Iran's winds of change
TEN MONTHS after moving to Boston from Iran, I returned in January to a snow-blanketed Tehran. After a nine-month crackdown on what Iran's moral guardians call un-Islamic dressing, the city had gone back to looking remarkably like its representations in the just-released film "Persepolis," a movie set in the repressive post-Revolutionary years of the early '80s.
The Tehran I left in 2007 was the capital of a country basking in the liberalizing glow of the post-Khatami period: a decade when the rock-star popular reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, allowed social freedoms to bloom as restaurants, cafes, and galleries reclaimed public spaces dominated by public art commemorating the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war.
Reentering the Islamic Republic I was shocked by the dark shades of black and gray that almost exclusively replaced the colorful fashions of just a year before. The chic women waiting to travel to Dubai's resorts for weekend getaways have toned down the salacious branded veils they used to drape suggestively over their blond highlights to neutral, muted dark shades. No one wants to draw attention to themselves anymore.
The moral crackdown sweeping through Iran's largest cities denuded public spaces of eye-catchingly dressed people and created cityscapes that evoke the drab, alienated figures populating Tehran's streets in Marjane Satrapi's film.
Before the crackdown, the event was little more than a bothersome national institution. For a few weeks every late spring, the grim-faced guardians of public mores would venture out in their olive-green uniforms, black official chadors, and Mercedes police cars to play cat-and-mouse with their mostly female prey, forced by the rising summer heat to stretch the seams of Islamically acceptable couture. On street corners and crowded squares, girlfriends sent text messages to one another on accessorized mobile phones and swapped tips on which parts of the city the morality police was conducting stop-and-search operations.
At a time when some deft Iranian diplomacy is increasing Tehran's influence throughout the Middle East, the domestic social situation is more dire than at almost any other time since the Revolution. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad broke his preelection promise to preserve the hard-won social liberties of the past decade as he seeks a return to the original Revolutionary ideals of public virtue and an Islamic society. But many Iranians have moved on from the submissive first days of the Islamic Republic, when morality militias and curfews governed the streets after dusk. The new generation mounts actions of social insubordination that their parents only dreamed of.
This demographically massive generation of young Iranians, 70 percent of whom are under 30, is one of the youngest societies on earth. These children of the Revolution make up arguably the first post-Islamic generation in the Middle East.
Having witnessed the dispiriting effects of bringing Muslim clerics to power and giving them free rein over domestic affairs, foreign policy, and, most importantly, the economy, they registered their frustration with the present order in 2005 by voting into the presidency a corruption-busting noncleric: Ahmadinejad.
Khatami briefly gave hope to the children of the Revolution that he would be their Mikhail Gorbachev. But his version of Islamic perestroika foundered against the inner core of the Islamic Republic - powerful institutions such as the Revolutionary Guard, the Guardian Council, and the office of the supreme leader - and the end of his term in June 2005 marked the end of the reformist era.
Still, on the ski slopes behind Tehran, the moneyed girls of Iran's Generation X systematically flout the Islamic Republic's regulations by dispensing with their head scarves as they ski downhill. Dyeing their hair daring crimson and scarlet shades accentuates their disdain for the rules restricting them. On YouTube, jerky videos circulate showing young Iranians standing up to those admonishing them. In one widely circulated case, a girl hits the chador-clad representative of the Interior Ministry with her handbag. The winds of change are blowing.
Ultimately, the moral surge is doomed to fail because it is mounted by idealistic revolutionaries out of touch with where Iranian society stands today.
Ordinary Iranians are less worried with conforming to Islamic norms and more concerned about the parlous state of the economy. At a time of economic crisis and a tightening international embargo against Iran, the Islamic Republic may have to dispense with marshaling young people toward an Islamic ideal if it is to survive.
As Mohammad Mousavi, a former Iranian ambassador to Canada told me in 2005, "The state is flexible, they will accept what the youth is pushing on them. I don't see cracks in the system but evolution. Contrary to what is argued that this clash will lead to the collapse of the system, I totally deny this."
Iason Athanasiadis is a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
