The Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Abbas Salehi and the director of the Imam Reza (AS) International Art and Cultural Foundation, Mahmudreza Barazesh, attended the closing ceremony.

Former Astan Quds Razavi officials Ali Karimi-Qoddusi and Ali-Mohammad Baradaran-Rafiei and poet Jafar Mahsorkh were among the honorees.

Also included were writers Faezeh Azimzadeh Ardebili and Mohammad-Ali Mojahedi, actor Dariush Arjmand and calligrapher Qassem Tavakkoli.

The secretaries of different sections of the festival were also honored at the ceremony.

The 17th edition of the Imam Reza (AS) International Festival opened with the birthday celebration of Hazrat Masumeh (SA), the sister of the Imam (AS), at her holy shrine in Qom on July 4.

The ten-day festival offered a wide variety of programs in different Iranian provinces.

The programs included theater performances, book fairs, art exhibitions and cultural seminars. Exhibitions of rare Persian and Arabic manuscripts and documents were also organized.

Cities in the provinces of Hamedan, Bushehr, Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari, North Khorasan, Kohkiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, and Markazi hosted sessions on religious poems.

The Razavi Theater Festival, an event dedicated to plays on religious themes, was held during the festival in East Azarbaijan Province.

A number of musical performances were also held in Tehran while several calligraphy exhibits were organized in South Khorasan Province.

Sistan-Baluchestan hosted an exhibition of graphic designs, and Isfahan showcased a collection of book illustrations in an exhibit during the festival.

The festival was also held in several countries in collaboration with Iran’s Islamic Culture and Relations Organization, the Ahl-ul-Bait World Assembly, and several other organizations.

A large collection of cultural products were put on display at the Razavi Permanent Exhibit in Mashhad, where the holy shrine of Imam Reza (AS) is situated.

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“That is not counting the time people spend for reading newspapers, magazines and online materials,” Seyyed Abbas Salehi noted on Saturday when he appeared during a TV program on Channel 1 to give an annual report on his organization.

“They also spend about 20 minutes a day reading press media and materials published online on social networks,” he said.

“A country like Iran with such a rich culture and long [history of] civilization doesn’t deserve this,” he lamented.

He said that the culture ministry has launched about 8,000 reading clubs with 500,000 members, and also helped public libraries to expand their children’s books sections to promote reading.

Salehi said that about 99,000 titles have been published for the first and second times over the past year and added that this amount falls short of the country’s target.

Earlier in April 2008, Ali-Akbar Ash’ari, a former director the National Library and Archives of Iran, lamented the lack of proper reading facilities and a shortage of the latest publications in Iran’s libraries, and said that the average Iranian spends two minutes a day reading.

He was criticized for making the remarks by numerous cultural officials, including the then culture minister, Mohammad Hosseini, who said that Iran’s per capita book reading was 76 minutes a day.

File photo: People visit the 31st Tehran International Book Fair at Imam Khomeini Mosalla on May 8, 2018. (IRNA/Fatemeh Behbudi)

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Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Seyyed Abbas Salehi said that media plays an important role in ethnic convergence and consolidation of national unity.

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