Kamangir (Archer)

“What you see and what you don’t see, in the Holy City”

Kamangir | September 26, 2007 | Category Human Rights, Iran, Islam, Islamic Republic

In a Persian post, the Iranian blogger Harfehesab [Persian], looks at the Google search trends in the holy city of Qom, for sex-related terms. Choosing the title “what you see and what you don’t see, in the Holy City”, the blogger writes [Persian],

Qom is the capital city of Shia Islam and the religious capital city of Iran. The city’s Jamkaran Mosque has recently become the spot to submit letters to Mehdi [the Islamic Messiah] and where the government gets its religious backing [not exact translation]. Therefore, the administration pushes very hard to present the city in a holy and Islamic way. However, a close look at the Internet activity of the city reveals that something else is going on in the city.

Is it only a coincidence that the search for sex-related terms in Qom is the highest amongst all Iranian cities? How long are we willing to suppress the instincts, by postponing them to the heaven, and make people’s life like hell?

The blogger then gives a list of ten sex-related terms and shows how Google Trends reveals that Qom is the first location where these terms are looked up in Google. He makes another interesting observation as well,

Interestingly, Tehran is not even in the list of the ten first cities for nine of these terms.

He relates this phenomenon to the existence of more social freedom in Tehran.