Citizens debate: Is life better since revolution?

Absard, Iran: Four friends gather in a basement eatery in a rural hamlet to talk politics about the revolution three decades ago that changed their lives.

"What kind of Islamic revolution allows sexy movies on television?" says Mohammad Rezaie, a 49-year-old farmer and the conservative of the bunch. "What kind of revolution allows young men to gel their hair up like this?" he says, making rabbit-ears with his fingers.

"What does hair gel have to with revolution?" bellows Seyed Rahman Hussein, 41. "Who are you to tell someone else how their kid should behave?"

Such are the conversations in the hinterlands as Iran celebrated the 30th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution yesterday. It is in the rural areas where the country's most dramatic changes may be occurring, propelling religiously conservative communities from a sleepy semi-feudal past into the 21st century. The rapid transformation has changed the way people think and frame debates about their communities and their relationship to authority.

"Thirty years ago, the dominant discourse was the concept of revolution," said Hamid-Reza Jalaipour, a social scientist in Tehran, the capital. "But now, the dominant discourse is democracy."

On Monday at 9pm, supporters of the revolution that overthrew the pro-American monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the country's leader climbed to their rooftops and chanted "God is great!" to mark the anniversary. Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of Tehran to commemorate the day Khomeini declared the Islamic Republic.

Much of the political focus in Tehran concerns the looming election battle between reformists like former President Mohammad Khatami and hard-line conservatives like the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And in the big city centres the social focus is on the friction between urban youth and women and the restrictive, fundamentalist clergy.

In Iran's rural areas, in places like Absard (pronounced Ob-sard), there is an inchoate sense of lost simplicity and of perplexity.

Among the four friends, none with more than a high school diploma, the tricky questions percolate rapidly, spawning charged debates: Why are there are no factories here to employ the young? Why are Afghan migrants taking all the jobs? Why is the countryside flooded with hard drugs, heroin and crystal meth, called "shisheh,""or glass? How did a few get so rich while others stayed poor? How should they respond to the semi-pornographic images from the satellite TV dishes that rest atop every other home in this town of 30,000?

They are pudgy, unpretentious men in shabby clothes, sprinkling their talk with praises to God and the Shi'ite saints. They long for the shared sense of purpose of the rapidly fading agrarian past, while relishing the creature comforts of the modern world.

In 30 years, Absard, or "cold water," named after the spring that draws tourists during the summer, has mushroomed from a sleepy backwater of dirt roads and a few hundred potato farmers in mud-brick homes without electricity, gas or phone lines into a thriving mountainside town with a hospital, a college of agriculture and three mosques. Upper-class Iranians from the capital 50 miles to the west have even begun buying vacation homes to take advantage of the cool summer air.

Under the Shah, fewer than five per cent of women in the countryside could read, compared to 70 per cent now.

Two-thirds of women now use modern birth control, according to Congressional testimony last year by Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a scholar at the Brookings Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC

Some people refuse to credit the Islamic Republic for such advances. They would have happened anyway, said Ahmad Zeidabadi, a frequent critic of the government.

"Three decades have passed since the revolution," he said. "Malaysia and even Thailand have undergone fundamental changes throughout these years, and the Shah's regime would have gone the same way."

Indeed, each benefit of modernity has come with a cost: the college, for example, is on a huge chunk of land previously used for grazing livestock.

"Everything that came, we paid for it," said Reza Gol-Mohammad, a former farmer who runs this small restaurant, called Alborz. "Even the loans we get from the government, we pay them back."

He grits his teeth and frowns as he grills chicken and prepares rice for a handful of guests at the table. He notes with frustration that rents, utilities and wholesale prices have all shot up.

Rezaie, the farmer, said he served proudly on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war and considers himself a staunch supporter of the government. He criticises the others for their complaints, resurrecting memories of the hundreds of thousands of people who sacrificed their lives fighting for the Islamic Republic during the war against Saddam Hussain. "We are not worthy of their blood," he says.

Hassan Rastegar, a grizzled 55-year-old former trucker now working at the restaurant, disagrees.

"We were well-fed before the revolution," he said. "The revolution didn't do anything for us. It didn't give us land."

"It's true no one gives us anything," Rezaie says. "But no one was supposed to give us anything. We helped ourselves up."

"You see the fancy houses?" Gol-Mohammad says. "They belong to the capitalists? If you're a capitalist you can buy a piece of land and build the nicest house ever. It's the young who are suffering."

Younger farmer Hussein interjects. His friends are mixing everything up. "The debate about freedom is one thing," he says.

"The debate about loans to buy houses is another thing."

"It's the same. It's all about justice," Gol-Mohammad says as they continue to debate the pre and post-revolution days.