THE ABSOLUTE POET BEHIND THE ‘ONCE YOU GO PERSIAN, THERE’S NO OTHER VERSION’ BRITNEY SPEARS MAGAZINE COVER

Breaking News Jun 23rd 2022

Press Release By Andrew Fiouzi

Andrew Fiouzi is a staff writer at MEL.

Persians in America love to point to famous people and say, “Did you know they’re Persian?” So it was no surprise to find a wedding photo of Britney Spears and her famous-enough Persian husband Sam Asghari on the cover of Tehran, the most widely distributed Persian magazine in the U.S. More surprising, however, was the cover line: “Once you go Persian, there’s no other version.” 

Persians in America love to point to famous people and say, “Did you know they’re Persian?” So it was no surprise to find a wedding photo of Britney Spears and her famous-enough Persian husband Sam Asghari on the cover of Tehran, the most widely distributed Persian magazine in the U.S. More surprising, however, was the cover line: “Once you go Persian, there’s no other version.” 

Nonetheless, Shahbod Noori, the founder of Tehran, tells me he came up with it himself, adding that he was obviously inspired by the better-known idiom “once you go Black you never go back.” “I just made a Persian version,” he explains.

Noori, who started his publishing company in 1989 with The Original Bazaar Weekly, the first free classified listings for Iranians in Southern California, tells me the purpose of the magazine has always been to celebrate unique individuals in the Persian community — e.g., the latest husband of one of the biggest pop stars in the world. 

Mainly, though, Noori is more interested in featuring activists, musicians and doctors on the cover of Tehran. (Asghari is a model and actor who was born in Tehran before moving to the U.S. with his family when he was 13.) To that end, a recent issue featured Sophia Kianni, an Iranian-American environmentalist and founder of Climate Cardinals, an international nonprofit working to translate climate information into more than 100 languages. (Due to some of this political content, Tehran has been banned in Iran since 2007.)

Because for them most of all, “Once you go Persian, there’s no other version.”