In the summer of 2005, I covered the Iranian presidential race that resulted in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's first, surprising, electoral victory. My mandate was not to report on the campaign, but to write about young people's attitude to politics there. I spent three weeks talking to student leaders and members of the Basij (an all-volunteer, quasi-legal militia), to exhausted waiters and urban hipsters. Most were either busy looking for a second job, or too exhausted from the several they already held, to care much about politics. Those who did not face cash problems spent their time flitting through galleries and buying ecstasy at pomegranate juice stands.
On the whole, I found that young people, pious and secular alike, were profoundly alienated from politics. They seemed more concerned with their immediate personal freedoms than in risking anything for political change.
Four years on, however, young Iranians have sloughed off that apathy and headed into the streets in their thousands, to wage passionate protest against an election they consider fraudulent. Young people who did not even bother to vote in 2005 are braving serious reprisals to support Mir Hossein Mousavi, the man they believe should have won power; Facebook martyrs co-opting the regime's own ideology of martyrdom to incite even greater fury and protest.
So what has changed in Iran to bring about this remarkable shift? The answer lies partly in Ahmadinejad's tenure as president, an era that has raised the misery quotient of most Iranians, regardless of class, age or ethnic background. But the scale of the protests being held across Iran today also suggests a despair that is more deep-rooted than simply outrage over what they see as a stolen election. In my view, it also reflects a fundamental antipathy toward a revolutionary regime that Iranians have grown to consider unaccountable, indifferent to the rule of law, corrupt and incapable of meeting its people's basic needs.
I moved to Iran in the summer of 2005 to work as a reporter and start a family. I found life there difficult but bearable: the economy was poor, but buoyed by soaring oil prices; traffic and pollution were stifling, but you could hold hands in the street or have coffee with a friend of the opposite gender without risking arrest. Book stores stocked copies of the latest western bestsellers, and magazines and literary journals flourished. The authorities permitted the occasional rock concert, and tolerated young women's flouting of Islamic dress codes. Even the murals of scowling ayatollahs had been repainted with cordial smiles. Iranians still wanted much more, but you if asked them if things were better than in the past, most would have said yes.
Ahmadinejad's reputation as a religious ideologue prompted worries that he would enforce social strictures with renewed vigour. But a crackdown never materialised. He declared that Iranians had more important things to worry about than hijab, or Islamic dress, and Iran's 48 million or so people under the age of 30 concluded that the permissiveness which they had come to take for granted would continue.
By the end of 2005, Ahmadinejad had begun to use the escalating standoff with the west over Iran's nuclear programme as a way of broadening his appeal at home. He cast the west as an enemy, bent on bullying and weakening Iran by denying it legitimate access to technology. Iranians angered by President George Bush's cowboy rhetoric were thrilled, and their mood, stoked by Ahmadinejad's nationalist talk, grew increasingly assertive. By the spring of 2006, he had transformed himself into a national hero. His slogan "nuclear power is our absolute right" slipped off the tongues of even westernised, secular Iranians. I couldn't attend a dinner party that spring without people gushing about their magnificent president. When he reversed a ban on women attending football games, a relative of mine compared him to Reza Shah, Iran's great 20th-century nation-builder.
Caught up in the nationalist spirit of the president's nuclear rhetoric, convinced that Iran was regaining its prestige and influence in the world, most Iranians were unprepared for what came next. First, the economy unravelled. Thanks to Ahmadinejad's expansionary fiscal policies, inflation spiked by at least 20% and later went even higher. Though I was paid in US dollars, I began to find it too expensive to buy large amounts of fruit; my babysitter's family stopped eating red meat regularly, while one friend stopped buying the imported baby formula that helped her son's colic. House prices in Tehran surged by 200%, and thousands of couples saving up to get married found themselves priced out of the institution altogether.
The economic downturn began turning people against the president, but his fate was sealed when he reintroduced the molesting social controls that Iranians considered ancient history. In the summer of 2007, authorities raided neighbourhoods all over Tehran to confiscate illegal satellite dishes. The police swooped down on our building early one morning, kicking down the devices. My six-year-old nephew wept at the loss of his cartoon channel, and looked on with confusion as the police confiscated our neighbour's mobile phone, with which he had been recording footage of the police trucks full of spindly dishes.
Late that summer, authorities launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation against young people they accused of un-Islamic appearance. Within a few short weeks, police detained 150,000 people, and all the women in my life went out to buy the shapeless, long coats that we had worn back in the late 1990s. Though the campaign targeted young men as well, authorities singled out women with particular brutality. The government's disdain for women increased by the day. Though Iranians fretted about the impact of western sanctions, the government turned its attention to a bill that would facilitate polygamy. Soon after, it announced a plan that would supposedly solve Iran's marriage crisis. It called the scheme "semi-independent marriage", and it amounted to a hollow version of the institution that would secure men legal and piously sanctioned sex, while denying women the security and social respectability of conventional marriage. On internet news sites and newspapers, women reacted scathingly. A girlfriend of mine, whose English classes had recently been segregated by gender, complained the government was imposing seventh-century rules on modern women.
To add to Iranians' frustration, interminable queues accompanied the government's petrol-rationing scheme, unveiled that summer. In the evenings it could take several hours to fill our car, and when our local petrol station was torched by rioters furious with the new plan, we stopped using the car. Iran's streets began to remind me of postwar Baghdad. Censorship had been stepped up such that seventh editions of sociology textbooks were not receiving permits to reprint. The ominous white morality police vans that patrolled the streets kept young people in a permanent state of anxiety.
One morning, while taking my baby for a stroll near the mountains, a teenage policewoman grabbed by arm and tried to lead me to a police van. "Your sleeves are too short," she barked, indifferent to the disgusted looks of other families nearby. Even our local produce seller, a deeply pious man with a gentle wife who wears a chador (an open cloak that covers the head and body), could not contain his fury at Ahmadinejad. "He's ruined this country," he said, storming around piles of tomatoes and figs. "Why doesn't someone stop him?"
My family left Iran in 2007, but on successive return visits I found the mood sliding into greater despair. Young relatives who had been determined to stick out life in Iran were talking about emigrating. Older friends whose spirit had lightened during the more moderate eight years of President Mohammad Khatami now had anguish etched on their faces. When I spent a month in Iran earlier this year, I found people ambivalent about voting in the June election, but also determined that somehow Ahmadinejad's reign must end. A girlfriend had lost her teaching job for failing a "can-you-pray-properly?" exam. One relative was threatened with losing her job if she didn't show up to the collective prayer sessions held at the ministry where she worked. Most people I knew could not quite absorb how the small freedoms they had grown accustomed to, the patches of openness they had taken for granted, had been snatched away.
Even before the advent of Ahmadinejad, Iran suffered from one of the world's most sizeable brain drains. Each year, the country's brightest and most talented young people left to work in the west, energising and enriching the technology, medical, and aeronautical sectors of other nations. They left because young people in Iran cannot find jobs suitable to their educations, and most believe that Iran reserves prosperity for the scions of ayatollahs. Even young people without the qualifications desired by immigration officials consider Iran a land barren of opportunity, and have preferred to struggle in the west.
This trend began long before Ahmadinejad's presidency, and it has served to tear apart Iranian families for three decades. If the tremendous diversity of the faces seen protesting in Iran this week underscores anything, it is that people's grievances have deep roots in Iran, and that their anger has been spurred, but not conceived, by this electoral outrage. Today, Iranians are registering their discontent with the system of Islamic government as a whole. They do not necessarily want to overthrow their regime, but to express the depths of their frustration with its inadequacy.
Of all the images I've seen emerging from Iran this week, those of fiery women beating policemen and leading protests have moved me the most. Throughout the past decade, Iran's extraordinarily sophisticated and well-educated women have sought for peaceful change through the existing system. Accounting for 60% of university students, Iranian women emerge from university armed with career expectations and modern attitudes toward their role in family and society. They have patiently petitioned the state to grant them more equitable rights before the law. But at each opportunity, they have been treated with contempt. Their vibrant presence in these protests is signalling to the government that they will not tolerate its discrimination and disdain any longer.
In 2001, I recall attending a football rally in western Tehran where young people flirted with political protest. Riot police quickly emerged from the shadows to beat protesters with batons. A girlfriend and I were among those beaten, and walked home along the city's riotous thoroughfares comparing our bruises, and wondering whether the newspapers would report what had happened the next day. When they didn't, I took pictures of my bruises and emailed them to friends.
The world seems astonished by how quickly young Iranians have commandeered the internet to spread news of their protests. The truth is, they've had a decade of quiet practice.