In the aftermath of Khordad the 2nd the Iranian press came to experience a short period of relative freedom in which the domestic oppositional (aka reformist-press) publications came to flourish and attend to relative self-ransacking and scrutiny of the system. During this period much of IRI’s dirty laundry was revealed and aired in the press before it was clamped down by the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei himself as a so called sovereign act of intervention for the welfare of the nation! One of the monthlies that was eliminated in this process was the progressive Payaame-Emrooz, which had been published even before the birth of the reform movement but came to take a more clearer stance against the establishment after the historic election. The publication was qualitatively the Iranian counterpart to Western magazines such as TIME and The Economist, with a very clever and bold cover design. Even though being banned in 2001 this journal came to leave behind a rich archive of many years of covering and analyzing, which today serves as perfect material for those who intend to do research about that particular era in the history of Iran and IRI, in particular. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the leather binded collected editions before they vanished. These extremely rare volumes are today among the most important sources in my research and valuable items in my collection!
