Tehran Blues: Youth Culture in Iran

More than two decades after their parents rose up against the Shah’s excesses, increasing numbers of young Iranians are risking jail at the hands of religious paramilitaries roughly their own age, for things their counterparts in the West take for granted: wearing makeup, slow dancing at parties, holding hands with members of the opposite sex. Every day anxious parents queue at courthouses to bail out sons and daughters who have been detained for ‘moral crimes’.Kaveh Basmenji, who spent his own youth amidst the turbulence of the Islamic Revolution, argues that Iran’s youth are in near-open revolt for want of greater freedoms, in furious defiance of the mullahs and their brand of sombre religiosity.Through candid interviews with young people,...