Young Iranians, once avid reformers, leave politics behind

[Flashermac]

Tehran, Iran - Alireza Mahfouzian knows how it feels on the front line of Iran's culture wars. When he graduated from high school, the police shaved off his too-radical long hair. He has been in court 20 times for social infractions and boasts that he knew the courthouse "room by room."

 

Caught drinking alcohol years ago, he received 75 lashes to his back â?? all the price, he says, of growing up and testing limits in the Islamic Republic.

 

But Mr. Mahfouzian is now older and wiser and has come to terms with the restrictions of Iran. Like many here in their late 20s and early 30s who were once foot soldiers in Iran's reform movement, he has given up on politics and has little interest in Friday's vote for the 290-seat parliament. Hundreds of reformists have been disqualified in an election that amounts to a referendum on this country's conservative leadership.

 

"They are walking away from the state. They are pushing away politics," says Hamid Reza Jalaiepour, a sociologist at Tehran University. "I call this the 'Era of Rethinking.' These days Iranians are thinking how they can find a better way."

 

...

 

Political choice is something that Tooska, a Tehran law student who asked that her real name not be used, says she gave up long ago. Like a number of Western-leaning young Iranians who supported the reform movement but were fed up with its ineffectiveness, she last voted in 2005 to prevent the archconservative Mr. Ahmadinejad from coming to power.

 

But today Tooska, who is 21, could hardly be less political.

 

"The Islamic system will exist for all my life, at least," she says in one of her favorite coffee shops. "I oblige myself to tolerate what I can't change. You can't be angry every morning, all the time, with the â?¦ country."

 

So Tooska creates her own parallel universe, separate from Iranian politics and more in line with its semi-underground cultural life. In it, she paints â?? often nudes and in the middle of the night â?? and has studied under one of Iran's best-known artists.

 

"It's not [just] freedom, it's my right," says Tooska. "I can paint whatever I want."

 

She also won't be voting on Friday.

 

"There are some rules in Islam they don't follow," she says of the ruling class. "They shouldn't be rich, they shouldn't womanize, they shouldn't lie â?? moral things. I am not a religious person, and I don't do those things. But they say 'Don't do,' and they do it."

 

 

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[Julian2]

They got a bit of a taste of reform under the popular president Mohammad Khatami. However the invasion of Iraq frightened the crap out of the average Iranian and the hardliner MahmÅ«d AhmadinejÄÂd ran a fear campaign and took over. (Sounds all to familiar doesn't it?)

[..]

The problem to me is that Iranians held out an olive branch under Khatami and the US slapped them in the face instead of encouraging the reform. So what do we expect? Som nam na

 

Cheers,

SD

[CTO]

Julien, spot on, sad as the country is one of the better educated in the middle east, and had a good chance of reform, now thanks to Iraq, gone.

[Flashermac]

When I was a university student close to 50% of the foreign students were from Iran. Plenty of educated folks in their 50s and 60s must have US earned degrees. Unfortunately, the Islamic nutters like Ahmedgingerbread managed to take over the revolution against the Shah and the governments that followed.