Eye on Blogs

Two photographs from Iran's post-election convulsions tell the story.

In one, picturing a demonstration in support of current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the officially proclaimed victor, all but a tiny number of the participants appear to be men in their fifties or sixties. They are the generation that overthrew the Shah, fought the Iran-Iaq war and consolidated the Islamic Republic of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the Iranian presidential dispute, history is about to pass them by.

In its vanguard are the subjects of photo number two, 500,000 marchers led by Ahmadinejad's moderate opponent Mir Hossein Mousavi. Take a close look at them, in any of the thousands of images from the Tehran streets that have been posted abroad on the Internet. The protesters represent a broad range of ages, but well over half of them are women and young people, the missing players in the pro-Ahmadinejad photo.

Iranians between 16 (the minimum voting age) and 30 comprise 45 per cent of the electorate. The demographic handwriting is on the political wall.

Now take a closer look at the second photo. Many of its women have wrenched the hajib from their heads, or pulled it back to expose their hair. The young, of both genders, have embraced the casually defiant pose of contemporary youth and the accessories that accompany it: Levis and t-shirts, cell phones and Twitter. There is an updated Iranian cultural revolution exploding in this photo, the reverse image of the revolution that brought Khomeini to power and ensconced the Koran in Iran's courts of law.

A week before the election, the outlook was for a change-of-command that empowered the moderate reformist but religiously orthodox Mousavi. Instead, the government's apparent vote tampering, followed by a brutal crackdown, has transformed alienation into full-fledged insurgency.

The very concept of theocracy and its suffocating strictures are now being openly called into question.