Iran in World History

The White Balloon
by Jafar Panahi—a touching story told from the 
perspective of children—which won the Golden Camera award at the 
Cannes Film Festival in 1995. Two years later 
The White Balloon
’s 
scriptwriter, Abbas Kiarostami, won Cannes’s most prestigious prize, 
the Golden Palm, for his film 
A Taste of Cherry
. Kiarostami had been 
known for making films featuring children as a way of dealing with 
censorship, but this time his subject was suicide. In 2012, Asghar 

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Th e I s l a m ic R e p u b l ic o f I r a n
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Farhadi’s film 
A Separation
addressed another social taboo, showing 
the unbearable pressures brought by modern Iranian society on a 
young married couple. That year the film won Hollywood’s Oscar 
for Best Foreign Film, introducing Iranian cinema to a mainstream 
American audience.
The temporary loosening of censorship during the 1990s and after 
came largely from the efforts of moderate cleric Mohammad Khatami, 
who served as minister of culture from 1982 to 1992. His surprise elec-
tion as president in 1997, followed by that of a large number of reform-
ists to parliament in 2000, led to significant changes in Iran’s social 
and political climate, including a relaxation of social controls and a 
more open attitude toward the West. Khatami, well versed in Western 
philosophy, promoted the notion of Dialogue Among Civilizations—a 
clear rejoinder to Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s pes-
simistic “Clash of Civilizations” theory. He was equally direct in chal-
lenging intolerance within his own society. “If, God forbid,” he wrote 
in a typical essay, “some people want to impose their rigid thinking on 
Islam and call it God’s religion—since they lack the intellectual power 
to confront the opposite side’s thinking on its own terms—they resort 
to fanaticism. This merely harms Islam, without achieving the aims of 
the people.”
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Under Khatami’s presidency independent newspapers began to 
flourish, modern art galleries thrived, and trendy cafés proliferated, 
while novels and films explored controversial subjects such as prosti-
tution, government corruption, and drug abuse. Repressive measures 
against Baha’is were relaxed, allowing them to register their marriages 
and conduct funerals. Iran became second only to Sweden as a desti-
nation for sex-change operations, which Khomeini had authorized as 
preferable to homosexuality.
Enforcement of women’s dress codes was eased, though not elim-
inated: fashionable urban girls pushed the limits of 
hejab
by showing 
tufts of highlighted hair under flimsy headscarves and wearing 
tight-fitting 
manteaux
in place of the chador. Nose jobs became so 
popular that wearing a bandage across one’s septum became a fash-
ion statement. Khatami appointed Iran’s first female vice president, 
American-educated environmental activist Massumeh Ebtekar—a 
woman who, years earlier during the revolution, had acted as fiery 
spokesperson for the student hostage-takers at the US embassy.
The scope of Khatami’s reforms was limited by opposition from 
hardline conservatives, many of whom held unelected positions in 
Iran’s judiciary and security forces and were ultimately answerable to 

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Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i. US policy toward Iran in the wake 
of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was not 
helpful. Rather than embracing Khatami’s efforts at openness, in early 
2002 US President George W. Bush branded Iran a member of the “axis 
of evil,” even as Iran was quietly assisting the United States against 
al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bush’s untimely declara-
tion was taken in Iran as a deliberate slap in the face and undermined 
Khatami’s support within the country.
Khatami was ultimately unable to push through any lasting 
changes because of opposition from conservative forces, and large 
numbers of reformists became disillusioned with his attempts to make 
Iran more democratic. Many boycotted subsequent local and national 
elections, allowing Supreme Leader Khamene’i’s favored candidate, 
a working-class engineer named Mahmud Ahmadinejad, to win the 
presidency in 2005.
Nose-job,