Youthful Cravings Are Aging Iran’s Revolution

Holding hands as they strolled through a crowded fairground on a brilliant day beneath snow-covered peaks, looking for bargains for the upcoming Persian New Year, Mariam and Reza were feeling less than sunny.

“Four times we have been checked: ‘Who are you? What is your relationship to each other?’ ” said Mariam, 20, looking at Reza, whose 17-year-old face bore the first wisp of a mustache.

“I am his aunt,” she said with irritation.

In Iran, it is illegal for unrelated couples to venture out in public. The morals police are everywhere, and punishment can be a fine or caning.

Like many of her generation, Mariam said she is fed up.

“Doesn’t everyone want to be free?” she asked.

When the leaders of the Islamic Revolution took power 17 years ago, they believed that they could turn back the clock to a medieval Islamic world where women would cover themselves willingly and men would put devotion to God above material concerns.

But they did not reckon with human nature.

The more Iranians are compelled to believe in something, the less they like it.

And that is what is happening today in Iran. Ideology is dying. Concern for bread-and-butter issues is preeminent.

Most important, the youth--the two-thirds of the population too young to remember what the country was like before the 1979 revolution--are frustrated, restive and turning their backs on the mullahs.

“Despite the impression on the outside, the Islamic Revolution is being made ever more pragmatic and secular,” said Vahe Petrossian of the Middle East Economic Digest in London. “A lot of the pressure is coming from the younger generation.”

At a time when the United States is trying to rally worldwide condemnation of Iran, there are signs that the real threat to Islamic rule is from within--the 40 million or so Iranians who are younger than 25 and were brought up on revolutionary rhetoric.

Now, though, by and large, they yearn only for a better, less rigid life. Consider:

* The regime’s ban on satellite television--with its window on the outside world bringing in rock music, uncensored information and a message of cultural freedom--is widely flouted. Pirate satellite dishes are hidden in closets and brought out at night. Other Iranians are using telephones and modems to access the Internet and exchange news freely around the globe.

* Economists estimate that the gross national product has grown, at most, at 1% to 2% annually in the 17 years since the revolution, a period in which the population has more than doubled. Foreign investment is almost nonexistent. Inflation rages at 60%.

“An increasing portion of the population is starting to feel pain,” one Western diplomat in Tehran said. “The $64-question is: When is that pain going to result in another major social dislocation?”

* Elections this month provided voters little choice after clerical councils screened and eliminated thousands of would-be candidates who failed the test of religious purity. But within the narrow choice allowed, a ticket of modernizing pragmatists backed by President Hashemi Rafsanjani appears to have won a victory over religious conservatives.

* Voices of dissent are growing bolder. Members of a small liberal opposition, the Freedom Movement, who until recently were denounced as “agents of America,” nearly made it onto the ballot. Newspaper editors have risked shutdowns, fines and lashings to publish stories of alleged corruption. A working-class riot over bus fares south of Tehran last year drew sympathy from university students and acquired political overtones.

All these factors reflect youth-driven challenges to the country’s governing elite--the alliance of clerics, security services and a group of 20 to 30 merchant families, or bazari, who control the economy and grow rich through trade monopolies and government concessions.

For many of the young, the highly insular nature of the ruling circle is part of the problem.

“The government is run by a semimonopolistic club whose members have a lifetime membership, and it’s very hard for outsiders to get in,” said Ali Rashidi, a prominent economist.

As a result, there is a sense, among college students especially, that the doors to success are closed.

“They say, ‘Why should we study? Why should we finish college? What job is waiting for us?’ . . . Every year there are 50,000 college graduates, but the country cannot find jobs for even one out of five,” Rashidi said.

Petrossian said younger Iranians also have higher expectations than their parents, who can clearly recall the hardships before the revolution in the waning days of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Back then, he said, corruption was rampant, basic foodstuffs were missing from store shelves and electrical power would break down on a regular basis.

But none of that means anything to those born after the revolution, he said.

“The young generation takes whatever they have for granted, and that’s their starting point,” Petrossian said. “Now they want more and better.”

They also are demanding less, when it comes to restrictions--finding ways to get around rules that deny them entertainment, self-expression and social contact with the opposite sex.

Clandestine parties where teenage boys and girls mingle and dance to rock music take place in private apartments.

Alcohol and uncensored videos are distributed on the black market.

The chador, the shapeless black garment meant to cover a woman from head to toe with only part of her face exposed, is being relentlessly dressed up or thrown back--showing a flash of hair here or bold earrings there.

With all this youthful dissatisfaction and social ferment beneath the surface, where is Iran headed?

“Secularization is the central question,” Petrossian said. “They are going through a process of reformation where religion is being slowly set aside.”

In 10 years, he predicted, “chances are you will not have a president who wears a religious robe.”