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What is the real Iran?

By Lindsey Hilsum

Updated on 06 February 2009

Lindsey Hilsum reflects on the changes in Iran 10 years after she first visited the country.

So which is the real Iran? I'm back in Tehran, and the contradictions which struck me when I first visited in 1998 are as acute as ever before.

There is sophisticated, cosmopolitan, highly educated Iran and there is impoverished, deeply religious, inward-looking Iran and any number of realities in between.

The government wants us to film the Iran of their tired revolutionary dream, so today we obediently traipsed out to the cemetery for the martyrs of the Iran/Iraq War.

Hundreds of thousands of boys and men are buried here, many the victims of the Ayatollah Khomeini's tactic of putting unarmed teenagers into the frontline.

This is the Ten-Day Dawn - the commemoration of the 10 days from Khomeini's triumphant return from exile in Paris in 1979, to the day the Revolution was formally declared victorious.

In its honour they had mustered a police helicopter to fly over the graves and drop gladioli and carnations.


The cult of martyrdom is alien to the modern western mind, but the grief of the families cannot be denied.

The government always wants visiting journalists to film here, and I always find it tricky. The cult of martyrdom is alien to the modern western mind, but the grief of the families cannot be denied.

So I talked to people there, all seemingly true believers in the Revolution. A teacher reminisced about how she demonstrated during the Revolution, but in those days didn't have to wear hijab, the headscarf.

She would not be drawn on whether she preferred it that way.

A man said he was still mourning two brothers lost in the Iran/Iraq War - he was sorry he had not been able to sacrifice himself too.

Another told a long story about how his major revolutionary act back in 1979 had been to smash a BBC camera. (He added that he had subsequently paid for it.)


Seventy per cent of Iranians were born after the Revolution. They want jobs and fashion and sex, just like young people everywhere.

But such people are scarcely representative. Many Iranians I know have little in common with those they see as gullible and ill-educated.

Nasrin Alavi in Open Democracy writes: "Iranian society is no longer what it was 30 years ago. Those who once believed no longer do; those who still claim to believe have no credibility; those who never believed have no reason to."

In other words, the scenes the government exhibits to foreign journalists - revolutionary parades, meetings of fervent women in black - represent an Iran created to prove a myth.

Most Iranians go nowhere near Friday prayers or the gatherings the international media are encouraged to film. They keep their heads down, avoid all this revolutionary religiosity and try to make a living.

Seventy per cent of Iranians were born after the Revolution. They want jobs and fashion and sex, just like young people everywhere.

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamanei, whose face glowers down upon us, is fighting that alternative Iran as fiercely as he and his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini fought the Shah, 30 years ago.

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