Iran A Revolution Loses Its Zeal

The icons of Iran's Islamic revolution are not what they used to be. The former U.S. embassy in downtown Tehran, where radical students held 52 U.S. hostages for 444 days, retains only the faintest echo of those angry days. The anti-U.S. slogans on the compound's walls are faded, and the Revolutionary Guards standing outside are definitely part of a new generation. A bearded, young guardsman asks of a passing foreigner, "Are you American?" To a nod, he responds with a big smile and says, "Very good."

Outside the city, a huge gold-domed shrine marking the tomb of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, is all but complete, and on weekends families flock there. But apart from a few offering fervent prayers near his tomb, most of the visitors chat and play with their children, unawed by the presence of the revolutionary imam's earthly remains.

Twelve years after Khomeini came to power, Iran's Islamic revolution has finally softened around the edges. The signs of fitful change are everywhere. On Tehran's streets women still observe hijab (the veil), the Islamic injunction that women keep themselves covered save for their faces and hands. But some have exchanged their shapeless black chadors for slightly fitted raincoats in colors like green and purple. Veils that are supposed to completely cover a woman's hair are inching back to reveal hints of the lush coiffures underneath. Women's lips and fingernails are beginning to sport glosses for the first time in years, though in appropriately muted shades.

Much of that change, dramatic by the standards of revolutionary Iran, has been at least indirectly endorsed by President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who came to power two months after Khomeini's death. Rafsanjani has not actually called for a reversal of strict Islamic injunctions, but in oblique ways he is signaling that he favors a more relaxed approach, especially in the enforcement of hijab. In a much publicized sermon last November, for example, Rafsanjani chided fellow clerics who make a virtue of "austerity" and argued that "appreciating beauty and seeking embellishment are serious feelings. To fight them is not God's desire."

The remarks ignited a debate among the country's mullahs that is still blazing. Two weeks ago, Ayatullah Abdul Karim Mousavi Ardebili, a conservative religious figure and former chief justice, said in a televised sermon that he was ashamed by the way hijab was being flouted and that "the revolution was headed for destruction" if the people did not step forward. Within a few days the Revolutionary Guards, who sometimes act independently of government wishes, began rounding up young women in the street whose dress they found objectionable. On Vali Asr Avenue, the capital's main shopping boulevard, a guardsman tried halfheartedly to capture a young woman by throwing a blanket over her. Surprisingly enough, she fought back and escaped.