Ctrl+shift as Iranian clerics take to Internet

QOM, IRAN — This has always been a city with one foot in the present and two in the medieval past. A walk down its dusty main boulevard threads through epochs. Fast food \o7chelo kebab\f7 stands and souvenir shops, with wallet-size portraits of the 7th century martyr Imam Hussein, crowd outside the colossal gold and blue domes of the Hazrat Masumeh shrine.

Mullahs in turbans pick their way defiantly through tangled ribbons of cars. Here, in a city that is the revered seat of Iran's powerful Shiite Muslim clergy and home to 52 Islamic seminaries, women in black chadors emerge from late-model Mercedes-Benzes with tinted windows.

Nowhere is this jarring juxtaposition of old and new more apparent than at the Aalulbayt Global Information Center, the place where Qom's ancient religious teachings and the Information Age intersect.

Here, stocking-footed men sit behind rows of computer screens in large rooms padded with deep Oriental carpets, typing out Web pages of Koranic analysis and religious edicts translated into 30 languages.

From here, via a server in Santa Clara, Calif., emanates www.al-shia.com, the most widely read source of Shiite proselytizing in the world. Also here is the worldwide communications hub for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, www.sistani.org, and for Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, www.leader.ir.

For years, many of Iran's clerics resisted a new age's preference for video screens over ancient Koranic calligraphy. They sanctioned the removal of satellite dishes from rooftops, called for website filtering to guard against pornography and peered at the nation's budding blogging craze as if it were a bizarre insect that would require new poisons. ("Blogging, due to its mundane nature, has the capacity to nurture the spirit of vulgarity ... [and is] a destructive plague," Sayed Reza Shokrollahi wrote a few years ago.)

Then they got it.

Now, to browse through Iranian websites is to come upon a flood of pages featuring solemn-looking men wearing beards and turbans. Hundreds of Iranian clerics today have blogs of their own.

Want to know what Khamenei thinks about the U.S. "enemy," why a proper \o7hezbollahi\f7 soldier always has his boots laced, or how Iran is "a modern example of a religious democracy"? Read his website, available in five languages.