Iran's Quiet Revolution

Deborah Campbell, a Canadian Journalist who has been in Iran several times during the last years, for a few months, has written an in-depth article in Walrus magazine. Walrus format is pretty similar to New Yorker weekly. She has traveled to one of the villages close to Bushehr in southern Iran where one of the nuclear facilities is located. (Full text in Payvand Website- PDF Foramt, Deborah's Website)Her colorful and multi-aspect story, deals with the cultural changes among the Iranian people and specially the transformations in the cultural atmosphere. She was among some of the few journalists who believed the chance of somebody like Ahmadinejad for the presidency is high. In her article Deborah present a fresh, interesting, updated and close picture of the Iranian society. She says how the Iranian society is turning to an open society.

Like for many journalists who travel to Tehran, reporting from Iran is difficult and the society seems very complex. Deborah has attempted extensively to go beyond the stereotypes and also biases which have bounded Iran for a long time. During the time she has been in Iran, she traveled to many cities and even villages to get a close, real and comprehensive portrait of the dynamic of political and social changes regarding to the rise of new wave of conservatism in a Shiite country.

She also has an intelligent and smart observation about the new president Ahmadinejad and his ideas. She has written a few pieces about Iran since 2005.
Debrah says in an interview that nobody wants to go to war in Iran. “Really what they want is to develop the economy situation”.

(Listen to Deborah’s interview here)

“Iran is a complex, even contradictory nation, and in the context of rising tensions and a growing threat of war, the lens through which the West and the Islamic republic view one another has become dangerously blurred. For the West, Iran is a nation of wild-eyed zealots shouting the familiar refrain of marg bar Amrika—death to America. It's an image Iranian authorities have not hesitated to promote in their efforts to quell internal dissent and present the outside world with the image of a fearsome, loyal populace. Yet Iran has changed remarkably in the quarter century since the Islamic revolution, and such reductionism images are deceiving.”