Archive Forensics: Firdusi No. 5, November 1978 — In That Suffocation, If Only They Had Let Us Be

Archive Forensics: Part of an Ongoing Series

In Archive Forensics, we pull one magazine out of Khajistan's digitized archive and read it closely. This week: Firdusi (فردوسی), No. 5 of the New Series, dated Monday, 15 Aban 1357, printed in Tehran and sold for 50 rials.

Look at the date. 15 Aban 1357 is 6 November 1978. The day before, Tehran burned: crowds put British banks, cinemas, and ministry buildings to the torch. On the cover date itself, the Shah dismissed the Sharif-Emami cabinet and handed the country to a military government under General Azhari. The Pahlavi state was about ten weeks from the Shah's flight into exile and did not know it.

This is also the New Series. Firdusi had been shut down once already, and its own pages here speak of "the dissolution of the magazine and the looting by Hoveyda's government." So this is a banned weekly, back in print at the moment its censors lost their grip. It uses the gap. It names Khomeini on page 4, gives thanks on page 3 that "no generation will remain from Amir Abbas Hoveyda," and on page 8 prints a woman buying a banned book under helicopter blades. Seven years earlier, Eastern Film survived its war by refusing to name it. Firdusi does the opposite: a magazine reading its own revolution out loud, page by page.

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Archival Fact Sheet for this Issue

Production Metadata

Magazine	Firdusi (فردوسی)
Issue	No. 5, New Series (دوره جدید)
Cover date	Monday, 15 Aban 1357 (دوشنبه ۱۵ آبان ماه ۱۳۵۷)
Gregorian equivalent	6 November 1978
Language	Persian
Frequency	Weekly; published every Monday
Licence holder & responsible director	Nematollah Jahanbanouei (نعمتالله جهانبانوئی)
Lead editorial voice	Abbas Pahlavan (ع - پهلوان), front editorial and the Jalal Al-e Ahmad tribute
Temporary office	Sazman-e Chap-e Maz Graphic, Darvazeh Dowlat, Khiaban-e Khaqani, Tehran
Press telephones	831919, 836450, 836460
Post box	11/1552
Price	50 rials (تك شماره ۵۰ ریال)
Extent	44 pages

The Day It Was Printed

5 November 1978	Tehran riots and fires; banks, cinemas, and government buildings attacked
6 November 1978 (cover date)	Sharif-Emami government dismissed; military government formed under General Azhari
Khomeini	In Paris; named in the issue as "leader of the world's Shiites"
Named in the crisis report	Khomeini, Shariatmadari, Karim Sanjabi, Ali Amini, US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Soviet Pravda
Strikes cited	Oil industry, National Iranian Airlines, Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs

What the 44 Pages Hold

Sovereignty & oil	Cover; "Which Independent National Policy?" (p3); "Global Dimensions of Iran's Political Crisis" (p4); the political economy of dependency (p14, p20)
Censorship & the banned book	Mehrangiz Kar on banned books (p8-9, 11); the Jalal Al-e Ahmad tribute and his own autobiography (p22-25)
Education & colonialism	"Liberation from Brainwashing" by Paul Sigmund (p10-11); "Blind Follower" by Goel Cohen (p15-16)
Everyday power	"Administrative Organizations Under Petty Statesmen" (p19-20, 38); "Is 'Halt' Not a Halt for Everyone?!" (p31); "This Blessed Consultation-House" (p36-37); sport (p40-41)
History as mirror	"Nation and Power" on France's eight regimes (p5-6, 39); "Brutus, You Too?!" (p6-7)
Literature, poetry, fiction	Esmail Shahroudi interview (p17-18); resistance-poetry notebook (p21); short stories (p27-30)
Political cinema	Soviet montage and Italian neorealism (p32-35); Anima Persa review (p42)
Advertisements	Pars color television with Grundig (p2); Seiko Quartz (p43); Canada Dry (p44); Eqbal Book Week and exam-prep notices (p41)

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Which Independent National Policy?

The front editorial, signed A. Pahlavan and running under the column head "Another Look," asks one question: which "independent national policy"? The standfirst answers it. "Honorable relations, worthy of the dignity and honor of the brave and struggling nation of Iran, must govern Iranian diplomacy, and with it our commercial and economic dealings with other nations."

Pahlavan treats independence as an account book, not a slogan. The country, he writes, hands over "its national wealth in the form of crude oil and gas to the imperialist countries" at prices those countries set, and takes back useless modern equipment, ceremonial luxuries, and the bill for spectacles like the Shiraz Arts Festival. The remainder, he says, drains out again through foreign technical offices and consultancy fees "into the throats of the international devourers." He wants the exploitative contracts cancelled and the principles of diplomacy rewritten so they fit a nation that respects its own people. A foreign policy that is neither independent nor national, built on "positive equilibrium," has bought Iran nothing but a "false global respectability."

The side columns sharpen it into something personal. One sketches how favors used to be bought, assembling a "priceless collection of gifted carpets" for officials, some of whom would only take dollars, some pounds, all of whom agreed on tomans. Another reports a man giving thanks in his own words: he is grateful, he says, that "no generation will remain from Amir Abbas Hoveyda." A third defends the magazine's literary pages against readers who want them dropped for hard news, insisting Firdusi is "instructive material, not a complaints box." The prime minister who ran Iran for thirteen years is named and mocked on page 3. A year before, that paragraph would have closed the paper.

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Global Dimensions of Iran's Political Crisis

Page 4 stops circling and says it. The standfirst lists what is on the table: the outcome of the Paris talks, the threat of more violence and "civil war," and the support of three world powers for the Iranian regime. The report puts "His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the world's Shiites" into a Tehran weekly, plainly, and reports his absolute refusal to compromise. It quotes the demand that not "a single step" be taken back from the people's wishes, and it carries Shariatmadari's warning that if people cannot get what they want by peaceful means they may take up arms.

Around that it builds the whole field. Karim Sanjabi and the National Front. Ali Amini's interviews. The "reflection and consultation" the Sharif-Emami government offered in place of answers. The strikes shutting the country down: the oil industry, National Iranian Airlines, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, the gas and oil exports cut, the rial sliding against foreign currencies. Then the outside powers. US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance backing the regime and calling Iran's survival a matter of "fundamental importance" to American policy; the Chinese deputy premier accusing the Soviets of fanning the unrest; Soviet Pravda, for the first time, speaking of the danger of "civil war" in Iran. The report reads the regime not as plain domestic authority but as something propped up from outside, by three great powers at once.

At the foot of the page, Mohammad Asemi's "Today's Generation at the Crossroads of History" widens the lens. Ashura, he writes, can fall on any day, and the dear flowers can be cut down on any day. The present generation stands before its sharpest choice: a free and happy life, or the ruin of every hope. The piece runs on to page 41, set among the reader letters and small notices, so the "crossroads" returns later in the issue, in among ordinary life.

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Nation and Power

Dr. Rahmat Mostafavi's serial, spread across pages 5, 6, and 39, is the issue's long lesson in how power behaves, taught entirely through France. He walks the reader through the eight regimes since Napoleon: the Restoration of 1815, where Louis XVIII and Charles X tried to "restore" the world the Revolution had ended and lasted fifteen years; the reign of Louis Philippe, who put the tricolor back up and whose minister told the deputies, "Gentlemen, get rich"; the Second Republic; the Second Empire of Napoleon III; the Third Republic that ran seventy years; Vichy; the Fourth Republic; and the Fifth.

It is social history, not just a king-list. Mostafavi tracks how the bourgeoisie pushed the aristocracy out of power and kept the people out of it, how the industrial revolution produced a working class that could no longer be ignored, how unions and socialist ideas grew from Proudhon and Louis Blanc to the Popular Front of 1936 under Léon Blum, which brought the forty-hour week and paid holidays. He follows the radicals, the colonial empire built to seize markets and raw materials, Pétain and Laval, de Gaulle's Free France, and the 1958 referendum that produced the Fifth Republic and its powerful presidency.

On page 39 he drops the mask. "It is quite amusing," he writes, "that when I began last week's article my intention was to give the example of France first, and then draw some conclusions about our own country." He has run out of room, so the conclusions about Iran are held for next week. The France was always a way to talk about home.

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Brutus, You Too?!

The sharpest fiction in the issue, signed A. P. Ashna, is an interrogation in a single room. The interrogator has a file two volumes thick and circles one word the prisoner once underlined in red — "Saba" — and a Hafez couplet about martyrs: "With the morning breeze in the tulip field I asked who the martyrs are." Every answer the man gives is met with the same jeer. The interrogator finishes a sentence and sneers, "Yadollah the Bald, you too?" — "Master Baqer the broker, you too?" — turning each name into a confession.

The menace is the claim to total knowledge. "You think you can hide something from us? Did you know we know there is a birthmark shaped like the map of Cuba on your left thigh?" The prisoner keeps repeating that there was nothing, that there is nothing, while the file thickens and the offers of tea and a soft drink keep coming. A facing column prints "the pantry bill" as an itemized joke: sweet tea, two glasses; telephone cable, two meters seventy; a pack of Winstons; four kilowatts of electricity; one candle; one nail-clipper. Anyone who had sat in a SAVAK room would know the furniture. By November 1978 the magazine prints it as comedy. The same nerve runs nearby: page 7 reports, deadpan, that a poet drew eleven years in prison for a single quatrain and asks the reader to work out the rate per line, and that the fire brigade now turns its hoses on demonstrators "with great skill."

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From the Ban on Gharbzadegi to the Banned Book In Vietnam

Mehrangiz Kar's essay carries the headline "Thinking in a Dangerous Atmosphere, and the Necessity of Changing Political Conditions." It is the centerpiece, and it begins fifteen years back. As a student she got a smuggled copy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad's banned Gharbzadegi from the stalls, and she remembers the feeling exactly: as though she carried "a time bomb up her sleeve" and had to rush it to its hiding place. That was what a forbidden book felt like.

Now she walks back onto a campus and writes the line that fixes this entire issue in place: "Today, in a dangerous atmosphere where the helicopter blades spin a meter from a human skull, a banned book called In Vietnam is being sold." Students have spread the banned books on the ground and sell In Vietnam to her — the woman who, fifteen years before, "had been a beggar for the little pamphlet Gharbzadegi." She reads pages sixteen to twenty-eight on the spot and cannot stay quiet.

Then she builds the argument. Censorship, she says, was never just an office confiscating books. The state strangled the new intellectual movements in the cradle, drove the secular intellectuals into isolation and into coded, private language, and steered the country toward a "broker society" — jame'e-ye dallal, unproductive, assembling other men's goods. Cut off from ordinary people, the intellectuals scattered, pinning colored labels on each other, while the people's anger found only one bed left open to it, in the religious networks, where it gathered and became one. The explosion in the street is the bill. Two sounds now want to strangle each other, she writes: the war machine and the exhausted, rebelling man. The press, bought with the people's blood, has no choice but to follow them. The essay continues on page 11: political conditions must change before thought can breathe.

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Liberation from Brainwashing, Cultural Subjugation, and Intellectual Exploitation

Pages 10 and 11 carry a translated essay by Paul Sigmund, on ideology in the developing countries, rendered into Persian by Mohammad Karami. Its case is blunt: a school system is never neutral. The real meaning of education, the page-11 headline runs, "is nothing other than the fundamental foundation of a nation's intellectual structure." A state that keeps a "luxury" academic system, built to train a thin layer of civil servants and lawyers, only reproduces the needs of an elite and ignores the masses. Real independence needs schooling rebuilt around national and practical need, mass literacy, and the training of technical cadres — and it points to the literacy campaigns of Castro in Cuba and Sékou Touré in Guinea as proof that an organized, unbiased program can clear illiteracy in a short time and reshape a society's political culture.

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Blind Follower

Goel Cohen carries the same fight onto pages 15 and 16. His target is the imported school. Developing countries chase the prestige of the industrial powers and swallow their education systems whole — translated primary and secondary textbooks, foreign curricula, the catalogues of Western universities copied wholesale — without a glance at their own environment or values. Their own administrators, trained abroad and shaped by those systems, come home and deny any "educational and cultural tradition" of their own, reducing progress to blind imitation.

Cohen reaches for Philip Coombs's The World Educational Crisis and a short history: Gutenberg's press, then the nationalism of the nineteenth century, then the rise of the "national army," the "national bank," and "national education." That nationalism, he argues, is the thing the imported school suppresses. He names the disease too — madraseh-zadegi, "school-struck," the credential race in which the rich outrun the poor for diplomas that mean less and less. Expanding schooling is not enough. The content, the language, and the purpose have to change, and a national model has to replace the borrowed one. Beside Kar and Sigmund, the piece widens the issue's question from who rules Iran to how Iranians are taught to think, and who profits from the teaching.

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White Means

Pages 12 and 13 carry a photo feature presented by Hadi Khorsandi, gleaned from the American book White Is by Preston Wilson and Sandy Huffaker. It is a list, and each line begins "White means." White means standing on a column held up by the shoulders of others. White means imagining you are the majority. White means letting Black men fight in Vietnam for their freedom while you claim you do not discriminate. White means wishing Muhammad Ali had stayed Cassius Clay. White means church in the morning and the Ku Klux Klan at night. The references run global — Rhodesia, Kenya, the ten-thousand-meter run, American suburbs and slums — and pull the Iranian reader onto a worldwide map of domination. Beside it a small cartoon: two angels on a cloud, listening to the racket below, working out that the crash and clatter is the sound of one side talking peace and the other refusing it.

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New Poetry, the Emotional History of Our People in Our Time

The interview with the poet Esmail Shahroudi, on pages 17 and 18, gives the issue its theory of literature. Poetry, he says, is "the disturbed equation of human expression," and the new poetry is "the emotional-cultural history of our people in our time" — a record of collective feeling kept where official language cannot reach. He runs through the old definitions, citing Vahid Tabrizi's treatise on verse and Khwaja Nasir's idea of poetry as "imaginative speech," then argues for the staircase layout, printing a Khayyam quatrain stepped down the page so that the stresses and pauses fall where meter used to.

Asked about women poets, he answers without flinching: in an age when poetry is a cry, the voices of Mahsati, Zeb-on-Nesa, Parvin, and Forugh can stand beside the great men, and their distance from those men is no greater than Simone de Beauvoir's from Sartre. The page closes on Forugh's "purple scream." Across pages 22 to 25 the same idea recurs through Shahroudi's own poem and the memorial verse, and the issue keeps treating the poem as an archive of what the state's words leave out.

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At the Feast of Light, with Clenched Fists

Mohammad Firouzbakht's essay on page 14, continued on page 38, reads the crisis from the street and the shop. Protest, he writes, is now a university — not one for students and professors, but one for the worker, the peasant, the clerk, the schoolchild, all standing beside them. Its subject is the everyday arithmetic of survival. The consumer of six months ago, frozen by fear, has become a public hunting for real answers. A fifteen-percent raise will not buy it off, because the raise goes straight back where the cost of living came from. He runs the numbers: American rice at 65 rials, then 70, then 80 the following week; twenty percent on salary, fifteen on benefits, ten on housing, all of it vanishing into inflation.

Page 20 does the larger economics the cover only pictures. The oil money, it argues, never built anything that lasts. The boom pulled Iran into the world economy as a buyer, not a producer; OPEC's price rises were answered by the six industrial powers — the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and England — raising the price of everything sold back, so the gain leaked out again. Assembly-line "montage" industries were stood up that made nothing of their own. The country traded its oil for a false prosperity and came out more dependent than before.

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Administrative Organizations Under the Authority of Petty Statesmen

Mohsen Talaei's essay, running across pages 19, 20, and 38, drags the same authoritarianism down to the office. A young man joins the civil service with a clean certificate of health and a sensible picture of the bargain — work for wages, wages for work, the two pans of one scale. Within months he is aggressive, listless, going slow. Talaei blames the rules: a thicket of laws, decrees, by-laws, and circulars so tangled that a single clause is applied a dozen different ways, all of them "legal." Two employees with identical conditions, hired under one law into two offices, draw two different salaries and two different fates. One is "technical," one is not; one can rise, one cannot.

Above this sits the personnel office and the small official who treats a public department as a private estate, the man Talaei calls a "petty statesman." The measure for bending a rule, he writes, becomes "the degree of the bow in the employee's neck." When the law fails, the last and most effective punishment is the transfer order. The essay sits beside the strike news threaded through the issue — slowdowns, stoppages, agreements signed and broken, the movafaqat-nameh that turns out to be a moqabeleh-nameh, a counter-document — and reads the bureaucracy as one more closed circle, run on connection and the bowed neck.

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The Notebook of Resistance Poetry

Page 21 is a full page of poems, and the vocabulary repeats from poet to poet: thirst, blood, wounded birds, and the red poppy, shaqayeq, the flower that in Persian verse stands for the martyr. Shahram Shahrokhtash's "Thirst," Jafar Hamidi's "A Thousand Years for the Crime of Love," Homayuntaj Tabatabai's "Safe Blue," Raha's "For Abbas, Who Fell from the Mill," Mehrangiz Salahshur's "Greetings to the Land of Red Poppies," and J. Chakavak's "Tremors of the Suffocating Air." Poppies laughing at dawn; the cold furrow of a house running with blood; a small red fish gasping for lack of water. These are not love lyrics. They are written for a country counting its dead, printed the week a military government took the capital.

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Jalal, in the Darkest Moments — In That Suffocation, If Only They Had Let Us Be

The banned book Kar smuggled as a student gets a four-page memorial. Abbas Pahlavan signs it "Jalal's little student." The keyword is khafaqan, suffocation, and the tribute is framed by it. Pahlavan remembers Al-e Ahmad as the first clear voice against the suffocation and Gharbzadegi as its first communiqué. He remembers how the state tried to handle him — first with "reconciliation," then promises and perks, the offer of foreign travel and a grant — and how Jalal, who wrote plainly, sat at ordinary people's tables, and spread his work even across the corner of a table at Cafe Firouz, read the maneuver in advance. They would not let the writers be, Pahlavan says; they would not even let them mourn him in peace when he died.

Beside the tribute, the magazine reprints Jalal's own short autobiography, "An Account of My Circumstances," in his voice: the clerical family and the father who shut his shop rather than register with the state's notary law; the Tudeh years and the 1948 split alongside Khalil Maleki; the Third Force and the Mossadegh period and oil nationalization; the silences forced by defeat that produced the monographs on Owrazan, the Tat villages, and Khark island; Gharbzadegi in 1341; the marriage to Simin Daneshvar; the translations of Ionesco and Jünger. The poets answer too. Mehdi Akhavan-Sales writes the line that crowns the page: "Though he counted among the Prophet's children, I hold that Jalal was one of God's." Across the same spread the magazine buries one of its own — the young illustrator Fereydoun Sharifi, killed in a car crash, whose drawings, Pahlavan writes, were full of silent shouts.

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The Multi-Homeland People

Page 26 goes after a social type. The "multi-homeland people" are the elites who keep several homelands at once, draining the country's income while holding a rest-house on the Côte d'Azur, a flat in Paris, and the casinos of Las Vegas in reserve. When the weather turns at home, the page says, they slip abroad to rest; when the waters calm, they come back to count the takings. It is not cosmopolitan praise. It is a charge against people who always have an exit while everyone else stays exposed.

The same page runs Kazem Jamshidian's portrait of "Agha," a faded aristocrat — opium-dulled, sentimental, taking vinegar-syrup from a crystal cup and eating his stew behind a curtain with a gold spoon, his hunting rifles rusting in their cases. Beside it, a village story: Mashhadi Heydar, the failing farm, the drought drying the well, and a broken transistor radio on the shelf, the fifth radio to die in that house. Two ends of the same country, the chalet and the cracked well, printed across one spread.

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The Stories

The news in this issue can be loud; the fiction is quiet, and it is where the texture of ordinary life shows. Four stories carry it.

Photocopy

M. Elhami's "Photocopy" is set in a copy-and-blueprint shop at the end of an arcade. The narrator, a young woman named Parvin, runs it for an absent owner who will not hire men. A young man in jeans keeps coming in, day after day, to photocopy his own birth certificate as an excuse to see her. She lets herself imagine the rest — the wedding card, the silver rose. Then the landlady's harsh voice cuts through it over the rent, and she is left with the hum of the machine and the thought that she should enroll in one of the night classes and get herself out from under both the photocopies and herself.

Contraband

"Contraband" rides the bus from Brazjan toward Shiraz and Kazerun in the wet heat. A smuggler the narrator has seen before hands out Chinese trousers and two-band radios among the passengers so the gendarmes at the checkpoints will find nothing on him. The whole run nets about eighty tomans, less the bus fare, and the young smuggler, rattled when the gendarme recognizes him, goes quiet for the rest of the road. The story is the small, exhausting economy of the poor, worked out in trousers and transistor radios.

Lemon

Sirus Rumi's "Lemon" is a child's day of labor. The mother sends him for seventy lemons; he juices them into a jar, cutting his fingers, the rind biting the cuts. Carrying the heavy tub out, he stumbles and the lemons roll across the landlord's courtyard. The landlord roars, his wife faints, and the boy runs into the street, five tomans of the rent-money in his pocket and, for once, the thought that he will not have to beg a ride from anyone next Friday.

Mr. Tardidi Returns Home

Morteza Abanifar's "Mr. Tardidi Returns Home" follows a lonely office clerk — Mr. "Doubt" — who wears glasses, writes ghazals at night, and was abandoned once in his youth and turned against women for it. His colleagues set traps; the office decides he is incapable. A meeting is arranged at a bridge. He waits, takes out the notebook of ghazals he meant to give, and instead opens his fingers and lets it fall into the river, half-relieved, half-afraid of being made a fool again. The whole crisis arrives here as private weather: traffic, curfews, loneliness, a notebook hitting the water.

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Is "Halt" Not a Halt for Everyone?!

Mahmoud Sarank's page-31 piece takes the issue to street level. It describes the worn-out worker stuck in traffic, trying to finish his shopping before the martial-law curfew, terrified of the soldiers' "halt." Then it turns to a restaurant advertisement on a wall: come from eight to twelve, and after midnight there are "other programmes," and do not worry about the ban on gatherings of more than two — with a special card, arrangements have been made. The curfew is a halt for the worker and an open door for whoever can afford the card. Underneath, "The Guy Is One of the Big Shots" tells of a man cut dead in the street by an old friend, who turns out to have become someone important. The point recurs all issue: the rules exist, but their force depends on who you are.

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Political Cinema

Across pages 32 to 35 the magazine runs a long translated history of political cinema by Leif Furhammar and Folke Isaksson, rendered by Abolhassan Alavi Tabatabai. It teaches readers to read moving images the way the rest of the issue teaches them to read books and budgets.

The Principles of Realism in Soviet Cinema

The first half is Soviet revolutionary film. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and October, Pudovkin's Mother and The End of St. Petersburg, Dovzhenko's Earth. It walks through montage as a tool for shaping mass consciousness, the Odessa Steps as the most powerful propaganda sequence in silent cinema, and then the collisions with a hardening state: the charge of "formalism," the worst accusation a Soviet artist could face, and the re-editing of October after Trotsky's fall. Revolutionary art, the article shows, gets disciplined by the revolution that made it; by the mid-thirties the party's control over every aspect of filmmaking was complete.

The Birth of Neorealism Out of Calamity and Disaster

The second half turns to Italy, under a title that is its own argument. Neorealism, the article says, grew out of misery — poverty, unemployment, hunger, injustice, and the destruction of war — and faded once those conditions eased. Rossellini's Rome, Open City, shot in poverty under the shadow of fascism with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, becomes the masterpiece of resistance cinema, made when the studios were dead and the script was dictated scene by scene by a real resistance leader. To run this history in November 1978 — how cinema made under dictatorship and war actually works — is itself a choice.

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This Blessed Consultation-House

Pages 36 and 37 carry the issue's broadest satire, "told" by Manouchehr Khan Qalamiran Fard Tehrani. A team of "investigators of sound lineage" is sent to audit a "blessed consultation-house" and discovers a side room converted into a "rolling-pin room," run by one Eskandar Khan with an electric rolling-pin and a squad of karate men who answer every inquiry with a beating, hospitalizing the whole inspection team. The investigators uncover a seven-volume reference work, the Ghārat-nāmcheh — a "Loot-ionary," parodying the great Persian dictionaries — and trace embezzlement through the petty-cash, the head-bonging, and the rolling-pins.

It is a parody of the committee and the interrogation cell at once, and it ends in the language of the moment: notices that members who resign will be treated harshly, that new "strikes" have broken out, a dry hunger strike, a food strike. A side joke turns the knife on the press itself — readers complaining the magazine now prints only crosswords, and a mock demand for the return of censorship so the puzzles will at least be solvable. Even the satire of bureaucracy knows the whole country is on strike.

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Ostad

Parviz Iravanlu's sports column on pages 40 and 41 carries the charge into a softer-looking corner. Walk into any club, he writes, and you meet the same men who have held the titles "ostad" and "great man" since your childhood, who draw salaries in a dozen places and run the federations as personal estates. He asks the plain question: in a whole career at the top, what have you built for sport? The page tracks the strikes reaching even into sports administration, the youth football team's disqualification dispute with the Asian confederation, a five-hundred-thousand-toman federation cheque cashed and split, and the late Khan Sardar's stipend signed off as the old guard cleared out. Sport is one more fiefdom, run the same way as the rest.

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Don't Make Idols of Us

The reader pages and small notices catch the issue at ground level. One reader asks the magazine, plainly, not to "make idols" of people the way the old order did, turning men into ladders to climb. A short news item on page 30 reports bags of rice donated to the survivors of the Tabas earthquake turning up for sale in the open market, the donors' handwritten notes still tucked inside, begging buyers in the name of God not to sell them. Another notes that Maxim Gorky's Mother has been seized, with the dry comment that it would have made more sense to arrest Gorky himself, and suggests the "national reconciliation government" should join the strikes too, so that the existing strikes might break on their own.

Two notices say what the magazine thought it was doing. A message from Pakistani students at the University of Tehran, printed in Persian, places the issue inside a wider regional and anti-imperial student world. And a small appeal asks readers to send their photographs for the magazine's archive — Firdusi explains it has none, because its archive was lost when the paper was dissolved and looted under Hoveyda's government. A banned, relaunched weekly, at the hinge of a revolution, asking its readers to help rebuild the record the old regime destroyed.

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The Mad Are Free — Venice, City of Secrets

Mohsen Zargarian's film review on page 42 closes the cinema thread with Dino Risi's Anima Persa, starring Vittorio Gassman and Catherine Deneuve. He reads it as a study of a schizophrenic mind: a respectable professor whose monstrous second self, the engineer Fabio, is kept hidden in a sealed room, a Jekyll-and-Hyde split staged in a decaying Venice. The city is sinking, and Zargarian takes the sinking as the point — the slow drowning of a civilization built on rotten foundations, its order, its morals, and its masks going under together. At the end of an issue preoccupied with hidden power and concealed selves, a film about secrecy and a buried second face sits squarely beside the rest.

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The Advertisements

The advertising pays for the attack with the very thing the articles attack. Page 2, facing the start of the political content, is a full-page advertisement for a Pars color television, built "with the technical help of Grundig of Germany." Page 43 sells Seiko Quartz from Japan. The back cover is Canada Dry. Page 41 runs a nationalist Book Week exhibition from Eqbal publishers and a konkur exam-prep school in the same breath. The magazine that prints "selling our national wealth to the imperialist countries" on page 3 carries German, Japanese, and North American brand prestige across pages 2, 43, and 44. The anti-dependency argument and the imported consumer world run on the same paper, for the same 50 rials, with no sign that anyone at the desk found the contradiction worth resolving.

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Read end to end, the issue holds together around a single pressure. Eastern Film in 1971 survived its war by refusing to name it. Firdusi in 1978 names everything: the three powers on the cover, the prime minister on page 3, the ayatollah on page 4, the banned book on page 8, the suffocation on page 22, the curfew that bends for the rich on page 31. Foreign policy, schools, oil, the office counter, the poem, the film, the rolling-pin room — every register carries the same argument, that liberation means changing the conditions under which people read, learn, work, watch, and obey. The censorship that had held for twenty-five years was failing as this issue went to press, and the magazine used every page of the opening.

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The digitized issue of Firdusi No. 5, New Series, is held in Khajistan's archive of Iranian print, more than 15,000 digitized files.