"Over decades of travel to Iran, I've regularly returned to symbolic sites of the Islamic Revolution as a way of assessing the national mood. One is the ornate mausoleum of the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which features a huge golden dome and four spiny minarets visible for miles, a sprawling parking lot with space for twenty thousand vehicles, and a mall of souvenir shops and kebab restaurants."
""It is almost impossible to keep the revolutionary élan alive and to transmit it down generational lines," Anne O'Donnell, a historian at New York University, told me. "There's something about revolutions as social experiences, almost independent of the ideologies that they are engaged in, that leaves an imprint on the generation of people who make them." But, she went on, that early enthusiasm or euphoria "has a shelf life, a time stamp.""
"It's been almost a half century since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi boarded the royal Boeing 727 at Tehran's airport for an extended "vacation." He reportedly wept while bidding farewell to his staff and inner coterie, and took a vessel of Iranian soil with him. At that point, after fourteen months of nationwide protests, his exile seemed inevitable, the culmination of the Iranian Revolution of 1979."
Mass protests have erupted amid political repression and a teetering economy, with demonstrators chanting "Death to the Dictator." Pilgrimage sites and Friday prayer gatherings show declining attendance and aging crowds at previously central revolutionary symbols. Observers note that revolutionary fervor loses intensity across generations and leaves a diminishing imprint on younger Iranians. Memories of the 1979 upheaval and the Shah's exile remain, but the current theocracy is now in its third generation. Popular discontent appears driven by economic hardship, authoritarian governance, and generational fatigue with revolutionary ideology.
Read at The New Yorker
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