Iran’s Legions of Weary Young People Push Against the Old Ways

HAMEDAN, Iran—During a spirited concert by the band Rastak, the Islamic Republic’s hard-line religious conservatives faced a challenge that is increasingly common in Iran: three young women cheering too enthusiastically.

As the friends, dressed in colorful head scarves, erupted in screams and applause, a stern woman in black emerged from the side of the auditorium here, pointing a finger and threatening to eject them. When they continued, another official snapped their pictures.

They didn’t seem intimidated at all. “Are you sure you don’t want to leave?” one of them shouted over the music with a smile to the security personnel. The women kept on cheering but were watched closely for the rest of the concert.

The confrontation shows how hard-liners who have dominated Iran for a decade are bumping up against another force: Iran’s rambunctious youth, most born long after the 1979 revolution. More than half of Iran’s 75 million people are under 35 years old. Many are weary of overweening religious edicts, economic mismanagement and isolation brought by a decade of international sanctions.

These younger Iranians aren’t trying to overthrow the regime, which remains locked in nuclear talks with six major world powers. Another deadline came and went Tuesday, but European Union foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini said negotiations would continue “for the next couple of days.”
Can’t stop a ‘tsunami’

For now at least, post-revolutionary Iranians seem largely apolitical, want to be free from the endless ideological fights that have racked the country since the revolution and are content with leaders who are conservative but not hard-edge ideologues, like Iranian President Hasan Rouhani.

“This is a tidal wave of young people looking for a better life,” says Reza Soltanzadeh, 43 years old, the manager of an investment fund in Tehran. “You can’t put a dam in front of a tsunami.”

If a deal is reached, Iran’s reform camp of activists and politicians hope that a wave of popularity for Mr. Rouhani will help sweep the hardest of the hard-liners out of parliament in elections next year.

That could open the door to an alliance between more-pragmatic conservatives and reformers, pushing Iran even closer to the end of its international isolation.

Already, many younger Iranians have taken heart in the corruption charges brought against two major figures from the presidency of Mr. Rouhani’s predecessor, hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. Rouhani has also blamed Mr. Ahmadinejad for mismanagement of Iran’s economy.

“They’ve realized they can’t manage the country without us,” says Saeed Laylaz, a reform-minded economist and activist jailed for a year for speaking out against the government in 2009. “We’ve learned we can’t ask the regime to change too fast. We are gathering in the middle.”

Iran’s hard-liners still dominate all formal levers of power, including the judiciary, parliament and committee that will choose the successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, shock troops of the hard-liners, has expanded its influence over the economy and society, while overseeing a foreign policy that includes employing militia groups considered terrorist organizations by the West, such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the hard-liners erupted after the 2009 re-election of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Challengers Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi disputed the election results and led weeks of demonstrations before being jailed. The regime was shocked by the protests and responded by crushing the opposition Green Movement.

The most strident dissidents are long gone, exiled, or in jail. Most younger Iranians and the parents they hold sway over are generally trying to get on with their lives.

They stunned the hard-line establishment two years ago by flocking to support Mr. Rouhani, a pragmatic regime veteran who vowed to deliver a new era of “wisdom and hope.”

Many voters saw that as a promise to temper the rigid and dour policies of Iran’s hardest hard-liners. Since his election, Mr. Rouhani has focused on stabilizing the economy and made a sanctions-lifting nuclear deal the centerpiece of his administration.

While Mr. Rouhani has disappointed many reformers hoping for more space for political activity and improvements in human rights, he has softened the regime’s ideological edges and worked behind the scenes to reverse some hard-line policies.

He has given some prominent roles in government to members of minority groups and women, dismaying hard-liners.

For example, the government recently announced that Marziyeh Afkham, the spokeswoman for Iran’s foreign ministry, would become Iran’s first female ambassador since the Islamic revolution in 1979. Mr. Rouhani’s government pushed to allow women to attend a national-team volleyball match against the U.S., but Iran’s hard-line interior minister announced at the last minute that women still would be banned.

Mr. Rouhani has removed hard-liners appointed by Mr. Ahmadinejad to overhaul Iranian state universities, some of which have historically been hotbeds of political activity. Under one of those appointees, Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran saw its classrooms segregated by gender, and hard-line student organizations challenged professors. Faculty members who opposed the hard-liners were purged.

Shortly after taking power, Mr. Rouhani’s government installed a new president at the university, where some classes have informally gone back to being mixed. Some expelled professors have been rehired.

The university has returned to international academic gatherings and recently welcomed a student recruiting mission from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“We’ve opened up,” says Esmaeil Ghaderi, a professor of tourism who was fired in 2005 and then hired back by the university’s new president.

And despite regime efforts to insulate Iran from unwanted foreign influence, including a project during the Ahmadinejad era to confine citizens to a domestic “Islamic” Internet, younger Iranians are connected to the world as never before.
Social media pervades

While the government officially blocks major services such as Facebook and Twitter, “social media is being used by everyone and in every different way,” says Maryam Abolfazli, chief operating officer of a U.S.-based company called Lantern that designs software that can be used to evade those blocks.

A recent protest where Iranian women posted photos of themselves on Facebook removing their head scarves in public gained a wide following and landed several of the women in jail.

Younger Iranians also are staging fashion shows, though very quietly. The third Tehran Fashion Week, featuring a women’s-only runway event for women’s fashion and a mixed-audience night for a men’s designer, took place over three days recently in the basement of an upscale shopping mall.

Young Iranians spend hours at a time on the website of online retailer Digikala, where they compare products and swap ideas about their hobbies. “People’s lifestyles are changing,” says Saeed Mohammadi, 35, who owns Digikala with his twin brother, Hamid. “The way people are thinking is changing.”

Hafez Safaee, 21, wants to be a barista. He honed his coffee-making skills under master Italian and Greek coffee gurus, carefully follows barista competitions in Europe and the U.S., and won one himself in Tehran last year.

“I want to bring people together through coffee,” he says.

He and his brother opened a cafe in an upscale Tehran neighborhood in May. They see themselves reviving an ancient “coffee culture” that they say existed when Iran was a crossroads of international trade that included Yemen and Ethiopia.

Iran’s staunchest conservatives are fighting back. Direct criticism of the nuclear talks has been muted because Mr. Khamenei supports them despite expressing skepticism that a deal can be reached. The two former Iranian presidential candidates who disputed election results in 2009, sparking massive antiregime demonstrations, remain under house arrest without trial.

And several Iranian-Americans are in Iranian jails, including a Washington Post journalist accused of espionage in a secret security court. The journalist, Jason Rezaian, has made two court appearances, but the progress of the closed-trial proceedings isn’t clear. He faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted, according to his newspaper.

In early April, around 200 hard-liners protested outside parliament as Mr. Rouhani’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, gave a private briefing inside on the status of the nuclear talks.

Such protests are illegal without special permission, and police quickly broke up the one in April. But Iran’s Interior Ministry recently found it necessary to warn against further demonstrations.

Still, conservative hawks say even a nuclear deal wouldn’t end Iran’s opposition to the U.S. as long as it supports Israel and insists on playing a role in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

“A cease fire doesn’t mean the end of the war,” says Hossein Kanani-Moqadam, a former officer in the Revolutionary Guard who now heads a conservative political party.

Recently, hard-liners have stepped up efforts to stymie cultural events they say are religiously inappropriate, such as concerts where women and men play music together. Organizers of the concert in Hamedan fretted until the last minute that the event could be canceled under pressure.

Two concerts in Tehran had been canceled just before then, with a number of others blocked around Iran during the past few months.

In May, a group of hard-liners came to a concert hall in Mahshahr, a port city in southwestern Iran, holding up a sign protesting the inclusion of women in a musical group set to play there that day. The concert was canceled after one of Mahshahr’s leading religious figures endorsed the demonstration.

The concert had been approved earlier by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The ministry’s leader, Ali Jannati, appointed by Mr. Rouhani, has pushed to allow more concerts. In another sign of Iran’s generational battle, Mr. Jannati is the son of one of the country’s most powerful and uncompromising hard-liners, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati.

Pirooz Arjmand, the director of the ministry’s music bureau, blamed the cancellations on “strict religious beliefs, political intentions and a lack of awareness about the positive impact of music on the younger generation.”

Yekta Jamehgarmi, a female violinist in a group whose performance of traditional Iranian music in the city of Isfahan was interrupted by about 50 hard-line protesters in February, says the ordeal was intimidating.

The group continued its planned performance over demands that the women leave the stage. The protesters stayed for about 20 minutes.

“They would chant slogans and make noises,” Ms. Jamehgarmi says. “This was the first time I felt fear for playing.”

A nonprofit musicians’ group called the House of Music has openly condemned the concert interruptions by hard-line protesters. Even though the law supports the musicians, concerts often are canceled by local officials under the influence of clerics and hard-liners, according to Hamidreza Nourbakhsh, a vocalist who is also House of Music’s managing director.

“The election of Mr. Rouhani, with the so-called government of wisdom and hope, inspired musicians,” he said.

From his perch in the music bureau, Mr. Arjmand sees the hard-liners as fighting a rear-guard action against the future: “There is a small group taking advantage of the cultural arena for political purposes.”

—Asa Fitch contributed to this article.