But a 25-year-old Iranian
says his Facebook activity has led to his father's detention in a
notorious prison in Tehran. And now he's struggling to find a way to
free him.
"I want my family to forgive me," Yashar Khameneh said. "But I believe what I believe in."
A year ago, while studying at a college in Holland, Khameneh joined a Facebook page
that made fun of a top Shiite Muslim imam, Ali al-Naqi al-Hadi. Naqi is
one of 12 imams considered successors to the Prophet Mohammed. Called
"Infallibles," the imams are protected by law in Iran from ridicule or
even frivolous comments. One can be arrested for insulting them.
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The Facebook page, dubbed
the "Campaign to Remind Shias about Imam Naqi," features a robed man,
presumably Naqi, with a face like Charles Manson's, flanked by a camel
wearing sunglasses and the donkey from "Shrek." It also shows a picture
of a Shiite tomb that has been pooped on by a flock of pigeons.
With more than 21,000 likes, the page explains, "Our goal is to use satire to take out the superstition from religion."
"We believe that
everything and everybody could be the subject of a joke," Khameneh said.
"Nothing and nobody is too holy to be funny. At the beginning it was
not that serious because it was a joke."
Khameneh didn't know who
the manager of the site was. They both used nicknames, as did many
people who posted, Khameneh said. In the early days, though, Khameneh
posted links to his personal Facebook page, which had his real name.
"I feel like that is how the authorities knew to come after me," Khameneh said.
During that time,
Khameneh said, he wasn't thinking too much about someone in the Iranian
government seeing the page. It seemed unlikely: one page out of so many
on Facebook. The thought did cross his mind a couple times that if it
did become popular, it would probably upset some people back in Iran,
where his father, mother and sister lived.
But he kept posting on the page out of principle, he said.
"From the beginning, I
knew that it could be dangerous, but the thing is this: Taboos should be
broken," he said. "I knew that it could be sensitive (for) Muslims and
Iranians worldwide, but here in Europe, jokes are made -- jokes of
Jewish stories or Christian -- and nobody is threatened or killed. This
is how it should be."
A page's overnight fame
Khameneh took comfort, he said, that the page had a small number of followers.
That changed this spring. Traffic skyrocketed in mid-May, when an Iranian rapper living in Germany made international headlines, Khameneh said.
Iran's religious
authority had placed a fatwa on the rapper's head for making a song that
mocked the same imam. The song had gone viral.
All of a sudden, people around the world were Googling the rapper and the imam.
"That was a boon for the (page)," Khameneh said. "It became famous."
On May 23, Khameneh got a call from his father, Abbas Khameneh, in Iran.
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