Someday in Tehran

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Like Donald Trump, I, too, once underestimated the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the fall of 2004, as an underemployed freelance journalist drawn to heady stories about international politics, I had the bright idea of traveling to the notoriously closed country on a tourist visa. Press visas for Iran were hard to come by, and my travel was exploratory—I had no particular assignment. My profile was low, I figured. Who would care if, between the obligatory sightseeing expeditions, I rattled around Iranian cities meeting political analysts, philosophers, students, filmmakers, and the relatives of Iranian expats I knew?

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The Islamic Republic was not to be messed with in this way. Its visa regime was deadly serious; so was the official paranoia about foreigners. American tourists were required to travel with a specially vetted guide. For four weeks, I strained to see past the diminutive figure of a young woman I’ll call Pardis, who pretended to be a tour guide while I pretended to be a tourist. Pardis excelled at her job, which was not only to make sure that I adhered to the terms of my visa, but also to report on all of my movements and conversations, and to obfuscate everything I saw.

One day I watched a bus disgorge a troop of uniformed Basij militiamen at an intersection in central Tehran.

“Who are they?” I asked Pardis.

“Oh,” she said. “They’re a youth group. Sometimes they help the police.”

Because Pardis stood between me and all that I was truly curious about, I studied her. She was not a dour Islamist but a fun-loving 31-year-old who had hair flowing out of her headscarf and risqué online flirtations with men overseas. She was an orphan, unlucky in love, and ambitious in her minder-ing, circumstances that rendered her marginal—an unmarried career woman living with a roommate. She was also relentlessly trivial, with a knack for diverting any potentially substantive encounter I might have with her country or anyone in it into an endless stream of repetitive inside jokes and girlish banter.

[Read: The ‘existential anxiety’ of the Islamic Republic]

We wandered through bazaars, threatening to buy each other the ugliest items we saw—a giant pair of red satin underwear, a wig, a dowdy zebra-print skirt. We flew to Shiraz on IranAir, a black-turbaned cleric across the aisle from us. Pardis took out a bottle of polish, began painting her nails, and smiled at me impishly. “In front of the mullah!” she said in her little voice. (He was absorbed in opening his airline-issue carton of apple juice.)

Pardis was not invested in anything that the Islamic Republic seemed to care about. But she was, for professional reasons, invested in exercising control over me. For my safety, she insisted, I could never be without her protective presence. But when she entered a room—even, memorably, one where I sat talking with members of her own family about their feelings about the hijab—everyone stopped talking.

Privately, she’d tell me about her love interests. Relationships between unmarried men and women were commonplace but forbidden under the Islamic Republic. Suddenly she’d freeze in fear and implore me not to tell anyone, or backtrack and claim that she was talking about a friend. Toward the end of our month together, in the shadow of a breakup, she sat smoking and brooding in my hotel room. I told her that Iranian women seemed forced to live complicated lives.

She replied with uncharacteristic bluntness: “Better to say that women here find ways to kill lots of things inside themselves.”

Pardis was not interested in politics, but I was. What had drawn me to Iran was a political and philosophical movement that seemed unique in the Muslim world. A circle of the most radical revolutionary elites—hostage takers, religious philosophers, former officials, even founders of the security forces—had fallen out of political favor in the early 1990s and spent the better part of a decade remaking themselves as proponents of incremental democratic reform. They produced an entire theoretical literature that drew on Western and Islamic sources; they mobilized young people to support their campaigns for elected office; and they tried to clean up abuses in some parts of the government they ran. The reformists were insiders who intended not to destroy the regime, but to liberalize it. They sought to make the supreme leader a benign figurehead—like the Queen of England, they sometimes said. The supreme leader had other plans.

My first visit to the country was comically unsuited to exploring any of this. By day, Pardis was obligated to fully occupy my time. Some of what we saw was splendid: palaces and gardens; museums of carpets, miniatures, and Islamic calligraphy; even madrassas and shrines. Then Ramadan set in, and all museums closed. Pardis had us driven around in circles or held me all but captive in her apartment, watching music videos on satellite television. After she dropped me at my hotel in the evenings, I went out to meetings I’d arranged on my own. She was livid when she learned of this. I needed to bring her with me, she insisted, or she’d lose her job. She threatened to sit in my hotel lobby until midnight to make sure I didn’t leave—unless, she said, I agreed to give her the names of everyone I saw.

Sure, I said. I’d give her all of the names before I left. I never intended to do this, and she never again asked me to. Maybe whoever needed to know about my movements already did. Or maybe Pardis covered for me—because she was lonely and considered me a friend, or because she feared she had told me too many of her secrets. Possibly she was simply satisfied that she had already done her job. I returned to New York in relative darkness about the reform movement and loath to write about the one thing I really knew, which was Pardis, and the story of how an otherwise indifferent person comes to hold a stake in a brutal regime—how she forces that stake on others just as it was forced on her.

During the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 to 2005, a window opened wide enough for a democratic-minded civil society to draw breath in Iran. A crop of semi-independent newspapers sprouted, along with investigative journalists who dared to write for them. Cultural and philosophical magazines published searching essays on religion and the state. Young people formed NGOs to address an array of civic needs; some ran for newly formed city and provincial councils. Student activism spilled onto the streets.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did his best to slam this window shut. His henchmen tortured journalists and student activists in prison until they made humiliating confessions on national television. State-linked thugs beat up a philosopher at his lectures and shot a political theorist point-blank on the steps of Tehran’s city hall. Even so, a real infrastructure for democratic change persisted for a time—in the form of people who had the training and experience to run newspapers and civic organizations, citizens who expected these things to be allowed, and the semblance of a political network that connected society to the ministries of the state.

Two presidential elections tested the resilience of this infrastructure. I covered the first of these, in 2005, with a proper journalist’s visa and a minder in her mid-40s who had a deep smoker’s rasp and a loud, insistent warmth. Bahar (also not her real name—for their safety, I’m using pseudonyms for the private citizens I met) belonged to a lost generation of bohemian Boomers whose class and secular social milieu had been violently displaced by the 1979 revolution. Women who had once lived and studied abroad now gathered in homes that smelled of opium smoke, where husbands were absent or idle and grown children seemed adrift. I learned only later of money troubles, past prison sentences, and ethnic- or religious-minority status that must have contributed to the sense of profound isolation in those homes, where it mingled with something louche and lively and almost careless.

Of all the handlers I was assigned to in Iran—I returned in 2006, 2008, and 2012—Bahar was the least beholden to the agency she worked for. I gave her a list of the people I intended to speak with, many of them reformist politicians, student activists, journalists, and former political prisoners. Her boss told her we’d wind up dead, like a photojournalist who had reported near Evin prison a few years before. Bahar was undeterred. The people on my list were heroes to her for standing up to the Islamic Republic, and she would not forfeit the opportunity to meet them. She told her own handlers that my modesty required us to hire a female driver, which is how we managed to get her best friend, Niki, to ferry us around in her red Peugeot.

How to fully convey the eccentricity of my little entourage? Niki had the stark, exaggerated beauty of a fashion model, though she was gaunt and faded, with a thousand-yard stare. She was also mostly bald. She’d first shaved her head in 1979 to taunt the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. By her telling, she went out bareheaded to test the hijab law, which required women to cover their hair.

Where is your scarf ? a Guardsman asked her.

I don’t need one. I have no hair, she said.

Ah, he replied. But you are still a woman.

Now Niki swathed herself in layers of flowing garments that resembled ordinary hijab less than they suggested dervish, flower child, and grim reaper all at once. She, too, wanted to meet the people on my list, and at times she entered the room with us. Bringing Pardis to any meeting had cast a pall of annoyance mixed with fear. Bringing Bahar and Niki added an antic element. They were extravagantly maternal, often starstruck, and prone to tears. One incident remains particularly salient in my memory.

The reformists had flubbed the election I’d come to witness. They ran three candidates, and many liberal-minded Iranians rejected all of them, on the grounds that the reformist project was a failure and Iranian elections were far from free. And so the populist hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—Khamenei’s favorite—surged to the presidency.

The morning the results came in, the red Peugeot was abnormally somber, Bahar and Niki absorbed in a nearly wordless grief. We were on our way to Tarbiat Modares University to see Hashem Aghajari, a reformist intellectual with a revolutionary background and a wooden leg that had replaced the one he’d lost in the Iran-Iraq War. Aghajari had been sentenced to death for a speech he gave in which he said that Muslims need not blindly follow a supreme leader, as though with “shackles around the neck.” Under popular pressure, including an international campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, the regime had commuted his sentence, but he still lived under the sword of Damocles, and I asked him whether the election results made him fearful.

“We have a saying in Farsi,” Aghajari replied. “ ‘There’s no shade darker than black.’ The worst they can do is execute me. I have prepared myself for that. If I am worried, it is not for myself. It’s for the Iranian people, for young people, today’s generation and future generations. My freedom and my life, and those of one or two people like me, don’t matter. They may take me to prison. I’m ready for that. In this society, we have no freedom to speak or to write. This is a prison, too.”

Outside Aghajari’s office, Bahar, or maybe Niki, motioned for us to sit a moment on a low brick wall in the university courtyard, where the sun beat down, and the two women wept.

“When we have people like this in our country,” Bahar said at last, “why must we have Ahmadinejad as our president?”

The author in Tehran in 2005 (Abbas / Magnum)

Reform was a conundrum like so many others under the Islamic Republic. It demanded cooperation and resistance at the same time—“pressure from below, negotiation at the top,” as one of its theorists articulated the strategy. The trouble was that Khamenei never once indicated that he would negotiate.

A compromise, practically by definition, satisfies no one. Reform was a compromise between hope and resignation. Iranian oppositionists grumbled about the movement’s timidity and its roots in the regime. The alternative, however, was confrontation, and throughout the period of my visits, Iranians were leery of it. The regime’s appetite and capacity for violence were never in doubt, and the country’s last revolution had gone very wrong. The movement behind it was broad-based, including liberals and leftists, but it was the Islamists who had emerged victorious in street battles and in politics, and who sealed their triumph through summary executions and imposed a theocratic state. This was not a distant memory. Mohsen Kadivar, a dissident cleric, once complained to me that his students railed against reform but shied away from rebellion. “If you won’t be the men of revolution,” Kadivar told me he said to them, “then be the boys of reform.”

The last great showing of this meliorist current was the Green Movement of 2009. In that year’s presidential election, liberal-minded Iranians, including many who’d boycotted the 2005 vote, turned out in electrifying force for the moderate reformist candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. On election day, some polls had barely closed when the regime called an implausible win for Ahmadinejad. Iranians I spoke with were incandescent with fury. Millions poured into the streets, and Mousavi and Karroubi eventually joined them there. The protesters didn’t demand an end to the Islamic Republic, even though many of them undoubtedly wished for it. They followed the cautious, legalistic reformist playbook and simply demanded that the system adhere to its own rules and allow them to elect the relatively moderate insider they’d voted for. They stood silently and held placards that read WHERE IS MY VOTE?

Bahar called me in New York on the day that the crowd was at its maximum in Tehran’s Azadi Square. She was enraptured; the atmosphere was like nothing she had ever known. The barriers of suspicion, private humiliation, and pain that had divided people for decades seemed to drop away in that expanse of shared silence, and the sense of common purpose was like a current passing through the crowd. To her special delight, she saw Aghajari not far from her—maneuvering, unafraid, on his wooden leg.

The Green Movement was the largest, most sustained, and most organized campaign of street protests that the Islamic Republic ever confronted. Foreign commenters sometimes mistook this for the spontaneous cri de coeur of a thwarted presidential campaign, mobilized by Twitter posts, but in fact it was a movement with a history, layers of experienced leaders, painstakingly articulated ideas, a pragmatic strategy, and a networked constituency. Precisely for this reason, the Islamic Republic set about destroying it with bullets, tear gas, batons, and torture.

Ahmadinejad’s first term had already seen the closure of virtually all of the reformist publications and NGOs and the exclusion of reformist candidates from campaigns for most public offices. Now the regime arrested enough of the movement’s leaders and activists to fill an auditorium, where they were paraded, hollow-eyed, in prison pajamas and forced to confess to outlandish conspiracies. Lesser-known young activists were remanded to a fetid metal shipping container in the desert. Many were raped and killed. By 2010, even to speak of or publish a photo of former President Khatami was forbidden; the cautious reform movement was dubbed “the sedition,” and Mousavi and Karroubi were placed under a draconian house arrest that would endure for a decade and a half.

When the Arab Spring came to Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries not long after the Green Movement was crushed, I ached for Iran. Of all the countries in the Middle East, up until 2009, Iran had perhaps the most credible infrastructure for democratic change—and one of the most obdurate autocracies.

My fifth and last visit to Iran, in 2012, felt in many ways like a bookend to the first, but with the coercion unmasked. Foreign journalists had been mostly excluded from the country since 2009, but three years later, I was part of a small group permitted to observe a parliamentary election. We were marched onto buses and driven to photo ops not of our choosing; even the top bureaucrats assigned to corral us made rueful jokes rather than pretend, per usual, that any of this was for our safety. Talking with a Green Movement activist required an assignation in a moving car after dark. Once again, I found myself studying the apparatus that stood in the way of studying anything else.

Just hours before I left the country, agents from the IRGC apprehended me for questioning because I had left my hotel at night without a minder. They interrogated me about my movements, my contacts, the time I asked my minder to take me to a butcher to confirm popular complaints about the price of chicken. “You have not behaved,” an interrogator told me—and, more ominously: “We think you’re not a journalist. We think you’re a spy.”

If they had actually believed this, they might have detained me indefinitely. But in the end I think they meant only to intimidate me. In the third hour of our interview, the interrogator seized my belongings and left the room with them. He returned in a fury and threw a folder of mine on his desk.

“Do you think we are not intelligent?” he demanded. “We’re keeping your receipts.” He waved in front of me the ones I’d collected for reimbursement for my travel expenses on my return. (I later realized that he may have thought I’d kept them to document the inflation that the government was at that moment trying to conceal from its citizens.) “And we are keeping this.” He held up one of the two extra passport-size photos I’d had taken for my visa. But I was a journalist, he conceded, and he let me go.

By that time, Iran’s democratic infrastructure had mostly been torched. But the yearning and anger it had once harnessed only grew and became more confrontational. At times, opposition still attached itself to elections—to whoever among the allowable candidates represented the most liberal edge of the possible. But it also exploded in street protests of a qualitatively new kind, such as those that erupted in 2017 and early 2018, when members of the lower classes in provincial cities openly reviled the Islamic Republic and chanted “Death to Khamenei.” For another hot minute, the world held its breath for the Islamic Republic to collapse. Instead, it killed.

To imagine that this cycle would repeat itself in 2022 was almost unbearable. Outraged by the death of a young woman in the custody of the morality police, women and teenage girls made hijab the symbolic center of their revolt. The headscarf was both a tool and a symbol of suffocation: Removing it publicly, en masse, was an act of civil disobedience without precedent under the Islamic Republic. Although the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising was violently quelled like all the rest—some 500 dead, maybe 20,000 in prison, families forbidden even to publicly mourn—it left a uniquely durable legacy, in that women began appearing uncovered in public with relative impunity. This was something new and promising. But it did not bring democracy or suggest what could.

Iran was and remains a heartbreaker. Where else is the civic spirit so enduring, and so unyieldingly denied? Time and again, the Islamic Republic proved itself implacable before even the most rudimentary of its subjects’ desires. It valued neither their lives nor any legitimacy that their consent could confer on the state. It refused them the dignity of small freedoms that might have cost the system nothing. And it would not even afford them a stake in prosperity: Over the course of the first two decades of the 21st century, a largely middle-class country was driven to penury, not only because of international sanctions, but because of the voracious corruption of the IRGC, which Khamenei allowed and encouraged as a means of hoarding power.

I’ll admit that I distanced myself from Iran. My run-in with the IRGC had made traveling there again impossible, and I questioned the value of what I could observe from afar. My network of sources outside the country had always been eclectic. Now it spanned a venomously polarized diaspora that traded accusations—of complicity with Iran’s foreign enemies, and with the ever more hated regime.

To hope for change in Iran was quixotic; to bet against it seemed cruel. Each upswell of protest presented a breathtaking display of youthful courage shadowed by near-certain tragedy. Eternally optimistic, a friend inside Iran offered me a metaphor: If it takes 100 blows of the axe to cut down a tree, he wrote to me on WhatsApp in 2022, you don’t say the first 99 were useless.

But the Islamic Republic seemed to be made of ironwood. It was not one man’s dictatorship. The revolutionaries had built institutions, both civilian and military, that perpetuated themselves. Networks of violence ran deep, through virtually every power center and organ of the system, and the regime retained a considerable base of ideological support in both the populace and the security apparatus. Time and again, asked to choose between their neighbors and their leaders, Iran’s men under arms chose the regime.

Would they really do it? Would they open fire on unarmed crowds of mostly young people, mowing them down by the thousands? This past January, the Islamic Republic made its security forces the instrument of an atrocity of world-historic proportions, killing at least 6,000 and possibly more than 30,000 protesters. Something broke inside of nearly every Iranian I knew. Or ignited: a fireball of rage and trauma. How could one live under such a regime? But what form of resistance was possible? One exiled activist told me privately that she fantasized about returning as an armed resistance fighter: “The reality is that we have reached a point, a dead end, where you almost have to be a partisan to win. Otherwise you have to accept that they will kill you and move on.”

When American and Israeli bombs began blasting their homeland, many of my old friends and contacts hitched their country’s epic hopes to Trump’s epic fury. No nonviolent effort had dislodged or even shaken the regime; here at last was hard power. The alternative was the Islamic Republic, forever. But others among my old network were aghast. The hard power in question was wielded by outsiders for who knew what purpose, against a continuously widening ambit of targets. One friend texted me to ask: If the Iranians celebrating such violent destruction of their country come to power by means of it, can they really be said to be pro-democratic? How will they treat their opponents?

Lately I’ve been wondering whether a fault line has always run through the opposition, or if what I’m seeing now is new. On one side are those who still believe that despite the outcome of the 1979 revolution, its broadest animating impulses—the rejection of monarchy and American dominion, and the assertion of Iran’s sovereignty over its resources and political fate—are sacrosanct. On the other are those who have concluded that not only the Islamic Republic, but the revolution itself, was a wrong turn. There is a potent symbolism in their embrace of the son of the deposed shah as a leader for the future, and their acceptance of American force as the means for empowering him.

The views of these camps are anathema to each other. I am trying to listen respectfully to both—though truth be told, I cannot at the time of this writing imagine a way that this war ends in Iranian liberation, or a way that the Islamic Republic, with or without the war, decides to yield. But how can I say these things, or even think them? Not when every phone call ends with a promise—that we’ll continue the conversation, someday, in Tehran.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Someday in Tehran.”

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