During the days of his exile in Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used cassette tapes smuggled into Iran to stoke the fires of a revolution. If Khomeini were alive today, he would no doubt have a Web site.
Not so his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Most Iranians would say it is highly unlikely that Khamenei has ever cracked a laptop.
President Mohammad Khatami, on the other hand, knows all about the Internet. You can e-mail him at [email protected].
Khamenei and Khatami are the two most powerful political figures in Iran today. Although both wear the black clerical turban that signifies genealogical lineage to the Prophet Muhammad, they represent sharply divergent paths of the revolution that transformed the Islamic world a generation ago.
Khamenei, whose title is “the Leader,” shares the brooding worldview of his mentor, Khomeini. He sees an Iran surrounded by enemies, ever the victim of plots and conspiracies. Behind owlish glasses, he has little reason to smile.
Khatami smiles all the time, and a beguiling smile it is: Quite a few Iranian women admit to keeping his photo in their wallets. Khatami is a modernizer. Instead of closing Iran to the world, he has been making the rounds of European capitals promoting his idea for a “dialogue of civilizations.”
In Friday’s parliamentary elections, Iranians went to the polls to choose between these two competing visions. The counting won’t be finished until later this week, but early trends indicate a major victory for candidates backing Khatami. If those trends hold up, it would open the door to many long-awaited social reforms. It also would redefine Iran’s role in the region and could speed the process of re-establishing relations with the United States.
But it won’t happen overnight. The conservatives represented by Khamenei are deeply entrenched, and they will not easily or quickly surrender their vision of the Islamic republic.
Despite the excitement stirred by the election, things are much calmer in Iran these days. The revolutionary fervor has faded. Twenty-one years have passed since Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi fled and Khomeini returned in triumph, borne from Paris aboard an Iran Air jumbo jet.
The “students” who took over the U.S. Embassy are all middle-aged now. Some occupy key positions in the regime. Others are in the opposition, bitter critics of the system they helped create. Most have quietly drifted into obscurity.
An entire generation has come of age with no living memory of those momentous events.
“More than 33 million Iranians have been born since the revolution. That’s half the population. For them, the revolution is something in the history books,” said Akbar Ganji, a 38-year-old writer.
Scholars of the Iranian Revolution generally agree that it was, first and foremost, a revolt against the shah’s dictatorship. Hatred of the shah was what mobilized the masses.
The mobilization against the shah turned into an Islamic revolution mainly because Iranians were unnerved by the rapid pace of modernization imposed by the shah. Traditional societies buffeted by rapid change tend to look for an anchor. Iranian society tried to recover its sense of balance and self-esteem through Islam.
Iran’s clerics seized the moment. They drafted a constitution giving themselves absolute power and began remaking society along the model of the 7th Century Islamic caliphate.
Young women who donned the hijab as a kind of symbol of revolutionary solidarity were suddenly told that this was now the mandatory dress code. They were told they could no longer wear makeup or ride bicycles–too suggestive, the clerics said. Discos and nightclubs were closed. Western movies and pop music were forbidden. Every day the list grew.
Iran’s new generation is not so sure about all of this. While they have been heavily propagandized since kindergarten, they’ve also been hearing quiet voices from home and from other sources questioning the divine right of the conservative clergy.
“I have nothing against the hijab, but I don’t want it imposed on us. I want to be free to choose it,” said Farida Pajooh, a 19-year-old architectural student from Tehran who last week was canvassing for a list for reform candidates.
“It’s really difficult for women here,” said her friend, Dena Motevallian, 18. “We can’t ride a bicycle. We can’t go out and have fun. . . .”
“More important than riding bicycles is freedom of expression. We can hardly talk without being afraid,” Pajooh interjected. “I’m saying this as a student who has been beaten up for taking part in a demonstration.”
Criticizing the regime is still risky, but Khatami’s sweeping victory in the presidential elections 33 months ago has lifted the threshold of tolerance remarkably. One hears things today that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
“We really don’t know the whole story about Israel,” said a 24-year-old university student. “All we ever hear is that they are the enemy and they are occupying Muslim lands.”
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Others spoke of the need to normalize relations with the United States.
The Majlis, Iran’s parliament, is currently controlled by hard-line conservatives who have blocked most of Khatami’s legislative initiatives, but despite this a genuine civil society has begun to take root here.
At least a dozen new newspapers have appeared in Tehran over the last 2 1/2 years. Some have been closed down for offending the powers that be, but new ones sprout the next day.
Satellite dishes and the Internet also have thwarted the conservatives’ attempts to monopolize information and keep Iran closed to the outside world.
In one of its last legislative acts, the outgoing Majlis extended the ban on satellite dishes, a ban that has been widely ignored and only intermittently enforced. Significantly, though, the Majlis has never addressed the issue of the Internet.
Hamid Chizari and Akbar Taleb opened Tehran’s first Internet cafe 15 months ago. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission. They just did it, and so far the authorities have left them alone.
Since then, seven more Internet cafes have opened.
“They didn’t want to make the same mistake they made with the satellites,” said Chizari, 40. “They know now that it is impossible to stop progress. The more you say no to something, the more attractive it becomes to the people.”
“Iran has never been against modernization or Western culture,” insisted Chizari. “We only opposed the unhealthy aspects of different cultures. We have always welcomed positive contributions.”
That’s a fairly forgiving interpretation of a society that not too long ago had a serious national debate on whether Coca-Cola was allowable under Islam. But 20 years after the revolution, Western culture no longer looks so terrifying–or even so Western–to Iranians.
“During the revolution, we equated modernity to Westernization and both were declared the enemy of the Islamic Republic,” said Hamidreza Jalaeipour, 41, a newspaper publisher who, as a leading student activist during the revolution, was rewarded with the governorship of Mahabad Province at age 21.
“Now we see modernization as a global phenomenon. These days everything is `globalization.’ The Internet doesn’t belong to Western culture; it’s something that belongs to the global culture,” he said.
“Some superficial aspects of modernization were imposed from the top by the shah, but because the shah was not very popular, these were not well-received,” noted Ebrahim Yazdi, a member of the circle of the Islamic intellectuals who led the early opposition to the shah in the 1960s. “With the revolution, we’ve learned to domesticate modern ideas to be compatible with our own culture. We are Islamicizing modern concepts.”
Both Yazdi and Jalaeipour attempted to run for seats in the parliament on reform slates. Both were disqualified by the Guardian Council, which passes on the “fitness” of candidates. Conservative clergy dominates the council.
Outside the gates of Tehran University, the scene of so much political turmoil, 23-year-old Mohsen Hosseini was distributing leaflets for reform candidates ahead of Friday’s election.
He has already been jailed once in the last year for political activities and said the experience taught him valuable lessons.
“I thought that by smashing glass things could be changed. I now realize it’s not easy to remove or replace the people in power,” he said. “This is still a very traditional society, and we have to move little by little to achieve reforms.”
Hosseini missed the revolution. He was 2 at the time. But he believes his generation will have an even bigger impact on the future of Iran.
“At the time of the revolution, a lot of people thought that if you changed the name of the country and changed the person at the top and changed the name of the streets, that the society would automatically change too,” he said.
“But today, few people of my generation believe that. We want to change the people in power without having to change the street names.”