Young Iranians speak out

Dallas Morning News: Sometimes, the signs of impending social change are small but unmistakable. Even in as rigid a fundamentalist theocracy as Iran.
The New York Times recently published an interview with Zahra Eshraghi, a 39-year-old government official who promotes women's issues. She hates wearing the chador, the black, veiled outfit that came to symbolize the Iranian revolution. (In that, she isn't alone. In some parts of Tehran, the chador has become so disliked that merchants refuse to serve would-be customers who wear it.)
But she still grudgingly wears it, although when colleagues at the Interior Ministry tried to force her to wear dark colors and more modest dress underneath the chador, she refused.
She also loves dancing and singing, despite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's condemnation of music when he returned from exile to spearhead the Islamic revolution.
Criticism
And she is blunt in some criticisms of the Iranian government. She was an early backer of reformist President Mohammad Khatami, but she now says, "I feel President Khatami's speed has been that of a turtle." She also says she has abandoned hope that political reformers will defeat the conservative clerics who have clung to power for more than two decades.
What she says isn't so unusual. She is reflecting the hopes and fears of a generation of young Iranians who have chafed under the rigid theocracy. They haven't been silent. But what gives special weight to Eshraghi's complaints is her special standing in Iran. President Khatami is her brother-in-law. Mohammad Reza Khatami, who heads the reformist wing of Iran's Parliament, is her husband. The casual observer might suspect that some of their liberalism rubbed off on her.
But she also has lived in the West, getting a close view of the culture that most young Iranians only dream of. As a girl, she lived in suburban Paris with her exiled grandfather -- the Ayatollah Khomeini.