Iran's Theocracy is Sputtering

Perhaps America's first violent confrontation with Islamic extremism was in the guise of Iran and the Ayatollah Khomenei. It's been a quarter of a century since the Islamic Revolution in Iran... and how are things going? Not very well. The leaders of Iran encouraged people to have lots of children and they complied; now, those children are growing up and seeking their own path in life - a path not always constrained by the old mullahs' ideas about Islam.

Nicholas D. Kristof writes in The New York Times:

[T]he latest fashion here in Shiraz, in central Iran, is light, tight and sensual. "There are some manteaus with slits on the sides up to the armpits," said Mahmoud Salehi, a 25-year-old manteau salesman. "And then there are the `commando manteaus,' with ties on the legs to show off the hips and an elastic under the breasts to accentuate the bust." Worse, from the point of view of hard-line mullahs, young women in such clothing aren't getting 74 lashes any more — they're getting dates.

The morals police no longer order women to cover up stray hairs. These days, the fashion is for brightly colored, glittery see-through scarves, worn halfway back on the head. "It's possible head scarves will be gone in another year or two, the way things are going," said Amir Suleimani, a scarf salesman in the Tehran Bazaar. "God willing."

"We want fun," declared Tannaz Haj Hosseini, a 20-year-old university student who was out with her boyfriend in Tehran. "There's no joy here." I protested that her nail polish and see-through scarf — not to mention the boyfriend — underscored the progress in Iran. A few years ago, she would have been lashed. "I don't compare myself with 10 years ago," she said. "I compare myself to what I could have and don't."

That last comment is an indicator of serious danger on the horizon. When people are content to compare themselves with the past and satisified that things are better than they were, then the spectre of revolution is generally quite far away. When people compare themselves to the thing they could have but which are being denied them, then there is a real risk that they will take action to get what they want.

They don't want to be Westerners and they don't want to simply imitate young people in America or Europe. They want to remain good Muslims and they want an Islamic society - but their ideas of what is required to be "good Muslims" and to have an "Islamic society" no longer look very much like ideas being enforced by the old mullahs who have been in charge these past couple of decades.

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