Iran official slams censorship policy
Iranian Culture Minister Ali Jannati has said that book censorship was too strict under the country's former government. In comments quoted by Iran's semi-official ILNA news agency on October 8, Jannati said censors would have rejected the Koran, which Muslims believe is a revelation by God. Under President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, censors even banned some already-published books as unsuitable. "If the Koran hadn't been sent by God and we had handed it to book censors, they wouldn't have issued permission to publish it and would have argued that some of the words in it are against public virtue," he said. Jannati said he had reviewed some of the titles that the administration of former Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad censored and concluded that in many cases, censors had objected to "irrelevant" issues. He also said in many instances censors had based their decisions on personal opinions, and added that the reviewers lacke...