I’ve spent the past few weeks in Iran.
It’s been some time since I’ve been back home, with my previous visits being in the summer of 2023 and winter of 2022/2023.
The ten points below are a summary of my observations about the current state of affairs.
I do not pretend to represent every Iranian – other people may have radically different experiences.
Nonetheless, these points provide a useful frame of reference that go beyond superficial news headlines.
# 1 – Social Tensions
In previous years, particularly after the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement, there was a trend of sharply rising social tension between groups of people, particularly the “religious” and “secular” (the names here are oversimplifications and there’s more than two groups, but this is enough to convey my point).
One group saw the other as direct representatives of the government, or at least, privileged and unfairly benefiting from government, regardless of whether they were connected with them or not. On the other hand, many of the religious, even those against the government, feared reprisals against them in the future.
I was surprised to see these tensions had cooled quite a bit (this was the opposite of what I witnessed in the diaspora). In fact, I didn’t believe this was the case until I had talked with a great deal of people from different sides and spent some time myself observing different situations.
It is far less unusual today to see two friends walking together – one wearing a chador and one without a hejab entirely, than it was in previous years. This extends to social circles, public spaces (things like gym classes), and beyond. These different groups, with different lifestyle choices, are more tolerant of each other and mingle far more, even beyond family groups.
I don’t want to pretend this didn’t happen in the past or that there aren’t still very real tensions. We’re talking about large scale trends, not individual people. But there is a real, noticeable shift compared to the past – particularly among the young.
I find this to be a source of hope. No matter what happens politically, it’s not healthy for different groups among the people to want to increasingly tear each other into pieces. Though the real test will be if this will persist if some new spark lights the country into a crisis again.
# 2 – Hejab
As has been the case for the past two years, in almost any street in the country, ~30% of woman, old or young, go outside with their hair bare and without any kind of head covering.
There are some variations seen – the rate of no hejab is highest in Tehran and large cities, higher in the north of the country than the south, and fluctuates based on neighborhoods. In trendy cafes or shopping centers it is sometimes closer to 90%.
This was not always the case. Despite all the changes in dress trends over the past few decades, when Vida Movahed intentionally didn’t wear any scarf in an act of civil disobedience 7 years ago, it was unusual and stood out. Today you can see someone dressed exactly like her basically anywhere in Tehran and wouldn’t blink an eye.
Zooming out even more shows how much change there has been. When I was young, it was considered edgy for woman to wear hejab in a way that would reveal the front of their hair when looking at them directly from the front but would not be visible when looking from the side. Today, it’s not usual to see people wearing crop tops with a cardigan or loose jacket revealing their midriff when looking from the front.
The government has retreated on the issue, particularly under Pezeshkian. Women who break hejab laws still face serious potential consequences – consequences that are sometimes enforced & there are still sometimes Hejab Enforcers in public spaces. But it’s not the same as the draconian “Tarhe Noor” & more often than not people completely ignore the enforcers without consequence.
While the government is unlikely to formally revoke hejab laws anytime soon, it is also unlikely the situation on the streets reverses to what it was like just three or four years ago.
None of this is to say this represents all women. There are plenty of women, including young ones, who still wear all sorts of different head coverings, including chadors. I do not mean to imply that the amount of skin women show (or don’t) is a sign of progress.
Furthermore, focusing just on hejab risks losing track of the vast amount of other societal changes happening beneath the surface.
# 3 – Societal Change
Without a doubt the most important story in Iran today is not regional politics, the nuclear conflict, or even the economy – rather it is the breathtaking speed of change happening in societal values and norms.
That’s not to say Iranian society has been stagnant in the past (it’s been one of the most dynamic in the world for generations), but this change has been rapidly accelerating in the past few years.
These are not things that are apparent from news articles or tidbits on X. Dozens of foreign reporters or tourists may be physically present in the country and still miss it. You can only fully appreciate them behind closed doors, in family settings (particularly traditional ones), among people that you’ve known for decades.
Attitudes towards everything from gender roles, spirituality, the relationship with Iran’s past, what we want from the future, who we are, LGBT issues (I’m not promoting anything, but there’s no arguing these are, for good or bad, becoming more prominent and attitudes are shifting), and much more are changing.
What is considered a ‘normal’ lifestyle and where social taboos lie are changing. I’m not just talking about the young – this is much more universal, across all age groups. I would say the change has been more prominent among women but is not exclusive to them.
These changes are independent of any political circumstances. For over a century, different Iranian governments have tried to impose top-down reforms on society based on their ideological frameworks. When those reforms clash with the values and norms of the masses, they’ve failed.
What is happening today can’t be explained by simplistic explanations like a reaction to cultural policies of the Islamic Republic. Nor can they be entirely explained by things like social media or globalization. They are a continuation of a multigenerational struggle to make sense of Iranian culture, values, and norms in the context of modernity and all it entails.
I don’t want to oversimplify things and claim the result of this will be the triumph of liberalism, or that Iranians will turn into clones of the West. It’s more complicated than that. There’s also been massive changes in the way religion is practiced or in how conservatives justify their view of society. What is consistent has been the change.
All future development in the country, from macrolevel changes like the relationship of Iran with the outside world to people’s individual choices in their lives will be affected by these changes. Much has been discussed about the relationship between the people and their rulers, but not enough about changes among the people themselves.
#4 – Inflation and Blackouts
Ever since Pezeshkian took office, there has been a roughly 40% decline in the value of the toman against this dollar – with the price being about 58,000 toman a dollar when he was inaugurated and reaching a record low of 82,000 toman a dollar last week (it has since slightly appreciated, but it’s unclear if that trend will last).
Most of that decline has happened after the election of Donald Trump as the US president. I believe it is largely due to the market pricing in a resumption of Trump’s maximum pressure policy to squeeze out addition concessions from Iran … though monetary policy by the central bank is also has an impact.
This decline has a major impact on inflation. It also means that the price of many key goods which are subsidized by the government are unsustainable. The most prominent among these is gasoline. The price of gasoline in Iran is significantly cheaper than Iran’s neighbors, meaning that there’s a huge amount of smuggling abroad with massive profits. There will almost certainly be an increase in the cost of gasoline in the next Iranian year – which carries the risk of social instability and will bring more inflation.
The minimum wage that was set in the government’s budget bill for 1404 is already out of synch with the reality of society.
However, no matter how painful this is, particularly for workers on fixed incomes, this level of currency devaluation and inflation is not unusual & has unfortunately been the norm for the past two decades. What is unusual have been nationwide blackouts during the winter.
I’ll write another post on blackouts later, but in short, natural gas supply (the source of most Iran’s electricity production) has not been able to keep up with demand. Peak demand is during winter months, when much of the north of the country plunges to freezing temperatures & needs gas for heating. Since there’s no short-term fix for supply, there’s been blackouts to make up for the shortage.
Blackouts usually last 2 hours, during peak demand hours, and happen around twice a week. Not every area gets them – some neighborhoods haven’t lost power at all. Typically (but not always) the power companies post a list of where will have blackouts and when from beforehand (and in some cases thieves look at those and take advantage of those times to steal wires).
These have led to a lot of problems. Note that a loss of power means that pumps also won’t work, so it usually means a loss of water too. People get stuck in elevators. Washing machines turn off mid cycle. Kids who had school canceled because high air pollution have to switch to mobile hotspots if they are attending remotely.
The problems are worse for businesses. I went to a local pastry shop and saw the owner cursing everything and everyone because a large batch of sweets went bad when the oven turned off mid cycle.
Industrial production is crushed because not only does production go down, but raw materials from suppliers is also decreased, so there is a compounding effect as one goes up the supply chain. There were also major blackouts for industry during the summer (those didn’t impact residential areas), so many factories were hoping to use these months to catch up with lost production. Altogether, this adds up to a massive loss to the economy.
#5 – Taxation
Since the government has experienced a massive loss of income from oil sales and other traditional sources due to sanctions, it is increasingly resorting to taxes for revenue. Existing taxes are constantly increased, things that get taxed are growing, and there is a steady march of new regulations to report transactions to the government to help enforce taxes more effectively.
This has led to tension with bazaris and producers. For example, earlier this year there were strikes by traditional gold sellers over tax related items. Taxation rates are still relatively low compared to global norms. However, many merchants retort that the quality of services received by the government is not the same as high tax countries either (such as the electricity issue mentioned) & the public sector is extremely bloated and inefficient.
# 6 – Bazaar Protests
I saw some social media posts about a protest in the Tehran Bazaar. In my opinion the significance of these was greatly exaggerated. There was not any sort of strike that was detectable across the country. Most the bazaris I talked to believed a conspiracy theory that this was all an inside job by elements in the government to put pressure to impeach Mohamad Reza Farzin, the head of the Central Bank (a carryover from the Raisi administration).
Protests in Iran are not unusual. There are frequent labor protests or strikes by groups like nurses and teachers, with varying degrees of success. And there are also nationwide protests like those that happened two years ago. Many of these are quite significant. But it’s difficult to separate out signal from noise from watching social media posts that imply every single one is a sign of the fall of the government.
In contrast, one act of protest that I did see almost everyone I know applaud was from Mohammad Khakpour, a former Iranian football player, who praised the former Shah as a patriot on TV during an event marking the opening of Azadi Stadium after a period of repairs. I thought that act was far more significant than the video from the bazaar.
#7 - Nostalgia for the Past
As long as I remember, there has been a feeling of nostalgia towards the past, particularly the two decades before the revolution in Iranian society. This nostalgia has grown more intense in the past few years.
Basically every trendy café in the country plays music from Iran’s pre-revolutionary pop singers. There are stickers of them in every bookstore you can buy. You don’t have to go very far to find portraits of the Shah sold openly on the streets. I had a funny experience where I was trying to buy a specific book by the current foreign minister and couldn’t find it despite looking in dozens of bookstores but was able to find a Persian copy of the Shah’s book “Answer to History” all over the place.
This nostalgia is not universal, but also not limited to just one group. I talked to a former political prisoner under the Shah who praised his long term thinking and kept repeating a quote of his about saving Iran’s oil wealth for future generations.
In the past, these signs of affection for the past may have been hidden, but right now it’s very much in the open and everywhere. Khakpour was not the first person to praise the Shah on state TV.
This feeling of nostalgia does not mean that everyone expressing it believes the Shah was completely faultless or agrees with all his policies. This isn’t the case.
But popular views of him and his rule have shifted – most people would not say he was some evil puppet of the West, but rather someone that had good intentions and accomplished many good things (and perhaps some bad ones).
In contrast, I was not able to find a single person who seriously supported his son as the next ruler of the country. I have no doubt such people exist (they’re all over social media), but they’re certainly not in my social circles. Nonetheless the numbers are not really comparable to the vast group that have nostalgia for the past or are discontent with the current state of affairs.
# 8 – Pezeshkian
Masoud Pezeshkian has now been president for 5 months. This has been one of the most tumultuous periods in Iran’s recent history in terms of regional politics. However, most perceptions of him have to do with his performance at home, not on battlefields abroad.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty about him, but his popularity has certainly gone down significantly due to the recent rise in inflation and winter power cuts. Most people I talked to viewed him as weak, without plans, and not pushing hard enough. A very popular comment was that he didn’t have the aura of the president and still seemed to be adjusting to the role.
His most concrete accomplishment has been allowing many of the professors and students expelled from universities in the past 2 years to return. There also has been a marked decrease in hijab law enforcement since he came in power. He’s objected to implementing a new enforcement law that was passed by Majles.
He did manage to get WhatsApp and Google Play removed from the list of censored apps. This is a good start, but if he wants to get things to the point where people don’t need to constantly buy VPNs, as he promised when campaigning, then apps like Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube also need to be removed. He’s implied there’s more to come on this front, but progress has been slow.
The reaction to WhatsApp getting removed was generally positive. There were some conservatives who complained this would harm Iranian made messaging apps like Eitaa. I also encountered a few far right people who very seriously believed this was all part of a larger conspiracy by Pezeshkian to start riots against the Islamic Republic – something I doubt.
# 9 – Foreign Policy
I did encounter some people who nervously joked about an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but by and large most the collective conscious had moved on from the back-and-forth attacks in October. Recent events in Syria were a much more popular subject of discussion.
Almost every discussion on politics I had eventually ended up on whether Iran was or wasn’t liable to a sudden collapse similar to Syria (I side with the second group). Opinions on the new Syrian government varied.
Most religious people I encountered were quite suspicious of them due to previous affiliations with anti-Shia sectarian jihadist groups. A lot of nonreligious people also disliked them because they don’t like Islamists, and the downfall of Assad reminded them of the downfall of the Shah.
On the other hand, there were some hardcore opponents of the government that welcomed these events because they were a setback to the Islamic Republic’s regional policies. I also encountered some people who were happy because the plight of Syrian refugees was over and they could return home and because the fall of a dictator.
There was also a widespread theory that there was some sort of deal between major world powers on removing Assad from power, which included guarantees not to harm the shrines in Damascus or massacre Syrian Shias, as well as security concessions to Iran. I don’t think it’s impossible, but Iranians also have the same conspiracy about basically every world event, so it’s difficult to discern.
# 10 – Trump
The elephant in the room for the coming months is Donald Trump returning as the US president and his relations with Iran. It’s impossible to fully know what’s happening behind closed doors, but there’s been multiple signs that the incoming US administration wants to engage in negotiations with Iran over the nuclear program and other areas of dispute.
What is unclear is what the Iranian government’s response to this is. There appears to be a growing divide between rhetoric from the Supreme Leader and statements coming out of the foreign ministry about negotiations (the same divide is seen over relations with the new government in Syria).
The administration appears quite willing, even eager, to engage in negotiations. This is not surprising given that Pezeshkian pretty openly campaigned on negotiating with Trump and even stated that there may have be concessions given.
This appears to contradict recent statements by the Supreme Leader. Furthermore, right wing groups are talking about the need to tighten belts and get ready for a difficult year with significant economic pressure. I even talked to a few people who said that they expected that “the enemy would instigate unrest” in the coming year and that they were fully ready to encounter this.
On the other hand, Pezeshkian does appear to have gotten the ok from the Supreme Leader to reintroduce discussions about implementing FATF reforms into the Expediency Discernment Council. Perhaps he does have a mandate to pursue a moderate realignment in foreign policy. What happens in the upcoming months will be telling.
Bonus Observation – Animals
I could swear that the number of street cats in Tehran has significantly increased, almost to an Istanbul level. They also seem much more plump and well fed than before. My theory is that this relates to evolving social attitudes towards animals and pets & the result of people feeding stray animals rather than viewing them as pests.
