Dissonance Online: The Islamic Republic of Iran, Music, and the Internet

Abstract

Questions of the permissibility and regulability of music in Islamic jurisprudence and Persian/Iranian governance have been historically disputed. Since the Revolution of 1979, Iranian music and musicians have been suppressed by their theocratic state and its agencies. Religio-political censorship has ensured the prohibition of musicians performing in public, banned women from singing and, among several other examples, suppressed the production, distribution and consumption of music deemed "incompatible" with the values of the Islamic Republic (Bo Lawergren 2011, Farmer 1975, 1942, Youssefzadeh 2005). In the last three decades, however, musicians and their music have harnessed new media technologies in the evasion of these censures. From musicological, new media, and network theory approaches, this thesis explores how music reproduction technologies and the Internet have altered dealings with barriers of bureaucracy facing music and musicians in Iran and the Iranian diaspora.