Resistance and Resilience: Reflections on Iran

Branded as part of the Axis of Evil, Iran is back in the public eye. Politically isolated by the United States for the 1979 hostage crisis, exporting Islamic radicalism, supporting Lebanese Hezbollah, and its quest to procure nuclear weapons, Iran remains an enigma of enmity to the international community.

However, beneath this hostile veneer a youthful population yearns for Western contact. Born in the aftermath of the revolution, the youth of Iran are bearing the burden of revolutionary nihilism. With limited political expression and social freedom, their frustration is understandable. It is the daily economic challenge, though, that tests the population's will. Having barely recovered from the hardship of the eight-year war with Iraq, Iran continues to suffer a general malaise from widespread unemployment, uncontrolled inflation, pollution, corruption, and a bloated state bureaucracy.

The 1997 election and the 2001 reelection of President Mohammad Khatami were supposed to right a revolution gone wrong. With a mandate of over 90 percent of the vote, Khatami ushered in hope for economic liberalization and social progress. Newspapers began to flourish with the dream of an Iranian spring, criticizing the regime's failures. Students demanded political transparency and social leniency. But the hard-line clerics' hold on power remained steadfast. Every step forward has been matched with two steps back such that many Iran watchers have declared Khatami's reform movement dead.

What remains is a population struggling for political expression and economic opportunity beneath an authoritarian clerical government bent on retaining power. To the outside observer, the Iranian resistance is interesting because this challenge of reform is taking place within the confines of the country's constitution. But for the Iranians themselves, their measured progress is at times almost too much to bear. Nonetheless, they continue to persevere by pushing the envelope through symbolic acts of non-violent resistance, artistic expression, and humor. If anything, their twenty-year conversion from impassioned revolutionaries to moderate evolutionaries reveals the resilience of a people struggling to recast history.