About Shabestan News Agency

Shabestan News Agency

Shabestan News Agency is an Iranian news agency based in Tehran that reports on religion, culture and the life of the country's mosques. Its Persian tagline describes it as a media of religion, culture and thought. Affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Shabestan was created to publish the activities of the cultural and artistic centres based in mosques, known in Persian as the Kanoon, and its reporting network reaches into every province of Iran. It publishes in Persian and translates its news daily into seven other languages. Iranian media directories list it among the country's news agencies, and in the Ministry of Culture's own rankings of news agencies it placed sixth among general agencies, an unusually high position for a specialist religious service.

A name taken from the mosque itself

The word shabestan is an architectural term. In Persian mosque architecture it denotes the roofed, columned prayer hall of a mosque, a covered space with rows of uniform parallel columns that opens on one side onto the mosque courtyard, where the mihrab indicating the direction of prayer is located. Mosques commonly have winter and summer shabestans, and the term has been used for these prayer spaces in historical texts since around the twelfth Islamic century. It was also, in older usage, the name for the private inner quarters of royal houses. For a news agency whose entire remit is the mosque and its surrounding community, the name is a statement of identity: the agency takes its title from the part of the mosque where worshippers gather, and its journalism is organised around the institutions that meet in and around that hall, above all the mosque cultural and artistic centres whose activities form its core beat.

Origins: a trial website in 2004

Shabestan began in the Iranian year 1383, corresponding to 2004-05, on a trial basis and in the form of a website, reflecting the events of mosques. For its first years it operated as an online service gathering mosque news without the formal status of a licensed news agency. Its launch announcement, circulated internationally at the time, presented the new service in direct terms: the agency would be active in pursuit of mosques and Muslim news in the world over, and the Iranian Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance was to inaugurate it. The announcement, signed by the agency's public relations officer Javad Khouban, gave an early contact address at the domain shabestannews.com, the address under which the service first published before moving to its present home at shabestan.news.

Formal licensing in 2007

In Azar 1386, in late November and December 2007, Shabestan received a news agency licence from the Press and Information Deputy of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and formally began its activity in cyberspace. Contemporary Iranian reporting marked the step from two directions: the Iran newspaper announced on 8 Azar 1386 that Shabestan had joined the country's non-governmental news agencies, while the International Quran News Agency reported days earlier that it had joined the country's official news agencies. The distinction matters to understanding the agency's position. Shabestan is affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, yet it entered the Iranian media system in the licensed, non-governmental tier of agencies rather than as a state wire on the model of IRNA, and its ownership is recorded as the Shabestan Noor Institute.

Ownership, leadership and headquarters

Persian reference listings record the agency's owner as the Shabestan Noor Institute, associated with Hojjat al-Islam Kamal al-Din Khodadadeh, who has also headed the national headquarters coordinating the mosque cultural and artistic centres. Its editor-in-chief is listed as Mohammad Rastgardani. In earlier statements its managing director, Hojjat al-Islam Soleimani, who served simultaneously as an adviser to the Minister of Culture and as head of the mosque centres' headquarters, spoke for both the agency and the network it covers, describing the mosque centres as a young, active, mosque-based network. The agency's headquarters are in Tehran, on Dr Beheshti Street, after the Shahid Modarres bridge, at number 263, placing its central newsroom in the capital within the administrative district of the ministry to which it is affiliated.

The mosque centres it exists to cover

Shabestan's founding beat is the Kanoon, the cultural and artistic centres of mosques, and that network has its own documented history. The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, in its resolution number 302 dated 18 Esfand 1371, in March 1993, approved the creation of a high headquarters for the mosque cultural and artistic centres, a step taken, in the official account, to confront foreign cultural invasion in a principled way. The first centre was inaugurated in the presence of Ayatollah Mahdavi Kani, and the network then grew across the country. Officials of the headquarters have given dated figures for its scale at different moments: more than two million young people and teenagers drawn into the centres, some 23,000 centres nationwide in statements from the late 2010s, and 25,946 centres recorded by the headquarters' head Habib Reza Arzani in 2021. The Islamic Consultative Assembly wrote into the Sixth Development Plan an obligation that by the end of the plan every urban mosque and every village of more than a thousand people should have such a centre. Shabestan is the news service of this world: its correspondents report the centres' festivals, Quran competitions, book programmes, libraries and youth activities as national news.

A provincial network of thirty-two offices

The agency maintains thirty-two representative offices, one in each of Iran's thirty-one provincial capitals and one for the South Kerman region, which is administered separately for cultural purposes. This structure is visible in its everyday output, where reports are filed by named provincial correspondents and frequently quote the public relations offices of the provincial mosque-centre headquarters. A single day's homepage can carry a report from Mashhad on a survey of teenage girls about how they wish their mosque to be run, a report from South Kerman on Quranic planning for the Maddahtan competitions, and a report from Golestan on a gathering of Sunni martyrs' families, each written in the same attributed, quotation-led style. Provincial culture officials have described the agency in terms that underline this function: the director-general of culture for Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province called Shabestan the loud, clear voice of the cultural and artistic centres in the mosques and a valuable opportunity to introduce their achievements.

Seven translation languages

Although Persian is its language of production, Shabestan translates its news daily into seven languages: English, Russian, Arabic, Urdu, Malay, Azerbaijani and Bengali. The selection is itself a map of the agency's intended audience. Arabic and Urdu address the wider Muslim world; Azerbaijani and Malay reach neighbouring and Southeast Asian publics with large Shia or Muslim readerships; Bengali serves readers in Bangladesh; Russian and English carry its mosque and religious reporting to international audiences. Few Iranian specialist agencies maintain a translation operation of this breadth, and it reflects the agency's original ambition, stated at its launch, to pursue mosque and Muslim news worldwide rather than only within Iran's borders.

Editorial sections and range of coverage

The agency's own site organises its output under sections that show a remit broader than mosque news alone. Alongside its lead section on mosques and the centres, it publishes sections for film and video, religion and thought, culture, politics, international news, women and family, photography, and the provinces. Its politics and international desks carry the statements of commanders, ministers and clerics that fill the general Iranian news agenda, while its culture desk covers subjects from rehabilitation funding and tourism projects to mosque-based schools and volunteer psychology networks in times of crisis. The mosque remains the organising centre of the service, but the structure is that of a general cultural news agency with a religious identity, which is how the Ministry of Culture classified it when ranking it among the general agencies rather than only among specialist ones.

Standing in the ministry rankings

The Press and Information Deputy of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has periodically ranked Iran's news agencies, and Shabestan's results in those exercises are a matter of published record. In the first ranking, published in Bahman 1394, in early 2016, Shabestan placed seventh. In the second ranking, published in Bahman 1395, in February 2017, it rose to sixth place among general news agencies. For a service devoted principally to mosques and religious culture to finish immediately behind the country's large general wires was a notable official recognition, and the agency's own reference entries preserve the two results as evidence of its standing in the Iranian media system of the mid-2010s.

How researchers have described its journalism

Shabestan's output has been examined in content analyses of Iran's web-based news agencies. In one such study, comparing five active agencies including Shabestan, the International Quran News Agency and the sports agency IPNA, researchers found that in Shabestan the provincial or counties service was the most frequently credited of its news services, that religion was its dominant topic, and that the president figured among the principal personalities in its news, with most reported events located in Tehran despite its provincial network. The study also measured its use of photography: about a quarter of its items carried photographs, a minority of those photographs were current news images rather than archive pictures, and the great majority of its photographs were classified as neutral, without added semantic charge. The picture that emerges is of a text-led, quotation-driven agency reporting official religious and cultural life, a style consistent with its own pages today.

Shabestan in Iran's religious media landscape

Shabestan works within a cluster of Iranian agencies devoted to religion, alongside the International Quran News Agency, the Hawzah seminary news services in Qom, and the AhlulBayt News Agency, but its niche is distinct: where the others are organised around the Quran, the seminaries or Shia news generally, Shabestan is organised around the mosque as an institution and around the lay cultural network, run largely by young volunteers, that the state built inside Iran's mosques after 1993. Its reports are cited beyond the religious press; academic literature in fields as distant as emergency medicine has drawn its Iranian figures from Shabestan reports, an indication of how far its general news gathering reaches. More than two decades after its trial website and nearly two decades after its licensing, it remains active from its Tehran headquarters, publishing the daily record of Iran's mosque centres to readers at home and, in seven translation languages, abroad.