Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Publication: The New York Times
Date: June 16, 2002
Iran has the bomb. I know. I found
it.
No, no - not that bomb. This bomb
is hiding in plain sight - in high schools, universities and coffee houses.
It is a bomb that is ticking away under Iranian society, and over the next
decade it will explode in ways that will change the face of this Islamic
Republic. It's called here, for short, "The Third Generation."
The first generation of Iranian
revolutionaries overthrew the Shah in 1979 and founded the Islamic Republic.
They are now old, gray and increasingly tired, a clerical regime clinging
to power more by coercion than by any popular acceptance of their plan
to Islamize all aspects of Iranian life. The second generation came of
age during the 1980's Iran-Iraq war, which left 286,000 Iranians dead and
500,000 injured. This is a lost generation, deflated and quiescent.
The third generation are those Iranians
from 16 to 30 who have come of age entirely under Islamic rule. They never
knew the Shah's despotism. They have known only the ayatollahs'. There
are now 18 million of them - roughly a third of Iran's population - and
they include 2 million university students and 4 million recent university
grads.
"As with most revolutions, this
third generation has no special sympathy for the founders of the revolution
- in fact they blame our generation for bringing them a government they
feel doesn't know how to run the country properly," observed Mohsen Sazgara,
a former aide to Ayatollah Khomeini and now a top reformer. "They are the
most significant population group in Iran [until the fourth generation,
the 24 million Iranians under 16, comes of age], and wherever this generation
decides to go is where Iran will go in the next decade."
Where this Third Generation wants
to go is already apparent. While some of them are religious conservatives,
most are not. They are young, restless, modern-looking and often unemployed,
because there are not enough good jobs. They are connected to the world
via the Internet or satellite dishes - and they like what they see. They
want the good life, a good job, more individual freedom and more connections
with the outside world - and they are increasingly angry that they don't
have those things. They embrace Islam, but they don't want it to occupy
every corner of their lives.
"They are not anti-religious, but
they are anti-fundamentalism - they refuse to be blind followers of anything,"
says Hamidreza Jalaeipour, a sociology professor. His 19-year-old son,
Mohammadreza, nods vigorously in agreement.
The government has already had to
ease up in response to them. When I was last here, six years ago, a friend
took me to see an Iranian guitarist who had an electric guitar but could
only play songs in his bedroom, because pop music had been banned. Today
he is giving public concerts of Iranian pop songs and cutting CD's. When
I was last here women had to be covered in black robes and their hair could
not show. Now the robes are multicolored and many push back their head
scarves to show their hair. When the mullahs shout at them, many young
women shout right back. The most popular Iranian films today are those
that mock the hypocrisy of the theocracy, including one now playing in
Tehran about a 15-year-old Iranian girl who has a child out of wedlock
and decides to keep the baby, and another about a mother who runs off with
her daughter's fiancé.
This Third Generation of Iranians
is quite different from its counterpart in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is
a country getting younger, poorer, more Islamic and more anti-American
- as young Saudis react against what they consider a corrupt, irreligious,
pro-American regime. Iran is a country getting younger, poorer, less Islamic
and less anti-American - as young Iranians react against an anti-American
theocracy, isolating them from the world.
When Iran got the telegraph in the
early 1900's it helped trigger the first constitutional revolution against
the despotic Qajar regime. When telephones and tape cassettes spread around
Iran in the 1970's, they became tools through which Ayatollah Khomeini
spread his revolution against the Shah. Today the Internet and satellite
TV have come to Iran, bringing with them new appetites and aspirations
for Iran's Third Generation.
This Third Generation hoped President
Khatami's reformist candidacy would satisfy those aspirations, but he proved
to be a bust, unwilling to confront the conservatives. No matter. The Third
Generation will eventually find a new political horse to ride and, when
it does, Iran will change - with or without the ayatollahs' blessings.
