Iranians are as ready as ever to complain about inflation, corruption and an overall lack of opportunity – but try and talk politics, and the most likely response is disinterest. True, at the top levels the attitudes and the rhetoric are still often vehement; the country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was in routine form at the United Nations general assembly’s annual meeting in New York, prophesying the end of the “American empire” and scorning the “few bullying powers” who were trying to ruin his country’s “peaceful nuclear activities”. But in much of Iran, in the marketplaces and cafes and streets, people have other concerns: this sort of thing appears to be just irrelevant background noise.
