A Stroll Down Mullah Sadra Avenue, Shiraz by Kamin Mohammadi

Where do you go at the start of the weekend when you are young, free and single in Shiraz, one of Iran’s largest cities? Head down to Mullah Sadra Avenue, of course, Shiraz’s most popluar shopping street. Kamin Mohammadi took a stroll.

It was four years since my last visit to Iran, and I had returned to the country of my birth. My grandmother lay ill in her home in Shiraz, so this was where I had stayed, keeping vigil by her bed. Somewhere in the world outside her house was a country itching for change, with students protesting. Inside the house you would have known of no such thing. The national television stations reported none of the unrest sweeping the country, and my teenage cousins were too busy watching the Iranian satellite stations broadcast from America to care. They wanted to know what J-Lo was wearing and pick over the latest colours from Chanel in my make up bag, not discuss the future of Iran’s political system.

The Thursday night stroll was my friend Bijan’s idea (Thursday and Friday make up the Iranian weekend). Bijan had come to Shiraz to see me and, having spent the years of his national service in Shiraz, he knew the city well. As I put on my long coat and headscarf - the obligatory dress for women - making sure to tuck any stray hairs under the scarf, he grinned at me. ‘You will be surprised by what you see...’ At first my only thought was that finally Bijan and I could go out alone: on my previous trips it had been too risky for an unmarried woman to go out in public with a man she was not directly related to.

The taxi dropped us at the bottom of the long avenue. We scrambled out and as Bijan paid the driver, I stepped on to the pavement - and was almost swept along by the tide of moving bodies, covering every inch of the wide pavement. I looked over the passing heads for Bijan. And what heads they were: slick male heads, hair mostly worn a little long and carried with a nonchalance that indicates fresh styling; female heads with the flimsiest breath of chiffon headscarf perched atop boldly coiffed, expertly-streaked hair, the faces below mostly heavily made up. I pulled my own headscarf tight around my bare face and grinned at Bijan. He took my hand and we started to promenade as I mentally blinked in the fact that we were openly holding hands.

The people flooding towards us and around us were all young; it was like being in some city of the future. At 33, I was probably the oldest person there. Not to mention the plainest, being possibly the only girl out in Shiraz that night whose cheeks had not seen a blush of rouge. Girls were mostly in big gangs of girls, boys similarly with friends of the same sex. But, as they walked, the groups openly checked each other out.

We went to a western-style café where Bijan’s friends were waiting for us. I looked around: girls fluttered lashes stiff with mascara at boys showing off their mobile phones. At other tables, young men and women were clearly out on dates, unchaperoned and unblushing, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes - a far cry from my first trip back seven years ago when I had scandalised my family by openly smoking.

I asked the group about this apparent freedom, miles away from the image of a chaste nation, celibate and segregated until marriage. ‘At the time of the revolution, Khomeini said "Islam offers no joy", said Babak, ‘But Iranian kids just want to have fun like everyone else. After all, we had nothing to do with the revolution, we don’t know what it was like before.’

He has a point. Iran is an overwhelmingly young nation, with over 50 percent of the population of 65 million under 25 - born in the baby boom since the 1979 revolution that deposed the Shah and ushered in Islamic law. A generation that grew up during the 8-year-long Iran-Iraq war and has little chance of meaningful employment after completing its education. A generation that delightedly swept President Khatami to victory and now with all his reforms blocked, a generation that is deeply disillusioned.

‘The authorities are scared of our power,’ said Laleh, a pretty 23-year-old politics student, ‘so they keep us distracted by letting us get away with a bit more make up, some of this kind of freedom that you have seen...’ she indicates the dating couples. But this too brings its own problems: safe sex education. ‘Look, when noone admits that there is sex before marriage, then how can safe sex be talked about?’ says Bijan.

Chewing over this conundrum we dive back into the river of people flowing along Mullah Sadra. Iran may be showing a veiled Islamic face to the world, but inside the country, the veil has slipped from the lives of the young people. And, after my night out on Mullah Sadra, I realised the revolution everyone hopes for has already taken place, in the mores governing Iran’s youth today.