About Tous

Tous

Tous was a reformist daily newspaper published in Tehran in 1998. It appeared within days of the banning of its predecessor Jameah, it was produced by the same editorial team with much the same content, and it was permanently shut down in September 1998 after a brief and turbulent life that included a first closure commuted to a fine, a physical attack on its editor, and the arrest of four of its senior staff. Tous was published in Persian through the Jamee-Rooz publishing company, directed by Mohammad Sadegh Javadi-Hessar, with Hamid Reza Jalaipour among its managers and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin as editor-in-chief. More than any other title, Tous gave the Khatami-era practice of the successor newspaper its public form: a banned daily returning to the newsstands under a new name, daring the courts to close it again.

Birth as the Successor to Jameah

Tous began publication in the summer of 1998 following the banning of Jameah. Jameah, launched on 5 February 1998 by Jalaipour's publishing group with Shamsolvaezin as editor, had been ordered closed by the Tehran Press Court in June and had its licence revoked on appeal on 23 July 1998, after it quoted Revolutionary Guards commander Yahya Rahim Safavi threatening the liberal press. The publishers immediately replaced it with Tous. Encyclopaedia Iranica described the new daily as identical to the banned paper except for its name, and Human Rights Watch recorded that it was produced by the same editorial team with much the same content. Amnesty International, writing in September 1998, likewise noted that Tous began publication earlier that year following the banning of Jameah and maintained the editorial staff of its predecessor.

The speed of the succession was the point. Jameah's editors had prepared reserve publishing licences precisely so that closure would not silence them, and Tous proved the preparation worked. To the judiciary, the manoeuvre was reminiscent of Iran in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party had used a stock of publishing licences to replace its banned newspapers. Head of the Judiciary Ayatollah Yazdi objected publicly that the publication of a previously forbidden newspaper under a new name was illegal and asked the Ministry of Culture to take action before someone else did. The legal position was less clear than his objection suggested, because the Press Law prohibited publication under the same name as a banned title without clearly prohibiting the same staff from publishing under a new title.

People and Publishing House

The newspaper was published through the Jamee-Rooz company and directed by Mohammad Sadegh Javadi-Hessar, who also served as a sub-editor on the paper. Hamid Reza Jalaipour, Jameah's publisher, was a manager of Tous as well, so the new title preserved not only the newsroom but the ownership and management of the old one. Its editor was Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, who later recalled the experiment in terms that captured its self-understanding, saying that the team was a test case of how much openness the government could tolerate. Among its staff writers was Seyed Ebrahim Nabavi, the satirist whose arrest alongside the paper's managers in September underlined that the authorities treated Tous not as a new publication but as the continuation of a known opponent.

That continuity shaped how everyone behaved. Readers who had bought Jameah could buy Tous and find the same voices. Officials who had complained about Jameah watched Tous for the same offences. Vigilante opponents of the reformist press did not wait for the courts at all. Human Rights Watch recorded that, shortly after Yazdi's objection, enforcers attacked the paper's editorial offices and beat up Shamsolvaezin. Scholarly accounts added that members of the hardline Ansar-e Hezbollah group carried out the beating in August 1998, the same month in which the judiciary first ordered the paper closed. Tous therefore lived under three kinds of pressure at once: legal, political and physical.

Editorial Line and Confrontation

Tous kept the editorial character that had made and unmade Jameah. It championed reform, questioned the status quo and gave space to reform-oriented political figures, and it questioned the absolute powers of the Supreme Leader in terms that contemporaries considered unusually direct. Shamsolvaezin refused to apologise for that questioning and demanded a constitutional reason for the paper's treatment, arguing that the constitution placed the Leader, like any other citizen, before the law, and asking what the paper had done wrong and where it had violated the law. Even sympathetic observers thought the paper pressed its luck. Abbas Abdi, editor of the liberal daily Salam, was quoted as saying that Tous marched ahead with a sharp object and plunged it into its opponents, a metaphor that conveyed both admiration and alarm.

Contemporaries also noted smaller provocations that accumulated into a reputation. Some journalists said Tous angered Ayatollah Khamenei by ignoring an unspoken convention of Iranian front pages in its layout and presentation. Whether or not any single gesture mattered, the paper's overall stance was unmistakable. It treated the limits of permitted criticism as questions to be tested in print rather than boundaries to be obeyed in advance, and it did so at a moment when senior figures of the Islamic Republic, including Khamenei himself, were repeatedly warning against what they called a cultural offensive by the West working through negligent elements inside the country. Tous was, by design, the most visible of the elements they meant.

First Closure, Commutation and Return

The judiciary first ordered Tous closed in August 1998 for, in the phrase used against its predecessor as well, publishing lies and disrupting public order. That order did not stand in its original form. Encyclopaedia Iranica recorded that Tous was banned by the Press Court but that an intervention by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, together with protests by students at Tehran University, resulted in the sentence being commuted to a monetary fine. The paper was allowed to reappear, on the understanding reflected in contemporary reporting that its front page would avoid further controversy while feelings cooled. The episode captured the divided state that defined the whole Khatami press opening: a court could close a newspaper, a ministry could bargain the closure down to a fine, and students could help make the bargain stick.

The reprieve was brief and conditional, and everyone involved understood it as such. The paper had survived by negotiation rather than by legal victory, which meant its continued existence depended on political weather that was already turning. In early September, hardline attackers physically assaulted Culture Minister Ataollah Mohajerani and Vice-President Abdollah Nouri, himself later the publisher of Khordad, at ceremonies honouring Iranians killed in the war with Iraq. President Khatami responded that the authorities must not show mercy toward what he called an ugly vengeance against the rule of law and freedom. Within days the conflict moved from street violence back into the courts and ministries, and Tous was at the centre of it.

The September Crisis and Permanent Closure

On 15 September 1998 Ayatollah Khamenei threatened to silence independent newspapers through other means if Khatami's government failed to do so, characterising the offending media as a dangerous, creeping cultural movement writing against Islam and saying that he was waiting to see what officials would do. The next day Tous was ordered closed. Human Rights Watch recorded that the closure was ordered by the Supervisory Board within the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance itself, a sign that the ministry had buckled under political pressure, and that the procedures followed bypassed the Press Court. The Committee to Protect Journalists summarised the formal ground as publication of articles against national security and general interests.

Two specific strands of reporting fed the final crisis. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders reported that the detained journalists had been held after Tous printed an article that questioned the Iranian government's recent policies in Afghanistan, at the height of the confrontation with the Taliban after the killing of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i Sharif, when questioning Tehran's hard line was treated as a security offence. Encyclopaedia Iranica added the item that is most often cited as the immediate trigger for permanent closure: Tous quoted former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing as having said that Ayatollah Khomeini had applied for asylum when he arrived in France from exile in Iraq in 1978. At a moment of maximum sensitivity on both foreign policy and the founder's legacy, the paper had challenged both at once.

Arrests of the Tous Four

The closure came with arrests. On 16 September 1998, by order of the Islamic Revolutionary Courts, the paper's managers Hamid Reza Jalaipour and Mohammad Sadegh Javadi-Hessar and its editor Mashallah Shamsolvaezin were arrested, and its offices were raided by members of the Revolutionary Guard. Columnist Seyed Ebrahim Nabavi was arrested two days later, on 18 September, by Revolutionary Guards, becoming the fourth Tous journalist detained. Amnesty International treated all four as prisoners of conscience, noted that none appeared to have been granted access to family or legal representation, and warned that they might face general charges of subversion or even the offence of enmity with God, which carried a mandatory death sentence.

Human Rights Watch called publicly for their immediate and unconditional release, arguing that the real motive was to punish them for their journalism and to intimidate other independent-minded journalists. The four men were released in October 1998, after several days and weeks in detention, but the release did not end their jeopardy. As of August 1999 the charges before the Islamic Revolutionary Courts still stood, including the charge of enmity with God. Tous itself did not return. Its permanent closure in September 1998 closed the second link of the chain that had begun with Jameah, and the team's next answer, after a pause, was a new title again.

Succession by Neshat and Place in the Chain

In February 1999 Tous was replaced in the chain by Neshat, launched by the same Jalaipour group with Latif Safari as publisher and Shamsolvaezin again as editor, exactly a year after Jameah had first appeared. Neshat was banned in September 1999, and members of the same circle then worked on Asr-e Azadegan, launched in October 1999 and banned in April 2000. Writers on the period listed the sequence as a single story told under successive mastheads, and hardline commentators gave it the name that stuck, the serial newspapers. Tous occupied the pivotal position in that sequence because it proved the method under fire: it showed that a successor could survive a first closure, win a commutation, and still be extinguished weeks later when the political balance shifted.

Closure and Legacy

Tous ceased publication in September 1998 and was never revived. Its legacy was carried by people rather than by the title itself. Shamsolvaezin went on to edit Neshat and Asr-e Azadegan, was imprisoned in April 2000 over an article from his Neshat period, and received the Committee to Protect Journalists' International Press Freedom Award that year, with the citation treating Jameah, Tous, Neshat and Asr-e Azadegan as one body of groundbreaking work. Jalaipour and Javadi-Hessar remained central figures in accounts of the reformist press, and Nabavi became one of Iran's best-known satirists. For press historians, Tous remained the clearest case study of 1998: a Tehran daily that tested how much openness the system would tolerate, received its answer in stages, in August with a closure bargained down to a fine and in September with arrests, a ministry-ordered shutdown and a ban that was never lifted.