Inside Iran, a rebellion that is familiar and unpredictable

Writing From Tehran — Walking through central Tehran this week and taking in the shattered glass, burned garbage cans and damaged traffic signs, it was hard not to think of the 1979 revolution, when thousands of Iranians poured into the streets and called for the end of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's regime. Cries of "Allah akbarAllah akbar!" (God is great!) and "Death to dictator!" rang from the rooftops this week, echoes from my childhood days in the late '70s, when similar symbolic acts of defiance led to the fall of the shah's regime. Tehran, once again, has become a city of rebellion.

But this is a very different kind of rebellion. The goal of the 1979 revolution was to turn away from monarchy --and the corruption associated with the shah -- and establish an Islamic state governed by clerics. This time, the protesters seek a more democratic state, transparent in structure and accountable only to its citizens.

The hotly contested presidential race pitted hard-line incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against three other candidates, including reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In a country where two-thirds of the people are under the age of 30, the opposition candidates looked for new methods of reaching voters, employing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The technologies not only spoke to new voters, they had the added benefit of allowing candidates and their supporters to more easily avoid scrutiny and censorship.

It is perhaps no surprise that people who were able to express themselves more strongly during the campaign than in the past are not willing to sit back now and accept election results they believe were rigged. But it's hard to predict what will happen next. The new generation of protesters, most of them born after the 1979 revolution, believes at this point that it has the momentum, that its members are riding the crest of a powerful wave of history into a more democratic future. And though this view may seem naive to older, more cynical Iranians, no one can deny the energy of the moment.

As an academic who studies Iranian politics, the recent developments in Iran have taken me by surprise. I originally left Iran for the U.S. in the mid-1980s, when the political situation in the country was highly unstable. But since 1997, when Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president, was elected, I have been back frequently. This year, I traveled to Tehran in late March to study the presidential elections and how Iranians perceived the electoral politics. I have been in Iran since that time.