Thousands of young men and women, hair uncovered and dressed in jeans and short-sleeve tops, jumped up and down, dancing and singing at a packed outdoor pop concert. In another part of town, young people bobbed to the beat of a hard rock street band. And scores of people traversed the city to experience Design Week, a festival of gigantic colorful art installations, light shows and live music in multiple locations.
This is not New York or Berlin. It’s Tehran, the capital of Iran, where young people in recent months have been leading a social renaissance. Last month, a five-day jazz festival turned cafes and art galleries into performance spaces.
It is a stark contrast to just five years ago, when women could be beaten and dragged into police vans for showing a few strands of hair, security forces raided homes to break up house parties, and dancing was banned in public.
“The society is changing at a very fast speed, almost like a shedding of skin. Aside from the openings we see in social space, we have a fearless young generation that is breaking taboos,” Donya Amiri, a 33-year-old fashion critic and designer in Tehran, said in an interview. “The young generation wants its basic freedoms, and it’s getting them through sheer perseverance.”
Scores of videos shared on social media, and interviews conducted with more than two dozen Iranians — among them artists, designers, musicians, entrepreneurs, university students, as well as sociologists and political analysts — depict a country in the throes of grassroots change.
Political dissent is still not tolerated, executions and death sentences are frequent, and security agents in early November arrested at least four scholars, economists and writers who had been critical of the system. But the government of President Masoud Pezeshkian, a cardiac surgeon who campaigned on granting more social freedoms, seems unwilling or unable to confront the tide of change and is perhaps wary of crackdowns backfiring and inciting unrest.
The government is already dealing with crisis upon crisis, including a dire economy, recovery from war with Israel, and an acute shortage of water and energy resources. Dancing lifts the gloom.
The festivities are not limited just to Tehran. Concerts and festivals are being staged across the country, in cities big and small, attracting enormous crowds. In Yazd, a religious, conservative city, a singalong concert was held of pop songs from the pre-revolution era once banned. The city of Kerman hosted a desert marathon in October where men and women ran alongside one another; morning yoga, and group exercise has become a staple at many parks; street musicians, notably women singing solo, are common sights; hip-hop dancers have appeared in Shiraz and other places; and impromptu dance parties at cafes, like this one in Karaj, and malls with DJs are a growing trend.
“We need to feel happiness and joy,” said Parnia, a 26-year-old beauty specialist in an interview from Tehran, asking her last name not be published for fear of retribution. “I go to these concerts to listen to music — when I’m there, I don’t think of war or conflict, I am in the moment, enjoying the special night.”
In a desert near Isfahan, tour operators organize rave parties dancing around gigantic statutes and fire pits in the style of the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, known as a bastion of tradition, held a fashion show with women models sashaying down a red-carpet runway draped in fur coats and cashmere shawls. Some restaurants in Tehran quietly serve wine and mix a shot of vodka in cocktail orders.
Musical theater, a thing seldom seen in Iran because of restrictions on women singing and dancing, has also come to Tehran. Broadway-style renditions of the Oliver Twist and Robin Hood stories have played to sold-out audiences nightly, according to social media posts.
It is grassroots change from a new generation of Iranians who, connected to the outside world through social media and less fearful of arrest, are testing boundaries and reclaiming public spaces from the Islamic government, long known for its stifling restrictions on mixed gender gatherings, dancing, singing, alcohol and Western-style events.
Fatemeh Hassani, a sociologist who studies social developments, said in an interview from Tehran that the boundaries of public and private life are increasingly blurred as young people refuse to live a double life.
“Over the past four decades, much of Iranian culture existed in private spaces: in homes, parties and restricted settings. But today, those same values, emotions and lifestyles are being reproduced in the public sphere,” Ms. Hassani said.
The government itself has jumped on the bandwagon of the trend, if a little tentatively.
In September, it organized a series of free outdoor music events across the country called happiness concerts, inviting top singers and bands to perform for the public to cement the nationalism forged as the country responded to the 12-day war with Israel in June. The move was a first of its kind: Iran’s government typically holds its celebratory events at mosques with public prayer services, not pop concerts.
“Holding concerts with millions of people participating strengthens our unity,” said Fatemeh Mohajerani, the spokeswoman for the government, to local media in September. She added that events like street concerts would help “increase collective happiness.”
The move generated praise and criticism, with some saying the government was doing something enjoyable for a change and others calling it duplicitous and aimed at distracting people from the country’s many problems. Nonetheless, the concerts were a huge hit, with more than one million people attending, according to local news media, and inadvertently became a showcase of the widening gap between the Islamic rulers and a new generation.
Bahman Babazadeh, 42, a music journalist and a concert promoter, said in a telephone interview from Tehran that the war had changed how concerts could be conducted in Iran. The government was easing restrictions, such as overseeing the choice of lyrics and songs, banning dancing, and requiring women to wear the hijab. On average, Mr. Babazadeh said, at least four concerts are held each night in major cities like Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan, drawing thousands of attendees.
The departure from Islamic rules has irked conservatives who have called for the judiciary and security forces to act, with a warning that at this pace the Islamic revolution will soon disappear. In some instances, the authorities have moved to shut down an event, like at the shop that hosted the fashion show in the bazaar, cancel a concert or fine an organizer, but it largely amounts to a game of Whac-a-Mole.
Iranian news media reported last week that the Ministry of Intelligence had provided the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with a confidential report on the departure from Islamic social rules and the decline in women wearing the hijab, and that Mr. Khamenei had ordered the government to bring the youth and women back in line.
But Elias Hazrati, the head of communications for Mr. Pezeshkian, the president, told Iranian news media that while the government was “sensitive” about this issue it did not plan to “use the failed methods of the past,” and that its views on hijab were “based on logic.”
“Gen Z is indifferent to power, and it has reached a collective state of disrespect,” said Abdolreza Davari, who was a senior adviser to former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a thread on social media about the phenomena. He added that Gen Z Iranians “do not tolerate imposed interference in their daily life,” and “from here, Iran’s future will change.”
Analysts say that the joy and fun on display across Iran does not mean that the young generation is indifferent to the economic problems afflicting the country or the sporadic attempts by the Islamic regime to crack down. Some of them describe the celebrations as a form of resilience and defiance, similar to the movement led by women who collectively abandoned wearing the mandatory hijab following nationwide protests in 2022 after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of the morality police.
“Iranian society has been able to create some cracks in the power structure by these forms of resistance and force the regime to give in to some of the events,” said Mojtaba Najafi, a political analyst based in France, who wrote a doctoral thesis on political social movements in Iran.
Amir Sam, an Instagram content creator with about 120,000 followers in Iran, frequently shares videos of concerts and events, and he wrote that it gives him pleasure to see young people being happy, saying, “I hope this freedom and joy holds in every corner of Iran.”
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization. She also covers Iran and has written about conflict in the Middle East for 15 years.
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