Tehran a paradox of rich and poor

Center of revolution
The bulk of protests and street fighting surrounding the revolution occurred in the city's center, especially around Tehran University and the long boulevard now called Vali Asr, but supporters of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini recruited many of their "foot soldiers" from Tehran's southern neighborhoods. And Khomeini, on his return to the country from exile, based his headquarters there.

Over the years, and particularly after reformist President Mohammad Khatami came to power in the late 1990s, personal freedoms again exploded in the city's north as women began dressing more liberally and modern shops sprang up.

Even after the reform movement stalled and Ahmadinejad was elected in late 2005, the northern neighborhoods have remained something of a haven for the more liberal and well-off _ with modern freeways, new and often graceful high-rise apartment buildings and green parks.

Nevertheless, the Ahmadinejad era has brought changes: Officials have cracked down on private freedoms in recent months, including stopping women on the streets for not properly covering their heads.

Yet in northern neighborhoods, young men still throng to hip hair salons at indoor shopping centers, the stylists and their customers on full display to passing young women, through plate-glass windows. Underground rock bands draw fans, and pre-Revolutionary music plays from car stereos.

In Tehran's sprawling metropolitan area of 9 million, an estimated 60 percent of the population is younger than 25, and thus born sometime after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

At outdoor cafes in the northern foothills, families talk about the hassles of heavy traffic and gasoline rationing and their fears of being priced out of the city's inflationary housing market. They swap sarcastic quips about the president, apparently unconcerned if someone overhears.

Sharp contrast just miles away
They also express some gloom about the future: Tips for obtaining a bank account in nearby Dubai are traded intently, at a time when U.S. government pressure on European and Asian banks to stop transactions with Iran has dried up access to the outside world economy.

Only miles to the south, however, many women still wear the long, enveloping black chador as they go out to shop or take children to school. Pictures of Khomeini and the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, stare down from murals on many streets.

And hard-line figures like Hossein Shariatmadari, close to Khamenei, cast Iran's differences with the United States as an unending ideological struggle between their Islamic theocracy and a plundering, arrogant America.

Speaking in his office near the city's government center, the map of Syria and Israel on a wall nearby, Shariatmadari said Iran is strong enough to resist whatever the United States might throw its way.

Even if Iran curbed its nuclear program, the United States would merely come after Iran for something else, he said. The point is moot anyway, he said, because Iran will never give up the nuclear program.

"We simply want to control our own resources, run our own affairs," he said. "The mistake that the U.S. administration makes is to threaten Iran ... They don't understand the Iranian nation."

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