The first thing you see in the sprawling shrine of Ayatollah Khomaini on a recent Wednesday afternoon is the small crowd of visiting Iranians, mostly poor villagers, gathered around his Plexiglas-walled tomb, offering banknotes and prayers to the man who launched the world's first and only Islamic revolution.
Look across the half-built shrine in the outskirts of Tehran, and you'll see something very different. There, along the marble wall on the opposite side of the enormous chamber, a dozen young couples sit together, hold hands, chat quietly and stare into one another's eyes, precisely the sort of activity that Mr. Khomaini's revolution banished.
"It's what you'd call a make-out place," one young man says. "If we were holding hands on the street or in the shops, the morality police would get us. But they'd never think of entering this place, so we come here after classes."
While none of the behaviour here would be described by a Westerner as making out, in Iran it is a crime for unmarried men and women to congregate or physically touch, and if caught by the morality police or bands of Islamic vigilantes, they can be punished with flogging. A generation ago, people just obeyed. Now, all over Iran, in rich neighbourhoods and poor villages, you see young people finding clever ways around the rules.
Here, in countless scenes like these, are the bizarre contradictions that govern Iran today and that underpin its awkward relationship with the outside world. This is, on paper, a society that is ruled by Islamic law to an extent unknown anywhere else, governed by mullahs who impose their strict readings of the Koran on every aspect of public and private life.
"It is definitely a totalitarian government," says Tehran movie director Dariush Mehrjui, whose acclaimed films have been censored and banned under various Iranian regimes since 1966, and who says that things are worse now than he has ever seen them. "But it is not at all a closed society. As a society, this is nothing at all like Eastern Europe under the Soviets."
Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, since he won the office in 2005, laws have become more restrictive: Dissenting newspapers have repeatedly been banned, critical views in universities have been aggressively repressed, bloggers have been locked in prison and primary- and secondary-school curriculums, according to United Nations workers, have been changed so that they consist mainly of prayer.
Yet despite the laws, Iranian society is in many ways more open and liberated than in most countries in the Middle East, certainly more so than in Arab states that fear Iran's influence. In places like Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive cars, shake hands with men or wear anything that isn't black. Iranians staunchly defend their freedoms, and seem to be pushing for more.
Well-informed Iranians say that Mr. Ahmadinejad faces a conundrum: Just as his government is trying to export its Islamic revolution to the wider Middle East, through endorsement and likely support of movements in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and many other places, it is facing a new generation at home that has diminishing interest in those values.
And a growing number of people here are quietly predicting that the Iranian revolution will likely run out of steam due to mounting public dissatisfaction and economic malaise, like the Soviet Union did in the late 1980s, unless it is strengthened by some outside threat such as a U.S. invasion.
Iran is facing the largest baby boom in the world: Between 1979 and the late 1980s, its population doubled, from 35 million to 70 million, with an average of almost eight children for every family. That number has plummeted back to slightly more than two children to a family at an equally amazing rate, but the country is left with 70 per cent of its population under 30 years of age.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is gambling, according to those close to him, that this postrevolutionary generation will embrace his rigidly conservative values as they get older.
