About Zan

Zan

Zan, whose name meant Woman, was a Persian-language newspaper published in Tehran, Iran, from 1998 until it was banned in 1999. It was founded by Faezeh Hashemi, a member of parliament and the daughter of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and it was the first women's newspaper in Iran, described by the United States Institute of Peace's Iran Primer as the first women's daily newspaper in the country. Zan appeared during the opening of the Iranian press that followed the election of reformist president Mohammad Khatami in 1997, and it brought women directly into the political debate between modernists and traditionalists. The hard-line judiciary harassed it from the start, its reporters were arrested, and on 6 April 1999 the Revolutionary Court ordered it closed after it published a New Year message from the exiled former empress Farah Diba and a cartoon satirising the unequal treatment of women in Islamic law. It never reappeared.

Founding in the Khatami Opening

Zan was founded by Faezeh Hashemi in July 1998, becoming the first-ever women's newspaper in Iran. Its launch came a year after Khatami's election victory, in which women voters had played a conspicuous part, and at a moment when a mushrooming reformist press was testing the limits of what could be printed in the Islamic Republic. The paper was a supporter of Khatami and his reform efforts, and it was edited by Hashemi herself, who was simultaneously a sitting member of parliament for Tehran, having been elected in 1996. That combination was unprecedented: a newspaper devoted to women's rights, run by a woman who was both a national legislator and a member of one of the country's most prominent political families. Because Hashemi was an elected deputy in the Fifth Majlis, she was able to use the newspaper as a mouthpiece for women's issues, although the paper also addressed wider social issues to expand its readership, and she declared that if men were part of the problem, the paper should get men to read about these issues too.

Faezeh Hashemi

The founder of Zan had already become a symbol of women's expanding role in Iranian public life before she entered journalism. Faezeh Hashemi, born on 7 January 1963, was the daughter of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, and of Effat Marashi. In 1993 she had helped to organise the Women's Islamic Games, and she had attracted conservative anger by advocating women's participation in sport, including riding bicycles in public. In the 1996 parliamentary elections she shocked many observers by coming second in the Tehran constituency, next only to the powerful speaker of parliament, and many believed she had in fact finished first before being pushed into second place. In 1997 she tried to run for the presidency to succeed her father but was overruled by the Guardian Council, which had never allowed a woman to run for that office; she supported Khatami in that election instead. She served in parliament from 1996 to 2000 as a member of the Executives of Construction Party, the moderate political grouping associated with her father. Zan was the journalistic expression of the same public career.

A Newspaper in a Hostile Parliamentary Climate

Zan was launched into a parliament that was, on women's questions, moving in the opposite direction. The Fifth Majlis had the highest number of women deputies yet elected, fourteen, yet it proved to have the worst record on women's rights of any parliament to that point, according to the analysis published by Middle East Report. Its newly created Women's Commission, in the name of defending women's rights, proposed two bills that became infamous for their anti-women slant: one stipulated that doctors could treat only patients of the same sex, and the second aimed to prevent the press from printing features on women and to halt the lively debate on women's rights. Both bills were part of a concerted conservative effort to frustrate Khatami's promised reforms, and although Hashemi and other reformists opposed them from a minority position, the two laws were ratified in July 1998, the very month Zan was founded, even if they proved so far removed from social reality that they were impossible to implement. The paper was therefore born as an act of defiance against legislation intended, in part, to silence exactly the kind of publication it intended to be.

Content and Controversies

Zan used its pages to contest the legal and social subordination of women. Contemporary commentary noted that it criticised everything from temporary marriage to stoning as a punishment. Its most legally dangerous material concerned the law of blood money: the paper published a political cartoon critical of Islamic jurisprudence, satirising the rule under which the compensation paid for a murdered woman was lower than that paid for a murdered man. That cartoon, together with its cartoons criticising Iranian traditionalists, was among the reasons later cited for its closure. The paper also intervened in national politics beyond women's questions. Because its founder was a parliamentarian and a Rafsanjani, Zan was read as one of the principal press supporters of the reform camp, and its willingness to print material that other papers avoided made it a repeated target of the judiciary, which summoned Hashemi twice on charges of publishing false news even before the final closure.

The Leaked Death List

During its brief existence Zan broke several important news stories, the most consequential of which came in the autumn of 1998. The newspaper published a leaked list of 179 intellectuals, writers and political activists who were marked for death by the Iranian government. The list included the writer Nooshabeh Amiri, the satirist Ebrahim Nabavi, the lawyer Mehrangiz Kar and Zan's own reporter Camelia Entekhabifard. The story caused a great deal of controversy within Iran, appearing in the same season in which a series of murders of dissident intellectuals, remembered as the chain murders, was coming to light. By printing the list, Zan placed itself at the centre of the most sensitive security story of the Khatami years and demonstrated that a newspaper founded to cover women's rights understood its brief to include the defence of intellectuals and writers of both sexes against the apparatus that was targeting them.

Harassment and the Arrest of Camelia Entekhabifard

The paper was quickly harassed by the hard-line judiciary, and its staff paid a personal price. Its reporter Camelia Entekhabifard was arrested and held for 76 days, according to the account of her career drawn on by studies of Iranian social movements; her own later memoir, published in English in 2008, recounted her experiences as a young journalist in the reformist press. She was known within the Tehran press corps for adventurous reporting and had volunteered as Zan's correspondent for crisis areas such as Kosovo, and had even sought to travel to Afghanistan to meet officials of the Taliban. After the paper's closure she was arrested again: reporting in August 1999 described the 26-year-old journalist, formerly of Zan, being arrested after she had returned from the United States, and twice being allowed to call her mother in Tehran. By then the daily she had worked for was still closed and awaiting trial at the Revolutionary Court, which was responsible for national security offences.

Closure on 6 April 1999

The Revolutionary Court ordered Zan to cease publication on 6 April 1999. The reasons cited for the ban included the newspaper's publication of cartoons criticising Iranian traditionalists and the publication of a Newroz message from Farah Diba, the exiled widow of the last shah, addressed to the Iranian people for the New Year. Middle East Report's account of the episode added a detail that reformists found damning: the whole text of the former empress's message, prefaced by a denunciation, had in fact been printed earlier by a paper supporting the conservatives. Hashemi defended her paper in court, and the reformist press stood up for Zan, but to no avail, and her father, the former president, remained silent. According to the World Association of Newspapers, the April order was the third time the paper had been shut down since its inception the previous year, an indication of how continuously it had been pursued through the courts during its short life.

International Reaction

The closure was taken up internationally within days. On 9 April 1999 the World Association of Newspapers, the Paris-based global organisation of the newspaper industry, wrote to President Khatami asking the Iranian government to lift the ban on Zan, which it described as a moderate newspaper and as one of the principal supporters of Khatami and his reform efforts. Its president, Bengt Braun, wrote that banning a newspaper to silence alternative opinion was an abuse of power, in direct contradiction to all international conventions, and urged Khatami to use his influence to ensure that the Revolutionary Court's ban was lifted and that the journalists of what it called a courageous and well-respected newspaper could return to work unharassed. The Committee to Protect Journalists likewise recorded Zan in its press freedom documentation on Iran, citing both the Farah Diba message and the cartoon about the lower blood money paid for murdered women as the immediate causes of the closure. The appeals changed nothing, and the ban stood.

Legacy

Zan survived for less than a year, but its historical place was secure. It was the first newspaper in Iran founded specifically for and about women, launched by the country's most prominent woman politician of the 1990s at the height of a parliamentary campaign to restrict debate about women, and it used that position to challenge unequal laws on compensation, to criticise temporary marriage and stoning, and to publish the leaked list of intellectuals marked for death. Later assessments of women's politics in Iran, including the Iran Primer published by the United States Institute of Peace, continued to cite the founding of Zan in 1998 and its closure by the authorities in 1999 as landmarks in the expanding, and contested, public role of Iranian women. Hashemi's own later career, including her arrests after the 2009 protests and her imprisonment in 2012 and 2013, kept her name in the news, but Zan itself was never revived, and it was remembered as the women's newspaper that the Revolutionary Court would not allow to live.