The last time protesters swarmed into the streets of Tehran to vent their frustration with the regime, I was among them. That was in the winter of 1999. Hundreds of thousands of undergraduates like me clamored for more freedom to choose what we wore, what we said, what we were permitted to study. We’d grown up after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, had only ever known fundamentalism, and we were sick of it. We marched in a delirium of hope, believing that the justice of our cause was irresistible. We were foolish in certain ways, but it was good foolish, happy foolish. “Something’s happening,” we said to each other. “Everything will change.” The crowds of Tehranis who watched us marching smiled and called out, “God be with you!” And those few who weren’t smiling? We pitied them; their day was past.Then one fine morning — a morning on which we didn’t march — the people who’d been watching us without smiling struck back hard. I was walking home from the Tehran University campus after studying in the library when a car pulled up beside me on a quiet street. A man and a woman who
