Young Iranians Revolt Like It’s 1979

Young Iranian-Americans Ponder Their Role in Iran’s Youth Uprising
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.

In 1999, students launched the most violent government protest since the revolution 20 years earlier after the liberal Salam newspaper was closed for what a special Iranian court called disturbing public opinion, endangering national security and violating Islamic principles. The protests began peacefully at Tehran University dormitories and soon spread to other cities. In standoffs with police, several students were killed, many were injured and hundreds were arrested. Some of the students involved remain in prison today.

The Iranian government has been applying pressure recently on the media for presenting opposing viewpoints. This summer, the daily Shargh (East) newspaper was banned for publishing an interview with Iranian-Canadian poet Saghi Ghahraman, who has written on homosexuality, which is illegal in Iran and can carry the death penalty. Ghahraman was also criticized for questioning Islamic views on gender roles. It was the second time the newspaper had been closed in a year. Another moderate newspaper, Ham Mihan (Compatriot), had been shut down by the government a month earlier.

To express their anger over the government’s policies, students disrupted a speech by President Ahmadinejad at the prestigious Amir Kabir University of Technology in Tehran last December by sparking firecrackers, burning his picture and heckling him with “Death to the Dictator” chants. Outside in the streets, protesters smashed television cameras, shouting the slogan “for freedom and against despotism.” The demonstration was one of several occurring that week over the barring of politically-active students from taking classes and the removal of secular and liberal professors by the government.

President Ahmadinejad downplayed the incident and none of the student hecklers were arrested. Seeking to capitalize on the Iranian public’s desire for greater freedom, the Bush Administration pledged $85 million to promote democracy in Iran last year. The initiative includes plans for a Farsi-language satellite television station, grants for non-governmental organizations and media independent of the Iranian government.

Struggles in the U.S.

Thousands of Iranians migrate to the U.S. each year, mostly to metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and New York, seeking better job opportunities and greater individual freedom. In 2000, there were more than 280,000 foreign-born Iranians living in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The U.S. State Department says more than 5,000 immigrant visas were issued to Iranians in 2005.

“I can’t speak for all young Iranian Americans,” Fahr says. “But the ones that I’ve come across are certainly concerned with what’s happening in Iran because like me, they feel a personal affiliation to the issues.”

Amid vast youth movement for a secular Iran, lays a faction of older Iranian Americans who support the Iranian government. “Our parent’s generation automatically sides with Iran since it is anti-imperialism,” says Roshan Pourabdollah, 25, who lives in California. “There’s an idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and they [parents] will never say anything bad about Iran.”

But Pourabdollah, who works with an organization that promotes human rights in Iran and the U.S., says she does not share her parents’ viewpoint on Iran. “Just because I say I’m anti-U.S. imperialism does not mean that I’m pro-Iran,” she says, noting Iran’s “atrocious” human rights record, which has included the stoning of women, violence against gays and the detainment of political prisoners. “You can’t sit here if you care about humanity and say that that’s okay.”

Human rights groups and other organizations have focused their recent attention on the hundreds of arrests and verbal warnings issued to Iranian women for wearing overcoats that reveal the shape of their bodies, and for showing too much hair underneath head scarves. One such group, Iranian Alliances Across Borders, who co-hosted the International Iranian Diaspora Conference with New York University’s Persian Cultural Society, is seeking to address Iran’s cultural issues by uniting young Iranians globally, particularly Iran’s student diaspora.

While some groups explore the cultural aspects of the Iranian Diaspora, others such as the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement, seek to preserve the legal rights of Iranians.

Iranian-American attorney Banafsheh Akhlaghi in 2004 transformed her temporary law office into a full-scale legal and human rights organization. NLSC advocates in courts, communities and Washington for people from 24 nations targeted by the U.S. government since the Sept. 11th attacks.

Akhlaghi says she’s concerned about students facing discrimination in the U.S. due to their Iranian heritage, noting cases where students faced unusual questioning from schools regarding visa status. Students are also being randomly approached to become FBI informants, she says. “This is an ongoing reality in the U.S.,” Akhlaghi says.

Last year, an Iranian student at the University of California Los Angeles endured a six-minute tasing from campus police after he failed to produce a student ID during a random check at a school library, and for refusing to leave when asked. UCLA quickly launched an internal investigation. Although the NLSC did not handle the case, other human rights groups immediately called the tasing “unjustified” and “excessive.”

The groups also called for the investigation to be independent of the university. The student filed a federal civil rights suit against UCLA this year, alleging campus police used excessive force, and violated his Constitutional rights.

Second-Generation Homecoming

To better understand their heritage, some Iranian-Americans have embarked on modern pilgrimages to Iran. Sina Tayebi of Silver Spring, Md., whose parents left Iran during the 1979 revolution, was surprised to learn in a recent visit that Iran was just as modern, diverse and peaceful as any ordinary U.S. suburb.

“There’s no big difference” between Iran and the U.S., says Tayebi, who is 17 years-old.

Tayebi, who occasionally adjusts the brim of his glasses when speaking, is confident, yet humble in admitting there’s more to learn about his parents’ homeland.

“I am still trying to find out about the 1979 revolution,” he says. “Once I know what happened, I think that will help me better understand what’s going on in Iran right now, so I can help.”