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PERMANENT REVOLUTION Women’s liberation and press censorship in the State of Evil    | Emma Farnè (Roma). To publish books is not easy in Iran, especially when you’re a woman. However, Shahla Lahiji succeeded: she’s got now a publishing house with over 200 titles, that comprehend woman’s studies, young woman writers, cinema and theatre. “We grew up learning how do act in the shadow, against the political power but at the same time in its folds”. Lahiji fought more than once against the power. In the spring of 2000 she went in Germany, and in the same period Khatami, the new Iranian president, started to talk about freedom, social rights and women protagonists of the society. Strong of it, she came back, but she got arrested, she went to prison, and she was accused of “propaganda against the Islamic system”. In that time the whole independent press was forced to stop publishing, as her publishing house, too. “It was a bad time”, she says. “We were all hopeful, but the power started to censure everything, to beat students on the streets, to close every newspaper.”    But they didn’t put her in silence. She went on in her work, changing every words of her books, adapting them to an Islamic system, measuring the themes with the limit of what it’s forbidden and what it’s allowed. “I’m optimistic”, she says. “The position of women in good in Iran: there are a lot a women writers, movie directors, theatre authors. 65% of university students are women. The future of this country depends a lot on women and on young persons. They’re not isolated from the rest of the world. They use internet, also if the government want to censure it, they react, and this will be the revolution, the social revolution: it will happen with the words, with the novels, the cinema, and nobody can stop this change”.