About Neshat

Neshat

Neshat was a Persian-language daily newspaper published in Tehran, Iran. Its name, Neshat, meant "Vivacity" or "Joy." The paper was a reformist and moderate broadsheet, and it belonged to the remarkable chain of successor dailies created by the same publishing team during the press opening that followed the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997. Neshat was launched by Hamid Reza Jalaipour as the successor of the banned dailies Jameah and Tous, with Latif Safari as its publisher and director and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin as its editor-in-chief. It quickly became as popular as its predecessors, and it met the same fate: it was banned by Iran's Press Court in September 1999 over articles that challenged the death penalty and the authority of the Supreme Leader, and its publisher and editor were imprisoned.

The Serial Newspapers

Neshat cannot be understood apart from the newspapers that came before it. Its publishing group first produced Jameah, meaning "Society," which was launched in February 1998 and became a watershed title of the Khatami era, criticising military commanders, demanding a multi-party system, and attacking reformists as well as conservatives when its editors thought criticism was due. When Jameah was banned in mid-1998, the publishers, who had expected the move, immediately launched a new daily, Tous, on the same day, with nearly the same staff and character. Tous was banned, allowed to reappear with an average circulation reported at 120,000 copies, and then closed permanently in September 1998 after its reporting angered the authorities; its senior journalists were arrested and jailed for several weeks. Hardline commentators complained about these reincarnations as "serial newspapers," but the tactic kept a reformist daily in print despite repeated closures.

Launch as Successor to Jameah and Tous

In February 1999, exactly one year after Jameah first appeared in the chronology given by the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the same group launched Neshat as the successor to Jameah and Tous. Hamid Reza Jalaipour was the founder of the new paper. Latif Safari was the publisher and director of the daily, and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin served as editor-in-chief, as he had on the predecessor titles. Most of the editors were those who had written for the Jameah and Tous newspapers, and the new daily inherited their readers, their reformist and moderate politics, and their satirical edge: the satirist Ebrahim Nabavi was among the prominent columnists whose work appeared in Neshat and the other papers of the group. Neshat was headquartered in Tehran and published in Persian in broadsheet format.

A Reformist and Moderate Daily

Neshat was a reformist and moderate publication, aligned with the opening associated with President Khatami but willing, in the tradition of Jameah, to push arguments further than official reformists found comfortable. The papers of the Jalaipour group questioned the status quo and served as vehicles for reform-oriented political figures to express their views, and Neshat continued that role into 1999, the most volatile year of the reformist press. It published during the months that saw the closure of the daily Salam in July 1999 and the student protests that followed, and its own coverage of those riots later formed part of the case against its publisher. By the autumn of 1999 the judiciary's campaign against the reformist press was at its height, and Neshat, as the surviving flagship of the serial newspapers, was an obvious target.

The Articles That Brought Prosecution

The closure of Neshat followed the publication of items that struck at religious and political foundations of the Islamic Republic. The paper published an article against the death penalty by an exiled Iranian activist, Hosayn Baqerzadeh, which questioned the use of capital punishment in Islam. It published another article by one of its own writers, Emadeddin Baghi, that was critical of the Islamic punishment of qesas, or retribution. And it published an unfavourable open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, by Ezzatollah Sahabi, a former minister and member of parliament in the early months of the revolution, which challenged the authority of Khamenei and urged him to distance himself from hard-liners in the regime. Together, the three items were treated by the authorities not as journalism but as offences against Islam itself.

Closure in September 1999

Iran's Press Court ordered the closure of Neshat on 5 September 1999. There were a total of 74 charges against the paper. The paper was found guilty of "insulting the sanctity and tenets of Islam," and the closure order described the offence as insulting the sacred decrees of Islam and the Supreme Leader. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the closure in a letter to the head of the Iranian judiciary, and the case was widely reported as part of the broader conservative crackdown on the reformist press in 1999, in which the dailies Salam, Zan, Khordad, and others were also closed. For Neshat's team, the September ban ended the third incarnation of their newspaper in less than two years, although many of its journalists soon reappeared on the group's next title, Asr-e Azadegan, which followed Neshat in the same serial chain.

Imprisonment of the Editor and Publisher

The punishment of Neshat extended to its leading men. In November 1999 Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, the editor-in-chief, was arrested and taken to Evin prison in Tehran because of the articles mentioned above, and he was sentenced to three years in prison. The publisher, Latif Safari, was convicted by the Press Court on several counts, including defamation, inciting unrest, and "insulting the sanctity and tenets of Islam," the latter charge arising mainly from the opinion piece challenging capital punishment, while the charge of inciting unrest apparently arose from Neshat's coverage of the July 1999 student riots. Safari was initially given a suspended sentence of thirty months in prison and banned from working as a journalist for five years, but in April 2000, after an appellate court upheld the thirty-month sentence, he was imprisoned in Evin prison to serve two and a half years. Emadeddin Baghi, the writer of the article on retribution, was also later imprisoned for his journalism.

The afterlife of Neshat illustrated the serial method one final time. After its closure, journalists from Neshat took over the dormant licence of the newspaper Akhbar and resumed publication as Akhbar-e Eqtesad, employing Neshat staff, while other Neshat personnel were employed by Asr-e Azadegan, the next title in the Jalaipour group's chain. Analysts of the Khatami-era press cited this pattern, in which a banned newspaper reappeared under an unused licence with its newsroom intact, as the defining survival strategy of the reformist press, and Neshat was one of its clearest examples: the masthead could be closed by a court, but the journalists, the readers, and the editorial line reassembled elsewhere within weeks.

Later Years and the Failed Relaunch

The ban on Neshat lasted for years. The ban was lifted by Iran's supreme court in March 2005. However, the paper was again shut down later, and reference works recorded 2005 as the year its publication ceased. Morteza Fallah was recorded as the owner and later licence holder of the title. In September 2013 it was reported that Neshat would be relaunched, that its licence holder would be Morteza Fallah, that Mashallah Shamsolvaezin would resume his post as editor-in-chief, and that Ahmad Sattari would be its managing editor. The attempted revival showed that the Neshat name still carried weight fourteen years after its closure, but the necessary permission was not granted by the authorities, and the relaunch did not take place.

Legacy

Neshat was remembered as the third life of the most inventive publishing experiment of the Khatami era. Jameah, Tous, and Neshat, followed by Asr-e Azadegan, demonstrated that a banned reformist newspaper could return under a dormant licence with its staff and readers intact, and the model forced Iran's judiciary to pursue not only newspapers but the people behind them. The price was paid by Shamsolvaezin, Safari, and Baghi in prison sentences, and by the paper itself in a closure that lasted, in effect, for the rest of its existence. Within the history of the Iranian press, Neshat stood as evidence of both the creativity of the reformist journalists of 1998 and 1999 and the determination of the institutions that closed them down.