Demonstrations in Iran: the revolt of the grandchildren of the Islamic revolution

Hadis, 20, Hananeh, 23, Ghazaleh, 20... At the cost of their lives, they were among those young women and men who express their anger in the streets against Iranian power. All taken with a passion for freedom that seems to come out of a history book. The 1979 revolution in Iran turned many lives upside down and also caused so much misunderstanding in some Iranian families.

How can the grandchildren of the revolutionaries of 1979 understand today what prompted their grandparents to rise up against the power of the shah, at the time very open to the West? Even if the reality of the shah's power was much less brilliant, with its glaring inequalities, the children who grew up in the war (Iran-Iraq), under a veil (worn from the age of 9), in isolation (from the community international), must sometimes have dreamed of a lost El Dorado of this pre-Islamist era.

While these sons and daughters of the 1979 protesters have already paid dearly for the uprising, whether they stayed in Iran or had to reinvent themselves in exile, now here is the new generation, that of the grandchildren of the revolution. In Iran, more than half of the population is today under 35 for a revolution that is 43. Anachronistic Islamist precepts no longer speak to these Instagrammers, polyglots, lovers of rock, pop and rap. A generation, the vast majority of which want to love each other in the open, can no longer live in the large-scale duplicity of this society with two faces: the public one, veiled and modest, and the other private, where one can find alcohol and letting go. Young women in particular, the majority in universities, who work, drive, and aspire to independence in a country where they can neither sing nor dance.

This generation today dreams of bringing Iran and the 2,500 years of Persian civilization out of the obscurantist parenthesis that has plagued the country for four decades. Finally ! Tired of paying for the error of their grandparents, these young people who had until then chosen exile - the brain drain - or drifting away - with record drug consumption - decided today to shout their anger against the choices of their elders. No one knows where this will lead, but it's a safe bet that despite death and repression, this youth can no longer live in the "absurdistan" of the mullahs and will continue to seek, by all means, to escape it. .