Thomas Erdbrink, the Tehran bureau chief for The New York Times, answered select readers’ questions about reporting in Iran; treatment of gays, lesbians and transgender people; a regional rivalry with Saudi Arabia; and the prospects for political change.
Q. Has the government of Iran set any limits on what you can and cannot report? — Matthew Doherty, Tewksbury, Mass.
A. Journalists who work here for foreign news media companies are not censored. We are not required to show our articles to the Iranian authorities before we publish them, as was the case for reporters embedded with the American military in Iraq. But after an article is published, the authorities or ordinary people might get upset or claim that our stories contain lies or, worse, are part of a campaign by the enemy to achieve this goal or that objective.
Iran is a lonely country where people feel as if they are surrounded by enemies, including the United States. They are as suspicious of a foreign reporter as some Americans would be suspicious of an Iranian reporter in the United States. In fact, journalists working for Iranian state television at the United Nations in New York are not allowed to travel beyond a 20-mile radius of the city. Here, I need a permit every time I want to leave the capital. Tourists, however, can travel the country freely.
Q. I would like to learn how gay, lesbian and transgender Iranians navigate their public and private lives. — Heidi King, Westport, Conn.
A. You might be surprised to hear that gays and lesbians do not always have to navigate their lives that differently from heterosexual Iranians. Here, everybody seems to keep up different faces in their public and private lives.
Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once infamously claimed that there are no gays in Iran. But last year, the Iranian Parliament issued a report saying that 17 percent of the population is gay.
There is no law here against homosexuality. There is, however, a law against sodomy, which carries the death penalty.
It is a very difficult crime to prove. The law requires at least four eyewitnesses, who must be pious Muslims and who must also explain what they were doing to witness such an act. They are required to explain why they didn’t leave the room or why they didn’t cover their eyes or, if they had their hands and feet bound, why they didn’t turn their heads to look away.
Transgender Iranians can have sex-change operations. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the former supreme leader who died in 1989, said that transgender people are sick and that those people born in the wrong body must be helped.
Now, Iran is still no easy place for gays, lesbians and transgender people.
Q. What effect will the Internet have as it exposes Iranians to modernity? — Pat Marron, Sandpoint, Idaho
A. The Internet is changing Iran as it has changed the world. Even the clerics here are online, and Iranian politicians have active Twitter and Facebook profiles, despite the fact that those social networks are among many websites that are officially blocked here.
Still, Iranians are avid users of social media, especially Instagram, which is hugely popular here. People circumvent official firewalls by using illegal software that is widely available for purchase from Iranian websites that are not blocked.
A large part of the public debate here takes place online.
Q. The Iranian population is very young; the people in power are old. Do those young Iranians have any kind of political power? And if they do, what difference can they make? — Esther, the Netherlands
A. Remember a key statistic: More than 70 percent of all Iranians are under 35 years old. That figure shows the tremendous influence that they can wield.
These young Iranians, seeing how their parents carried out a revolution in 1979, have not always been pleased with the results, and therefore, many shy away from politics. But there are no legal avenues for groups of people with different ideas to organize themselves outside the dominant political framework of the Islamic Revolution.
That doesn’t mean that all of those young people are not already changing this country. In many ways, their desires, their style, their connections to the rest of the world via the Internet and their love for higher education have created an invisible current that is undeniably influencing those in power, even staunch conservatives. Some people here call it a lifestyle movement.
Young Iranians have muscled out some space for themselves where, officially, not much is allowed but where, in reality, a lot is possible.
Does that mean that Iran will soon become a country that resembles Western nations? No, I don’t think so, nor does it mean that pressures on activists and journalists will ease. But the relative openness does illustrate some sort of dynamism in this society that other countries in the region lack.
Q. Is Iran’s government trying to dominate the region with their expansion policy by supporting their proxies in other Arab countries? — Fahad Aljarbou, Saudi Arabia
A. It is interesting to get a comment from Saudi Arabia, especially at a time when the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran are increasingly at odds with each other. They have been vying for power and influence for decades, and the rivalry has deep religious, political and cultural roots.
An Iranian might say, “Of course our country has influence in the region; Iran is a great power.” You might disagree, but in Iran, the perception of its role in the Middle East is very different.
For a long time, many ordinary Iranians were upset with their government’s support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and other Shiite groups in the Middle East. They saw such support as a waste of money.
But the rise of the Islamic State and the threat those Sunni militants pose to Shiites in the Middle East has led many people here to change their opinion. Many Iranians say Saudi Arabia shares the same ideology as the Islamic State, and they suspect Saudi Arabia of partly funding the group.
The Saudi-led bombings of Yemen are perceived here as an attempt to regain Saudi influence in that country, where it is also clear that the Houthi rebels receive some sort of support from Iran.
In short, Iran is supporting proxies, but its regional rival Saudi Arabia is doing exactly the same thing, Iranians say.
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