Iran election protester details encounter with riot police, militiamen

Jordan was a target of the Islamic revolutionaries who took control of Iran in the late 1970s, a symbol of all that was decadent about the toppled regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Authorities re-designated Jordan Boulevard, named after American educator Samuel Jordan, who established a high school here, Africa Boulevard in a showy sign of solidarity with the Third World, and a slap to the district's cosmopolitan pretensions.

Analysts sometimes describe a great rift in Iran between rich and poor, between the pious downtrodden masses and the wealthy Westernized elite. But many say Iran's divide is more about culture than class, more about cool than cash.

Plenty of the bazaar merchants who bankrolled the ayatollahs and became fundamentalist pillars of the Islamic Republic were rich, and many of the young working stiffs in menial jobs in wholesale districts listen to made-in-L.A. Persian pop music and sip homemade vodka with their friends on weekends.

And among the so-called north Tehran elite are many of modest means: government employees or teachers who treasure the arts, travel abroad and, above all, believe in a good education for their children.

The revolutionaries were resentful of the north Tehranis not so much for their money but for their schooling and worldliness, for what they viewed as a pretension that they could meld East and West instead of just being content with Iran's traditions.

The late intellectual Ali Shariati, who once inspired Iranian revolutionaries, came up with a term for it: gharb-zadeghi, meaning struck or poisoned by the West.

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Growing up, Anousheh encountered pro-government militiamen on motorcycle patrols of her neighborhood. They regularly made their way up to Jordan to set up checkpoints. They searched passing cars for alcohol and young unmarried couples to detain.

On occasion, the young people of the district would fight back, pummeling the militiamen with their fists and chasing them out. For the kids of Jordan, the clashes between the pro-government militiamen and the youths unfolding over the last few days are just the latest episode of a 30-year brawl.

Anousheh wound up studying art and graphics in college, and Babak, six years her senior, became an engineer, like their father.

Their mother, a homemaker turned community activist, became involved in Iran's budding civil society movement under the government of former President Mohammad Khatami, the reformist who tried but failed to open up Iran's religiously conservative political system. She was arrested in 2003 while supporting a student uprising.