign, was part of the press system that delivered the result, even though its own founder-figure, Nouri, was in prison and disqualified from standing in the election his old paper's successor was helping his allies to win. The victory, however, convinced the movement's opponents that the press itself had become an electoral machine that had to be stopped, and the response came within two months.

Through March and April 2000 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered speeches denouncing the reformist press, complaining that ten or fifteen newspapers seemed to be directed from the same centre, accusing them of weakening trust and offending believers, and describing parts of the press as bases of the enemy. A restrictive new press law, passed by the outgoing conservative parliament, supplied the legal setting. The Revolutionary Guards warned that enemies would feel the hammer of the Islamic revolution. Journalists understood the sequence as preparation for a general closure rather than another round of single-title cases, and Fath's position was especially exposed because it was, by origin, a banned paper's continuation: the very existence of the title demonstrated the successor method that the authorities now intended to end for the whole reformist press at once.

The April 2000 Closure

On 23 and 24 April 2000 judicial authorities ordered the indefinite closure of Fath together with twelve or more other newspapers and magazines, including its fellow successor daily Asr-e Azadegan, for continuing to publish articles against the bases of the luminous ordinances of Islam. The specific ground recorded against Fath was that it was publishing articles that disparaged Islam and the religious elements of the Islamic revolution. The official communique said the newspapers had been closed in order to prevent them from committing new offences, from affecting society's opinions and from arousing concern among the people, and Tehran reporting added that the authorities claimed the tone of the closed papers had brought smiles to the faces of the enemies of the Islamic Republic and hurt the feelings of devout Muslims at home. Reuters described Fath and Asr-e Azadegan as mass-circulation titles at the forefront of Iran's press revolution and recorded disappointed readers learning of the bans at Tehran newsstands.

The closure was indefinite rather than immediately permanent, and Fath's legal end came later. On 31 July 2001 the state news agency IRNA reported that a Tehran appeals court had confirmed the ban on Fath, stating that the paper had been banned for publishing defamation and lies about the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards and other state institutions. With that ruling the status recorded in press-freedom references changed from suspended to permanently closed. The distinction mattered to the historical record: Fath was shut by administrative-judicial order in the April 2000 wave, kept formally in suspense for fifteen months, and then extinguished on appeal on grounds that named its critical reporting on the judiciary and the Guards as lies, the same institutions whose conduct its predecessor had investigated. No revival followed.

Aftermath for Its Journalists

The crackdown that closed Fath consumed its people through separate cases. Ganji, a member of its editorial board, had been arrested on 22 April 2000, the day before the closures, over his investigative articles on the 1998 killings and his remarks at the Berlin conference on reform, and he remained imprisoned for years in one of the emblematic press cases of the period. Baghi was arrested on 29 May 2000 after a hearing before the Press Court and sentenced on 17 July 2000 to five and a half years in prison, later reduced to three years on appeal, for undermining national security and spreading false news in the September 1999 Neshat editorial on the death penalty, on complaints filed by the Revolutionary Guards and former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian. Human Rights reporting listed Baghi expressly as a member of the editorial board of Fath when recording that sentence, tying the paper's name into the prosecution record of its journalists.

Other reformist journalists, including Massoud Behnoud and Ebrahim Nabavi, were also taken into custody as closures and arrests continued through 2000, and President Khatami himself said in August 2000 that the situation that had come about for the press was not satisfactory, while reformists in the new parliament failed, after Khamenei's intervention, to liberalise the press law. For Fath's team there was no third title. Khordad had been continued once, as Fath; Fath was not continued, because the April crackdown had been designed differently from the single bans of 1998, closing the successor titles together, jailing their leading writers through cumulative cases, and leaving the legal confirmation of the ban in July 2001 as a formality over a newsroom that had already been dispersed.

Place Among Tehran's Successor Newspapers

Fath belonged to Tehran in the same way its predecessor had: headquartered in the capital, sold from the capital's newsstands, arguing about the capital's institutions, and closed by the capital's courts. Its distinct place in the period's press history came from the clarity of its lineage. Jameah's chain showed a publisher outmanoeuvring bans with reserve licences; Fath showed a newsroom outliving its founder's imprisonment, which was a different and more human form of continuity. Khiabany's scholarly account preserved that lineage in a single sentence, later reference works repeated it, and press-freedom organisations preserved the paper's closure dates, charges and final appeal in their fact sheets, so that a daily which published for only a few months retained a fuller documentary trail than many longer-lived Iranian newspapers.

Closure and Legacy

Fath ceased publication in April 2000, and its ban was confirmed permanently on 31 July 2001. It was never revived, and no successor title carried the Khordad team forward as Fath had done. Its legacy was therefore double. As a newspaper, it had given the journalists of Iran's most outspoken reformist daily a second life through an election victory, published analysis of the intelligence struggle and a defence of constitutional reform in its editor's own words, and reached a mass readership before being closed in the crackdown that ended the open season of the Tehran press. As a case, it demonstrated the final logic of the period: a successor paper could survive the imprisonment of its founder, but it could not survive a coordinated closure of the entire reformist press, followed by the imprisonment of its board and the appellate courts' patient confirmation, a year later, that its reporting on the judiciary and the Guards had been lies. Fath's few months closed the Khordad story that Nouri's trial had begun.