The word “transit” in the title of this book denotes its main theme, referring not only to the rapid overall changes under way in Iran, but also to the many daily transitions Iranians make as they move from public to private space, with the greater margin of freedom the latter affords. Transit also indicates the adjustments made by Iranians returning from living abroad.

Malu Halasa is a London-based writer and editor, of partly Jordanian descent, with a number of publications to her credit. Maziar Bahari is a documentary filmmaker, playwright and journalist who divides his time between London, Tehran and Baghdad. Together they have compiled a book of essays, studies, fiction and photos from over 30 contributors, giving a rare glimpse into the lives of Iran’s post-revolutionary generation.

Since 75% percent of the Iranian population is under 35, focusing on youth is not a marginal pursuit, but gets to the heart of what Iran is today and will become in the coming years.

According to the editors, this is a generation with “strong emotional and social attachments to their culture and religion while being critical of the Iranian government’s censorship of arts and culture.” (p. 5) There is also critique of the previous Shah regime, but criticizing is not the main point. Instead, images and text carry the reader from one issue to another, one milieu to another, one social group to another in rapid succession, showing real life in today’s Tehran.

The book quickly dispels any notion of Iran as a monolithic society and state, caught in the past. On the contrary, Iranian youth are very much in touch with global trends, and not only by virtue of the Internet. It’s a fact of their own lives, since Iran is experiencing many of the benefits and not a few of the downsides of globalisation. In some cases, the government is also experimenting with new concepts and policies. One example of this is covered in a groundbreaking article on drug abuse which reveals that Tehran not only “has the highest number of heroin addicts in the world, it also has the first needle exchange centres in the Middle East. The religious establishment is torn between regarding addicts as patients or criminals.” (p. 7)

After a very interesting history of the city of Tehran, which has grown from four to 14 million people since the 1979 Islamic revolution, there is a photo essay on women, starting with a transsexual and moving on to schoolgirls, brides, female football players and others. (The reader may be surprised to learn that since the 80s, the Iranian leadership has allowed sex change operations.) There are also some boy-meets-girl vignettes, as well as essays on Persian hip-hop, the White Scarves (a group of women fighting to be admitted to football matches), and the training of female police. The book’s cover connects to this, showing four women scaling a building façade wearing full-length chadors, each with a machinegun strapped over her shoulder - quite a feat!

Essays range from private lives to the use of public space, from secular issues to religious ones. Several articles deal with political and social criticism as expressed in artworks, while others address the cult of martyrdom and how it has changed over the past decades. One photo essay follows the private life of a highly respected cleric, while another reports on women’s religious seminaries.

Though the book’s focus is very current, two historical phenomena keep cropping up. One is the overwhelming countryside-to-city migration that began under the Shah and was encouraged by the Islamic revolution’s leadership, and further increased by people fleeing war-stricken areas during the Iraq-Iran war. In all cases, it led to urban sprawl, including vast marginalised, under-serviced and deprived areas. Several essays deal with specific neighbourhoods and their problems. One of these titled “Tehran’s garden suburb has been turned into a building site,” may resonate with Ammanites.

The other past event that still haunts the present is the war itself which, besides the huge loss of life and material destruction, traumatised a whole generation of young Iranian men who fought and were prisoners of war for long years in Iraq.

The introduction to a photo essay on dress somehow captures the essence of the book’s overall approach. Noting that the Shah forced Iranian women to remove the hejab, and the Islamic authorities reimposed it, Javad Montazeri writes, “Both regimes failed. They altered surface appearances, but people’s minds were unaffected. At the same time, their inhumane actions destroyed some of our real culture… but I have my own memories, and have seen how lives change.” (p. 189)

Sally Bland