A campaign in mid-2008 in the Islamic Republic of Iran against "bad hijab" - scarves worn in a way that reveal a woman's hair and thus violate the country's rigorous public dress-code - saw many women arrested and an even larger number cautioned. At the time a university student called Shadi offered me a handy obstacle-course roadmap of Tehran, which she and a group of her friends had compiled. This contained advice on how to avoid the "annoying hassle" of arrest, in part by highlighting all the major centres and thoroughfares in Tehran where police-cars and police-vans are deployed.
Nasrin Alavi is the author of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Portobello Books, 2005). She spent her formative years in Iran, attended university in Britain and worked in London, and then returned to her birthplace to work for an NGO for a number of years. Today she lives in Britain.
Also by Nasrin Alavi on openDemocracy:
"Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fear" (1 November 2005)
"Inside Iran" (14 February 2006)
"Iran: the elite against the people" (22 May 2006)
"Tehran's red card to human rights" (23 June 2006)
"Iran: cracks in the façade" (11 December 2006)
"Iran's election backlash" (19 December 2006)
"Iran's attack blowback" (5 February 2007)
"Women in Iran: repression and resistance" (5 March 2007)
"Axis of Evil vs Great Satan: wrestling to normality" (2 May 2007)
"The Iran paradox" (11 October 2007)
"Iran's circle of power" (23 October 2007)
"Iran: the uses of intelligence" (6 December 2007)
"Iran's new order" (28 January 2008)
"Iran's election signals" (18 March 2008)
"Iranians' interrupted freedom" (8 October 2008)
The roadmap seemed to sum up the mood of many young people like Shadi that I'd met in the previous couple of years; outmanoeuvre and outwit the authorities, rather than risk a direct confrontation.
It is not always as easy as that.
Zahra Bani Yaghoub was born soon after the revolution of 1978-79 which established the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her father had been a political prisoner during the Shah's regime, and he later became a member of the Revolutionary Guards. Zahra herself grew up in a modest home in the narrow alleyways of working-class south Tehran. She was a bright student who ranked twenty-third in the national university-entrance exams; soon after qualifying as a doctor, she volunteered to work in a deprived area. On 11 October 2007 she was arrested on a busy Friday morning as she sat beside her fiancé in a park in the western Iranian province of Iran. The "morality-police" team who detained her carried the official title of "Propagation of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice Squad".
Forty-eight hours later, Zahra was dead.
While in detention, Zahra had asked for permission to telephone her rural clinic, fearing that her patients would be met with closed doors. Her brother was able to speak to her, and later told reporters of her high spirits when she heard that her family were to arrange for her quick release (as it turned out, this conversation took place only fifteen minutes before her death). He insisted that it was "impossible" that Zahra could have committed suicide - both because of her defiant character and of the conditions in which she had been held. "Zahra was a resilient girl - one of those who cannot tolerate bullying and who always defended her rights", he said.
When Zahra's father arrived to secure her release, the staff at the basij (militia) detention-centre chose to conceal the truth of what had happened, instead taunting him and making time-wasting bureaucratic requests. An open letter to the press on the anniversary of her death - which was not published inside Iran - outlined the family's experience of threats and intimidation when pursuing their fight for justice; it quoted an official in Hamadan who appealed to their revolutionary credentials in asking them to keep their daughter's death in basij detention a secret.
Zahra had been an outstanding member of the generation of young people that has grown up under the Islamic Republic - and whose lives have been transformed as a result of its free-education policies and national-literacy campaigns. Now, as the revolution's thirtieth anniversary is commemorated and celebrated with Daheh Fajr (ten days of dawn) on 31 January-9 February 2009, Iran is grappling with its demographic "success" - and does not know how to come to terms with it (see "Iranians' interrupted freedom", 8 October 2008).
The game
The instinctive reaction of many hardline champions of the revolutionary flame is to redouble its repressive credentials. The president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - elected in June 2005 - is one of them; he has been responsible for introducing a renewed crackdown on young people's "un-Islamic" appearance, under the guise of protecting "social safety". Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the chairman of the Guardian Council - which has powers both to decide on who can be a candidate for the majlis [parliament] and to approve or nullify its laws - spoke during a recent Friday sermon in Tehran of "the misfortune that university and women students have created".
But the crackdown has met with widespread criticism even within conservative circles; the close Ahmadinejad ally Sadeq Mahsouli (appointed interior minister on 18 November 2008 in place of the disgraced Ali Kordan) has called for a reassessment of the campaign, and Mohammad-Hussein Taghavi (a senior member of the majlis [parliament]) has pronounced it "ineffective"
When young women in today's Iran are confronted by a combination of power and irrationality, perhaps it is not surprising that many choose to produce creative roadmaps to claim whatever margin of freedom they can. The other side of this coin is a larger retreat among many Iranians (if far from all) from and evasion of direct political action.
This is increasingly visible in election turnouts. In the majlis elections of March-April 2008, for example, less than 30% of eligible voters took part in the capital, Tehran; and the figures were similar in the country's other urban centres (which in total account for 70% of the electorate).
But as the young and many other citizens have turned away from the "official" political game, there is no escape - for politics in Iran has a way of insinuating itself into surprising corners of social life. Inside Iran, even an apparently innocuous TV sports broadcast has a tendency to become a political battle-of-wills.
Adel Ferdosipour is the 30-something presenter of a live football programme in Iran's Channel 3 called Navad (Ninety), a job he combines with teaching English at his alumni (Iran's premier engineering school, Sharif University). Iranian viewers took a liking to his informed and enthusiastic commentaries, which can draw more than 20 million viewers a week. Yet when he had the temerity to criticise allies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - who, soon after his election, had commandeered the Iranian Football Federation (FFIRI) - they in turn accused him of "undermining the regime" and disrespecting the "martyrs" of the war and revolution.
Overnight, what should have been a routine controversy became a national cause célèbre. There was an explosion of popular support for Ferdosipour: football fans chanted his name and held up banners in his support, while Sharif University students created a human chain shaped like the programme's title. The adored ex-player Khodadad Azizi (who scored a crucial equaliser that allowed Iran to qualify for the World Cup finals in 1998) commented: "When officials do not have reasonable answers, they resort to arguments about the regime and the blood of martyrs - but this issue has nothing to do with the regime or politics". Among openDemocracy's many articles about Iran's internal politics and foreign relations:
Kamin Mohammadi, "Voices from Tehran" (31 January 2007)
Fred Halliday, "The matter with Iran" (1 March 2007)
Anoush Ehteshami, "Iran and the United States: back from the brink" (16 March 2007)
Nazenin Ansari, "Tehran's new political dynamic" (16 April 2007)
Rasool Nafisi, "Iran's cultural prison" (17 May 2007)
Omid Memarian, "Iran: prepared for the worst" (30 October 2007)
Jan De Pauw, "Iran, the United States and Europe: the nuclear complex" (5 December 2007)
Rasool Nafisi, "Iran's majlis elections: the hidden dynamics" (11 April 2008)
Paul Rogers, "Iran and the American election" (5 June 2008)
Ferdosipour's own answer was to conduct a survey among the viewers of his programme. In a very short period of time he received over 2 million text-messages, the vast majority of which supported him. He signed off the next programme by "(asking) God to make the officials more tolerant and open to criticism".
At the height of their power, the rhetorical assault on Ferdosipour - who had to meet the strict recruitment conditions of a state body in order to front his show - would have resulted at least in his instant dismissal. Now, the authorities are reduced to inflated rhetorical attacks on him merely for doing his job, in the process revealing their weakness.
The implication of Khodadad Azizi's remarks is that it is the authorities and their supporters who - by the residue of the totalising ambition that marked the revolution - choose to make all things political.
The trace
It can seem that the regime's conspiracy theorists compete to outshine each other in nonsensical accusations (the ultra-hardline Kayhan Sport supplement even published a front-page story proclaiming a western conspiracy in the publicity around the Ferdosipour affair).
In January 2009, brothers and pioneering HIV/Aids doctors Arash and Kamiar Alaei were jailed for nine years for being "key elements" in an alleged CIA-backed plot to engage in a "soft overthrow" of the state.
The veteran revolutionary figure and Shi'a cleric Abdollah Nouri (who served as interior minister under the presidency of both Hashemi Rafsanjani [1989-97] and Mohammad Khatami [1997-2005]) sees such paranoia as a sign of fragility. In a recent meeting with a group of reformist students he argued that the term "overthrow" tends to be used by systems that are unstable or feel unstable". At the same time he recited the history of civil-rights activism in the United States from Martin Luther King's movement to Barack Obama's presidency; welcomed Obama's election; and praised the political process that had led to his success.
Abdollah Nouri asked the students: "In reality, among world nations is it Islamic countries or others that are the flag-bearers of the defence of human rights and dignity and the fostering of democracy?" He added that he saw the ideals of Islamic justice best embodied today in the conduct of people such as Nelson Mandela, and asked: "Do we see any trace of this in Islamic societies?"
The wellspring
At the dawn of the Iranian revolution thirty years ago it would have been inconceivable that Abdollah Nouri - the "trusted lieutenant" of Ayatollah Khomeini, and his representative in the Revolutionary Guards - would one day offer genuine praise for an American president. The students had come to ask Nouri to stand in the presidential race that culminates on 12 June 2009. In current circumstances, however, it is also inconceivable that he would be allowed to compete.
But there are other reformist hopefuls who do have a realistic chance of qualifying for the race: among them ex-president Mohammad Khatami, and even the prime minister during Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq, Mir-Hossein Mousavi (who is supported by Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the revolution's founder). The most artful argument of such reformers is that the revolution has strayed from its original noble principles: in this view, Ayatollah Khomeini was the equivalent of a sincere, quasi-Lenin figure whose ideals were hijacked and ruined by his quasi-Stalin successors.
There are more conservative challengers to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will himself seek a second term in June 2009. The current mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer-Qalibaf - a pasteurised version of the current president. He has spoken of loosening Iran's rigidly controlled economy (for example at Davos in January 2008), yet there is little sign that he will question the unyielding grip that the revolution's institutions hold over 80% of the economy.
Ahmadinejad and Baqer-Qalibaf will be competing for the effective endorsement of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, some of whose own allies overlap with the mayor's. Both these calculating politicians are willing to peddle any case or line - even including rapprochement with Washington - as long as they are in charge to do the dirty deed.
The approach of the election will intensify the efforts of these aspirants to market populist formulae and quick-fix solutions to Iran's deep-seated problems. The shape of the contest between those who emphasise the need for a free society, an open market, social justice or "more of the same" is yet to become clear. But the lives of millions of Iranians - the young doctor Zahra Bani Yaghoub, the TV presenter Adel Ferdosipour, students such as Shadi, and clerics such as Abdollah Nouri - reflect different forms of resistance that will sooner or later irrevocably take Iranian society beyond the revolutionary era.
Iranian society is no longer what it was thirty years ago. Those who once believed no longer do; those who claim still to believe have no credibility; those who never believed have no reason to. But the future lies with those born later: the countless educated young people whom the regime can no longer afford to pick fights with that it will inevitably lose.
