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Reformists like the former president Mohammad Khatami making a comeback to challenge the hardline conservatives like the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could pave the way for moderation on radical Islamic practices, a more secular administration, improvement of the economic conditions and relations with the US.

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Three decades after the revolution, it's a different world for Iranians

Rural Iran is being propelled into the 21st century, writes Borzou Daragahi in Absard.

Four friends gather in a basement eatery in a rural town to talk about the revolution three decades ago that changed their lives.

"What kind of Islamic revolution allows sexy movies on television?" asks Mohammed Rezaie, a 49-year-old farmer. "What kind of revolution allows young men to gel their hair up like this?" he says, making rabbit-ears with his fingers.

"What does hair gel have to with revolution?" bellows Seyed Rahman Hussein, 41. "Who are you to tell someone else how their kid should behave?"

Such were the conversations in the hinterlands as Iran celebrated the 30th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution yesterday. It is in rural areas where the country's most dramatic changes are occurring, propelling religiously conservative communities from a semi-feudal past into the 21st century.

"Thirty years ago, the dominant discourse was the concept of revolution," says Hamid-Reza Jalaipour, a social scientist in Tehran, the capital. "But now, the dominant discourse is democracy."

On Monday, supporters of the revolution that overthrew the pro-US monarch, Shah Reza Pahlavi, and installed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as leader climbed to their rooftops and chanted "God is great!" to mark the anniversary. Yesterday hundreds of thousands marched through Tehran to commemorate the day Khomeini declared the Islamic Republic.

Much of the political focus in Tehran concerns the looming election battle between reformists like the former president Mohammad Khatami and hardline conservatives like the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And in the big city centres the social focus is on the friction between urban youth and women and the restrictive, fundamentalist clergy.

In rural areas, there is a sense of lost simplicity and of perplexity.

Among the four friends, none with more than a high school diploma, the tricky questions percolate rapidly: Why are there are no factories here to employ the young? Why are Afghan migrants taking all the jobs? Why is the countryside flooded with hard drugs, heroin and crystal meth, called "shisheh", or glass? How did a few get so rich while others stayed poor?

In 30 years, Absard has mushroomed from a sleepy backwater of dirt roads and a few hundred potato farmers in mud-brick homes into a thriving mountainside town with a hospital, a college of agriculture and three mosques. Upper-class Iranians from the capital have even begun buying holiday homes here.

Under the shah, fewer than 5 per cent of women in the countryside could read, compared to 70 per cent now. Two-thirds of women now use modern birth control, according to Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Some people refuse to credit the Islamic Republic for such advances. They would have happened anyway, said Ahmad Zeidabadi, a frequent critic of the Government.

"Three decades have passed since the revolution," he says. "Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and even Thailand have undergone fundamental changes throughout these years, and the shah's regime would have gone the same way."

Reza Gol-Mohammad, a former farmer who runs this small restaurant, notes that rents, utilities and wholesale prices have all shot up.

Rezaie, the farmer, said he served proudly on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War and is a staunch supporter of the Government. He resurrects memories of the hundreds of thousands of people who sacrificed their lives fighting for the Islamic Republic during the war against Saddam Hussein. "We are not worthy of their blood," he says.

Hassan Rastegar, a 55-year-old former truck driver now working at the restaurant, disagrees: "We were well-fed before the revolution. The revolution didn't do anything for us. It didn't give us land."

Rezaie counters: "But no one was supposed to give us anything. We helped ourselves up."

"You see the fancy houses?" Gol-Mohammad says. "They belong to the capitalists. If you're a capitalist you can buy a piece of land and build the nicest house ever. It's the young who are suffering."

The younger farmer Hussein interjects: "The debate about freedom is one thing. The debate about loans to buy houses is another thing."

"It's the same. It's all about justice," Gol-Mohammad says.

"The revolution gave us bravery," Hussein says. "Under the shah, people would see a soldier and they would pee in their pants. Now the people will put their heads into the lion's mouth."

Gol-Mohammad, who says he has been locked up 10 times for speaking out against the Government, tells the story of how the mayor's security forces tore up a man's house, beating him up and arresting him over a property dispute. Later, the man was charged with insulting the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and Khomeini. Such abuses of power, he says, "are what people are upset about".

"Did you see that Iranian rocket with a satellite going into space?" Rezaie says, smiling broadly. "That's our pride."

- Los Angeles Times

http://www.smh.com.au/world/three-decad ... -83iy.html