We were standing by the side of the road when we heard the scream. We looked up the road to see a clearly terrified skinny young man in a white shirt and blue jeans being pursued by a middle-aged man clasping a thick, heavy-looking plank of wood. From the side, another, younger man joined the chase, armed with a grey cinderblock. The young man tripped and fell, his pursuers were upon him in a second and others quickly joined in, kicking and punching. Still more protesters then jumped in, pulling the attackers away and lifting the man from the ground, shielding him with their bodies. Incredibly, it seemed he was basically OK – there was no blood and no obvious injuries, although he did seem unable to walk without support.
I asked Iman why the man had been attacked. He told me the crowds said the victim was a member of the Basij, an organization that was part social movement and part militia, with links to the regime. Khomeini’s boy scouts, was how I thought of them. Over the next few days I would see more and more of their ugly side as they joined the police in their efforts to beat the protesters off the streets and into submission.
The incident highlighted something that has been missed by much of the reporting on the situation in Iran. The conflict is not just between the population – or segments of it – and the regime. There are also tensions between the urbanised, educated middle classes and the rural or newly urban poor.
In the days leading up to the election, I heard two stories of trendy young middle-class women – the kind who wore headscarves dotted with Chanel logos, often pushed so far back on their heads that looking at them from the front you couldn’t even be sure they were wearing one – being confronted by groups of young men, probably from the country or the southern suburbs. On one occasion, a girl told me, her veil had been ripped off.
Another girl recounted a more serious confrontation. She had been heading into a train station when she was stopped by a group of young male Ahmadinejad supporters, in town for one of the massive rallies. From what I could tell, they had been trying to inform her that the way she was heading was blocked, or offer some other kind of practical, helpful advice. Even by her own account, her response sounded snobbish. She had told them she knew how to use the subway system and that she didn’t need their help, thank you very much.
They formed a circle around her and one stepped forward, threatening her with a knife. She slapped him across the face. He backed down. After telling the story, she began heaping abuse on her tormentors, and their backwards, uneducated, village ways. She struggled to find the appropriate word for them in English.
‘Peasants?’ I offered.
‘Yes, exactly,’ she replied, a look of vindictive satisfaction crossing her face. ‘Peasants.’
These seemed to be manifestations of the tension originally described by Michael Axeworthy in his history of Iran, Empire of the Mind.
‘The young men of south Tehran, newly arrived from traditional communities in the countryside, either with no job or only poorly-paid jobs, with little prospect of being able to afford to marry or support a family for some years, saw (if they took a bus or taxi uptown) pretty young middle-class women sashaying up and down the streets, flush with money, unaccompanied or with girlfriends, dressed in revealing western fashions, flaunting their freedom, money, beauty and (from a certain point of view) immorality.
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
