Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 83 years old, ill and has no obvious successor. For those who crave change this could be the best opportunity in two generations.
Years ago I was in Shiraz in the south of Iran having dinner and celebrating Nowruz, the Persian new year, with a small group of friends. The ancient symbols of Nowruz were all around us – a mirror, a plate of sprouting grass, coins, coloured eggs, a live goldfish – and a meal of delicious Persian food, together with homemade Shiraz wine made by my friends from their own Shiraz grapes.
“Down with the USA”. The 10-story-high mural in Tehran is iconic, striking and powerful in its simplicity: bombs falling out of the American flag onto Iran, “Down with the USA” – a bumper sticker of the revolution – painted across the red and white stripes.
For generations Iran has been divided, torn and fought over between those who crave an interweaving of the old Persia and modernity, and those wedded to religious fundamentalism – which from the start of the revolution 43 years ago quickly morphed into a fear and loathing of America (“the great Satan”) and the West.
When you live in and travel around this beautiful country you are confronted every day with these deep chasms and contradictions: the stunning mosques, morning and evening calls to prayer, and the morality police on the one hand; and the deep love for pre-Islamic Persia, together with a yearning for Western culture, on the other.
Read the article by Nick Warner in the Financial Review.