by AmirAli Maleki, spiked
The Islamic Republic plans to criminalise even the exchange of ideas with non-Iranian institutions.
Since the news broke that the Iranian parliament is planning to criminalise talking to foreign media outlets, my father has been telling me to stop. Stop writing, stop getting involved, stop speaking to people abroad, stop doing anything that might make me visible. My friends have been calling too, usually with the same question: ‘Aren’t you going to leave? Isn’t it time?’
I am a 24-year-old philosophy researcher living in Iran. I run the Persian-language philosophy magazine, Praxis Publication. Yet somehow the ordinary question of what I should do with my life has been reduced to whether I should leave my country in order to keep doing the things I came here to do.
I understand my father’s view, which makes the whole thing harder. He just wants his son to be safe. When parliament starts discussing laws that could turn contact with foreign institutions into a security matter, a father does not sit down with the legal text and analyse every clause. He looks at his son and thinks about an email, a conference, an article, a conversation with someone abroad, and whether any of these ordinary things could later be given a very different meaning. My friends understand this, too. They are not telling me to leave because they have stopped caring about Iran. They are telling me to leave because they can see what happens when people begin calculating the risks of ordinary human contact.