Young Iranians have challenged the Islamic Republic with formal protests.

By JOSETTE COMPTON

To young Iranians, it’s like 1979 all over again.

Almost three decades after students and other young people revolted against the Iranian monarchy and its pro-western policies, a new generation of young Iranians are ironically rebelling against many of the traditional laws their predecessors fought to preserve.

Despite the country’s strict laws banning “un-Islamic behavior,” young Iranians are now sporting tattoos, buying iPods, surfing Internet dating sites and embracing other aspects of Western culture. As a further act of rebellion, Iranian students and other young people have staged massive protests. They even heckled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during speeches, voicing their displeasure over the country’s strict social policies, which have involved everything from a ban on public hand-holding by couples to Western-style haircuts. And with more than 60% of Iran’s current population under the age 30, some predict that another youth-led resistance could be on the rise.

The growing conflict in Iran has also been a complex issue to assess for young Iranian Americans, many of which have family members that fled the country during the 1979 revolt. On one hand, young Iranian Americans support their counterparts’ pursuit of secular freedom. On the other, Iranian Americans are seeking to remain aligned to their parent’s values, which is supportive of Iran’s anti-imperialism ideology.

“It’s hard to have a real sense of what’s happening in Iran,” said Saara Nafici, a 27-year-old Iranian American from Virginia. “They (Iranians) have a set of sovereign issues that we don’t necessarily see, and if you’re from America, when you go there you are not going to know what’s going on.”

1979 Push for Tradition

Despite the country’s economic growth in the late-1970s, opposition mounted against the Shah and his diplomatic ties with the United States, which many viewed as a threat to Iran’s traditional Islamic values. In the months leading up to the Shah’s 1979 self-imposed exile, young people took to the streets of Tehran, burning stores and banks.

The revolt reached a breaking point that November when militant Islamic students beseeched the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 66 U.S. citizens hostage, subsequently suspending diplomatic ties with the U.S. for decades. When opposition leader Ayatollah Khomeini took office that year, he inserted a new Constitution that reflected many of the traditional Islamic policies governing Iran today.

At a Columbia University screening of her first documentary, filmmaker Anna Fahr, whose petite figure, dark hair and almond-shaped eyes draw a resemblance to an all-American woman, says she has always felt a connection to Iran. “It's difficult to disassociate yourself from a place that is undergoing political upheaval when the people being affected in that region are members of your own family.”

At the annual International Conference on the Iranian Diaspora in New York this Spring, Fahr joined academics, artists, activists and students for a series of panels and workshops designed to address the issues facing Iranians, particularly Iranian youth.

In the session “Going Home: Tales of Return and Departure,” Fahr and other panelists explored the “homecomings” of second-generation Iranians. Fahr discussed her “Khaneh Ma: These Places We Call Home documentary,” which chronicles the lives of three generations of her family living in Iran, Canada and Germany. In the film, Fahr interviews her aunt Parveneh Sepasi, who like millions of Iranians, fled the country during the 1979 revolution due to the political unrest surrounding the collapse of the Shah regime. Fahr also filmed several Iranian college students who left the country in 1979 after they were expelled from universities for opposing the government.

The Western Rebellion

Amid the latest young Iranian revolt are police crackdowns against public displays of affection by couples, alcohol, Western music and other violations of Islamic rules, forcing many Iranians to pursue such Western-like freedoms in the privacy of their homes. In the previous years, police turned a blind eye to such behavior, often following a small bribe.

In the late-1990s, the Internet and international media outlets offered Iranians a window into the independence of Western and European young people, which augmented several isolated demonstrations against the Islamic Republic. NEXT

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