Tehran
![""]("http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/27/opinion/cohen.190.jpg")
Roger Cohen
The Alborz Mountains soar above the north side of the megalopolis that is the Iranian capital, their snowy peaks arousing dreams of evasion in people caught by the city’s bottlenecks. One day I could resist them no longer.
Near Evin prison, where thousands languish and executions are frequent, a trail begins. Following a rushing stream, it winds up past teahouses full of the fragrant smoke of hookahs and stalls offering fresh pomegranate juice, into the bracing wild.
Iran’s pursuit of liberty, unbowed since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, remains unfulfilled. The Islamic revolution has not birthed a totalitarian state; all sorts of opinions are heard. But it has created a society whose ultimate bond is fear. Disappearance into some unmarked room is always possible. So the freedom of the mountains is double in nature.
For young Iranians, the Alborz trails are a physical escape from the city where jobs are elusive, but also a mental one — from self-censorship, from monochrome dress, and from the morality police ever alert for a female neck revealed, hands fleetingly held, or hair cascading from a headscarf.
Their youthful voices open up. They sing to the haunting sound of the kamancheh, a bowed fiddle. They bellow into the gullies. They recite the poetry of the great Hafez. They allow fingertips, and more, to touch. Their camaraderie is strong: bowling alone is not what repressive societies do. Iran’s force — a population younger than its 30-year-old revolution — is palpable.
At a teahouse around the 1,900-meter mark, I fell into conversation with a couple, Narges Azizi, 23, and her 26-year-old boyfriend, Behnam Moradi. Students of graphics and design, they hike once a week. She was wearing a loose-fitting blue sweat suit, a sufficient affront to Islamic dress code to have caused her detention back in the city.
“They took my photo, face to the camera, both profiles,” Azizi said. “My parents had to get me.” I’d heard a similar story from a divorced woman in her mid-30s stopped for wearing another proscribed garment — a skirt — even though it reached to her ankles. She was still seething from the humiliation of the experience, parental rescue and all.
“Our relationship is like stealing,” Moradi said.
“It’s worse than stealing,” Azizi said.
Highly educated, lacking the means to marry or acquire their own apartment, dodging parental reproach and dour governmental strictures, dissatisfied but not to the point of rebellion, this young couple is typical enough of a nation in a halfway house of Islam and modernity.
Iran’s emblem should be a turbaned mullah on a motor scooter talking on a cell phone; or a young woman who has fashioned a hijab into an article of Parisian elegance.
“Should we leave?” Moradi asked me.
“Not if you’re prepared to be patient.”
“Change could take two generations,” he said.
One is more likely if the United States shows restraint. I thought back to a senior cleric, Mohsen Gharavian, whom I’d met in the holy city of Qom. He’d seemed at ease expounding on the union of Islam, politics and freedom until the subject of women’s attire came up.
“Prostitution is a career for some people in some countries, but here we cannot bear that,” Gharavian said. “So the reason this looseness in dressing is not admitted is that this concept may lead gradually to a negation of our values and bring the preconditions for the spread of prostitution.”
Right.
Yet the revolution of which this cleric is a bastion has empowered women. In the end, it was only Ayatollah Khomeini who could tell traditional families they had to educate their daughters.
Today, as my colleague Nazila Fathi recently noted, more than 60 percent of university students are women. Laws cannot forever lag the reality of an emancipated mindset.
The irony of the Islamic Revolution is that it has created a very secular society within the framework of clerical rule. The shah enacted progressive laws for women unready for them. Now the opposite is true: progressive women face confining jurisprudence. At some point something must give.
That is why I suggested Azizi and Moradi be patient. That is also why it is essential that the West engage with Iran and avoid the one thing that could set back the country’s inexorable evolution: an act of war that would increase repression and embolden religious nationalism.
It’s not easy to be patient. Service in the Basiji, the pro-government volunteer militia, is often a surer path to a good job than a college degree.
Still, up in the Alborz, Iranians’ long-held dream of freedom seems within reach. At 2,100 meters, I saw two young women with their hair down. Afraid? They laughed.
Higher still, I met Marjan Safiyar, 20, an electrical engineering student. She looked chic in a tight-fitting silvery jacket. Up here, she said, “I breathe.” I asked her if she thought Iran would change.
“No,” she laughed, “Our men don’t have the courage.”
But its women are another story. They are reason to see Iran as one of the most hopeful societies in the Middle East rather than one of the most threatening.