Posted By Edmund Downie Share

Those who have lamented the decline of the book have an unlikely new friend. From Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency:

Tehran, July 20, IRNA -- Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on Wednesday urged the cultural institutes to spare no efforts to promote culture of reading books and encourage the youth to make optimum use of libraries....

The Supreme Leader said that reading is the best means to propagate modern ideas and enlighten the society and nothing else than replace the merits of books, a reference to the prevalence of audio-visual media posing threat to the role of books as the major means of communication in the society.

No doubt this will go down in the annals of Iran's efforts to promote reading, along with moments like this:

The Teheran [sic] radio quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as asking ''all the Muslims to execute them,'' referring to Mr. [Salman] Rushdie [author of The Satanic Verses], who lives in London, and the publishers of the book, Viking Penguin, ''wherever they find them.'' He said that anyone killed carrying out his order would be considered a martyr.

Or this:

In 2007, Iran's ultra-conservative daily Kayhan called Harry Potter "a billion-dollar Zionist project" and a "destructive bomb" for children's minds. It alleged that the author J.K. Rowling had links to Zionists and that was how she became so well known.

But hey, anything that gets kids to read.

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

EXPLORE:CULTURE, IRAN
 

ZORRO

2:00 PM ET

July 21, 2011

Censorship

Libraries are much easier to censor than the Internet.

 

444BAROFF

6:36 PM ET

July 21, 2011

Watching the US Congress, the British Parliament, in their recen

Watching the US Congress, the British Parliament, in their recent debates over budgets, deficits or war-making - or the representative institutions of most western democracies - you would be hard-pressed to argue that they are any better. As for the fact that parties are sxe 11.9

 

EVELINA ROEHLER

5:04 AM ET

August 17, 2011

ensure that child reads books

As a parent, do you ensure that your child reads books that contain a range of genders? Cultures? Disabilities? Sexualities? Religions? Do you ensure that your child understands that different races, disabilities, genders and sexualities are okay, through a range of different books that do not exclude these people? That's a rhetorical question, you don't have to answer it and I'm not interrogating you about how you choose to raise lexi belle, incidentally. They can also be used in a similar way to indoctrinate children to a parent's ideas. This might be in the best faith -- for example, a parent who believes homosexuality is completely wrong and means you'll go to hell. Then they would monitor the child's reading, not allowing them to read anything gay-positive, and push them towards books about how wonderful marriage between a man and a woman is, and gradually in this way teach a child that sex before marriage is wrong, that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and thus that homosexuality is wrong.

 

AXELBROOK

6:55 AM ET

August 19, 2011

I think he's doing a great

I think he's doing a great job. He is exactly what this country, and the world needs. I think he solves conflicts with diplomacy and thinks things over before he puts them into action. RIO And do you see how the european's love him?.

 

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