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By Root 440 0

the city was not a place where I’d ever choose to settle down. Successive Iranian governments had destroyed many beautiful traditional houses with Persian gardens and had built gaudy, quasi-modern high-rises in their place. The mountains that surround the city trap the smog, and with a population of twelve million people and thousands of cars and motorcycles crowding the streets, Tehran is among the most polluted cities in the world. On the back of Davood’s motorcycle, I could feel the heat of carbon monoxide on my face and taste the diesel fumes on my lips. But as we whizzed between the cars, while young men and women wearing green danced on the sidewalks and in the middle of the streets, I didn’t wish to be anywhere else in the world.

The last time I had witnessed such exhilaration in the city was February 11, 1979, the day of the victory of the Islamic Revolution, when the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was removed from power. I was twelve years old and had gone to a demonstration at Tehran University with Maryam. My sister belonged to a generation of young Iranians who grew up learning about such progressive ideas as democracy and human rights, concepts the shah pretended to adhere to, though in truth he believed democracy would only hinder Iran’s move toward industrial progress and could be allowed only once Iran prospered economically.

During the revolution, Maryam was studying Persian literature at Tehran University and was among the first students who staged strikes and took part in the demonstrations against the shah. Even though our parents did not agree with the idea of revolution itself, deep inside they despised the shah for what he had done to them and their comrades. Therefore, even though they were worried about Maryam’s safety, they quietly encouraged her to take part in the demonstrations and didn’t mind my accompanying her.

That day, as we had walked among the crowds of thousands that had gathered, Maryam began to grow worried. She feared that the demonstrations were going to get violent and said she thought we should go back home. I knew that she wanted to stay and take part, so I asked her to give me money for a taxi and stay behind without me. Of course, I had no intention of going straight home. I used the money to buy a hot dog—food my mother forbade us to eat—and walked home slowly as I ate it.

The whole city felt as if it were on fire. I saw young men in different neighborhoods attack police stations and take the guns they found there. As I got closer to our house, six blocks north of the former U.S. embassy compound, some teenagers were firing celebratory bullets into the air. I asked our neighbor’s son, Gholam Ali, to pass me a pistol. He put me on his shoulders and I shot into the air as well, feeling as powerful as an adult. The shah’s thirty-seven-year dictatorship had finally come to an end. “Tyranny is over,” we chanted. “Death to the shah! Long live Khomeini!”

A few years later, as soon as Khomeini fully secured his grip on power, he ordered the imprisonment and execution of many of the same young men and women who had risked their lives to bring him to power. Their crimes—often punishable by death—included everything from possessing an “anti-revolutionary” leaflet to plotting against the “holy” government of the Islamic Republic. Gholam Ali, on whose shoulders I’d ridden in 1979, assassinated a government sympathizer in our neighborhood in 1983. He was caught and executed a few days later.

As important as the 1979 Islamic Revolution was in the history of Iran, I knew that the 2009 presidential election could be an even more historic occasion. A few decades ago, this fight would have occurred with guns and Molotov cocktails. This time around, young people were battling it out with posters, pamphlets, and discussions. They were tired of thirty years of the stringent rules of the Islamic Republic, and surely they were angry, but in their joyful faces, and in the air of the city, I also felt a certain sense of patience and a desire for peace. Unlike their fathers’ generation, these young