Word: tehran
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even as recently as six months ago, many in Iran were ambivalent about voting in this election. "Why should I bother to vote when my vote isn't respected?" a shopkeeper in eastern Tehran said to me. His wife, he said, was already hectoring him to vote. "She thinks it will make a difference. She'll probably make me in the end." Given the inertia and skepticism that reigned just a few months ago, the sudden energizing of public sentiment in the three weeks preceding the election was extraordinary. Seemingly overnight, Iranians sloughed their cynicism and began to follow...
Relatives and friends that I never expected to vote decided to participate. From Tabriz to Tehran to Mashhad, from Bonn to London to Virginia, they waited in long lines at polling stations, determined not to let the country slide further into penury and isolation, not to let 2005 repeat itself. I was thrilled when some friends e-mailed to say I had helped encourage them to vote. I recently published a memoir of life in Iran under Ahmadinejad, invoking in detail how destructive it was to boycott elections. I wrote about the day I was led off to a police...
...spent nearly three weeks in Iran over the winter, talking to clerics, students, street laborers and professionals. People's anger and despair over Ahmadinejad's mismanagement of the economy pulsed throughout Tehran. People were not just discontent; they were punching-the-wall furious. Dismissing opposition to Ahmadinejad as a north Tehran phenomenon, limited only to affluent urban areas, is insulting to the millions of middle-class Iranians who have suffered the most under his tenure. As a rule, affluent Iranians aren't much affected by high inflation and unemployment. As the foreclosure crisis in the U.S. has shown...
...started sniffing around the question of the President's much discussed popularity in smaller cities and rural areas. Family and friends whom I trusted, people who spent time regularly outside Tehran, said rural Iranians weren't as pleased with Ahmadinejad as was supposed. For every hospital he had built, there was a promise either undelivered, or delivered so shoddily that the project at hand, a bridge or a road, was unusable. I applied for official permission to report a story on the President's popularity outside Tehran and was turned down. Given the government's constant griping about the Western...
Azadeh Moaveni, a former Tehran correspondent for TIME, is the author of Honeymoon in Tehran and Lipstick Jihad. She is co-author of Shirin Ebadi's autobiography...