The first metal concert I ever went to was, oddly, in Iran. This was no secretive underground affair: it was staged in a modern venue with tickets booked online. The band played loud and heavy (that’s the actual show in the video above): covers of Metallica, Rammstein, and, rather incongruously, Bohemian Rhapsody. The rules stipulated that everyone had to remain seated in their soft, cinema-style seats, but they banged their heads like rutting antelope and people had a great time.

I had been invited by a friend who was a true metalhead. He was not sure why these bands had been given a relatively free rein of late (this was the late 2010s) — he assumed it was the system trying to balance out the repression in other areas. No one was under any illusions that this would last forever — it all felt like a crystal decanter on the lip of a table, every thump of the drum kit pushing it closer to the edge.

There had recently been a run of gigs at Azadi Stadium, until one band took a single step out of line, giving into demands from the crowd to play an extra song by French band Gajireh. There had been no gigs at the stadium since. Every single song had to be approved by a board of officials and clerics — they had to actually play the songs to them and explain the lyrics. I loved the image of some ageing clerics sitting in the front row and having Enter Sandman slammed into their faces.

I left the gig that night thinking that things were not so bad. The kids were alright. Sure, they couldn’t stand up and dance but there was a steady beat of progress.

Yet many of the artists I met saw this as a delusion.

Iran has, of course, been a place of exquisite art for centuries, but its bohemian sensibility has been brutalised and penned in by decades of regime repression. Protests repeatedly raised the hopes of the artist community only to be quickly crushed. Some preferred to embrace despair.

I was invited to an art show downtown in Tehran. It was full of young, well-dressed people smoking thin cigarettes and being languid. Someone was spouting fantastic gibberish about some collages on a wall. But I was not feeling cynical about any of it — these shows were a safe space in the true sense of the phrase, a place where soft-bellied geeks could be themselves without too much fear of the consequences.

Downstairs in the permanent collection were some excellent pieces. I recognised one by an artist I had met, Nima Zaare, who made obsessively detailed drawings, weird combinations of extraterrestrial objects and insect nests and body parts. Over coffee and cigarettes, he had politely mocked me as I tried, in typical journalistic fashion, to find some political theme in his work, as if everything in Iran had to be a response to the regime. “What exactly are you looking for, Eric? A picture of a closed door with someone banging on it? A photo of a man with his mouth stitched shut?” he chuckled.

“The West demands that art belong to some place, so that it can be exotic,” he continued. “Certainly, there are local factors that affect an Iranian artist, but we are exposed to world cultures. Am I supposed to be an Iranian artist, when the main influences in my mind are Japanese, Danish, French?”

Nima was right, of course, and not just because Iranians were as plugged into the wider world as everyone else. The Iranian art scene was like any contemporary art scene: too abstract, too dislocated, too self-conscious to really encapsulate a place. It was also young: it had not had time to coalesce around anything or anyone. Its artists were still sweeping up after decades of religious zealotry. The revolution had been actively hostile to anything beyond useful propaganda in its early years. The modern art movements of the 1960s and 1970s became instantly taboo, and the regime purged almost everyone with aesthetic taste from the universities. As with other world revolutions, the only acceptable art became pictures of ruddy-faced honest folk carrying out useful tasks with determination.

Gradually, the atmosphere eased a little, and by the time I arrived in the late 2010s, the art scene was blooming. Galleries were opening all over the country and there was unprecedented interest from European and Asian collectors. This was not always a good thing. “Collectors show up with a formula in mind,” said one curator as we strolled around a basement gallery. “They want one piece with calligraphy, one with some sort of carpet design. People have appeared out of nowhere to cater to them… it can be a lot of bullshit. In Europe they give away funds like crazy to Iranian artists, Afghan artists. I don’t know why — just because we’re exotic I suppose.”

Still, it was hard to predict what might upset the censors. They had been more proactive of late. State broadcaster IRIB was roundly ridiculed after blurring the logo of football club A.S. Roma because it shows the nipples of a she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. The curator told me one of their shows had been denied a permit because it contained “too much pink”.

One major concern was what was happening to the absurdly valuable collection of paintings in the basement of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

TMOCA opened just before the revolution. Its architectural debt to New York’s Guggenheim and the Pompidou in Paris, with a long circular staircase running up through its centre and industrial periscopes popping out of the lawn, perhaps seemed poignant to some as a reminder of a time when Iran was the sexy new debutante to global high society, but it struck me as an act of gross artificiality — a decadent transplant destined for violent rejection.

The Shah’s wife, Queen Farah, oversaw the creation of the museum and the purchases that became the most valuable collection of modern art outside the West — works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Magritte, Rothko, later valued at some $3 billion. Monarchy lick-spittles would talk about her involvement as if she had personally carried the artworks on her back over the Zagros mountains. “The empress was able to amass one of the world’s greatest collections of modern art for her country,” drooled the blurb to an absurdly expensive book about the collection. Her particular skill, of course, was to have an unlimited cheque book.

Most of the collection had barely been seen since 1979. Parts of it were wheeled out for brief displays, though in censored form. The middle panel of a Francis Bacon triptych was hastily removed shortly after one show opened in 2017 because someone had figured out that it depicted two men in bed together. There seemed little chance that Renoir’s Gabrielle with the Open Blouse would ever be seen again. At least one item had been rescued over the years: in 1990, a painting of a “contorted nude” by Willem de Kooning was exchanged for some sixteenth-century Persian miniatures owned by an American art collector in a carefully choreographed swap on the tarmac of a Vienna airport.

Most of the time, the collection waited in the basement. Or at least that was the hope. A friend who worked at the gallery when a cataloguing was being done in the early 2000s told me they were worried to discover an iron sculpture was missing — she was too embarrassed to say which — only to discover that a janitor had been using it to reach high places when cleaning.

“There isn’t even a public list of what’s in that collection,” said my curator friend. “Some say there are 3,000 pieces, others say 3,100 — that makes a lot of difference when you’re talking about Picassos and Jackson Pollacks.”

For all the challenges, Iranian bohemians had rebuilt pockets of their graceful aesthetic in an abundance of new cafes and craft stores. They were delicate places — net curtains and rickety furniture, soft violin and piano on the stereo, the fragile beauty of handicrafts in little cubby hole shops all over the city. It was the best country in the world for buying tat: the artisan stores shared an effortlessly cool sensibility.

The tragedy was, of course, that this fragile beauty should be trapped within such a ferocious political environment, like a butterfly trying to find somewhere to rest on a battlefield. It was fighting not just the authorities but the ugliness of the city around it — the corrosive horror of Tehran architecture.

“I just wish we could walk around my town without buildings looking like this,” a gallery owner told me over lunch one day, gesturing out of the window at a typical north Tehran building with huge columns dwarfing its entranceway. “Why do they look like a bad copy of ancient Rome? I feel ashamed. How can you create an artistic sensibility when people are surrounded by this shit?”

The rich Tehranis who had built this northern part of town had a lot to answer for, he said. They had picked certain bits of Western aesthetic, and picked badly. The architecture was mirrored on their own faces in all the nose jobs and hair dyes and collagen lips that had already become a tired cliché by the time I arrived. “Why the fuck is everyone’s hair blond? It looks like I’m in Stockholm,” said the gallery owner. “This is what happens when you suppress and suppress and people go crazy. You see Maseratis driving around – what kind of idiot would drive a Maserati around with all these potholes and crazy traffic?!”

Perhaps the wealthy neighbourhoods were so ugly because there was nothing Iranian in their planning. After the revolution and the war with Iraq in the 1980s, most of the artists and architects had been scared off, killed or cowed. There was a need to rebuild, and there was a lot of money to be made, but little thought was given to how anything might look.

It was a tragedy for a country that had built so much of its culture around the importance of beautiful spaces. Homes had once been treated as works of art. Courtyards in particular had a divine aspect; they were meant to represent oases in the desert. There were rules of symmetry that reflected Zoroastrian ideas of internal and external balance, and domes that acted as meditative centre-points, a line to the one true God. “Houses were very environmentally friendly in those times,” the gallery owner said. “Everything was supposed to trap heat in the winter, and let it escape in the summer. They took into account the winds, the rivers, the underground streams. Architects were curators not just of art but of personal well-being, of how homes and neighbourhoods and society were structured.”

The art scene wanted to recover some of that sensibility, but its main role was to give the young arty kids a semblance of middle-class normalcy. The curator worried that it was built on denial.

He introduced me to one of his older colleagues, who had been fighting these battles for decades. I said it must be exhausting. “I do this to survive,” she replied. “I focus on what I’m doing and try to bring a little bit of joy, to live as if they are not there.” It was as if they were exiles in their own land.

The curator was less sanguine. “Tehran’s art scene is like a party, but really you’re being sedated,” he said. “You think you’re in a party, when you’re really in a locked room. The art scene only influences itself. The people who go to shows at one gallery then put up their own show in another gallery. There are these 2,000 people who go from one gallery to another, from one pool party to another, living in LA while not really living in LA. It’s a psychosis — you’re disconnected from reality. It’s fun but it’s a coping mechanism.”

The threats, the latent intimidation, were always there. The bullies were in charge of the school. The geeks had no chance.

“There have been terrible repercussions for some of us. We just don’t talk about it. Not even to ourselves. Whatever happens, we just ignore it. There’s no other way to deal with it. You have to realise that the hardcore revolutionaries wake up in the morning thinking of ways to harm you. There’s nothing else they are doing."

“What keeps me going is hopelessness,” the curator continued. “I don’t see any hope for change, any hope for things to improve, so I’m able to focus on what I’m doing now. And actually that hopelessness is liberating. Where would I go if I was more hopeful or more ambitious? I’m not rich enough to get a visa for Europe or America. The West has made this country a prison for people like me.” He said it not with sadness but frank resignation.

I said people pay thousands of dollars to life coaches to learn this kind of acceptance, to rid themselves of the emotional baggage of aspiration and ambition.

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “I should be grateful maybe.”

If Kaveh Madani hadn’t missed his plane back to Tehran, he would probably still be in prison today. By a fluke, he was delayed on his work trip and a carefully laid plan by the Revolutionary Guards was foiled.

Kaveh was supposed to land back in Tehran just as hacked images spread across the internet, showing him doing such outrageous things as having fun at a party and being in the vicinity of a glass of wine. This would be enough to force him out of his job at the government’s environment department and into prison. The Guards had been arresting environmentalists of late — their latest paranoid, self-defeating crackdown on civil society. One of their targets had already, mysteriously, killed himself in his cell.

But because he took a later plane, Kaveh had a changeover in Istanbul, and while he waited, he saw the pictures of himself that had flooded Twitter and Instagram. The captions said he had been partying in Malaysia during a government-funded work trip. Kaveh knew the pictures were actually from an awards night in the United States years earlier. They were completely anodyne by Western standards: a man laughing and having fun with friends and colleagues. He wasn’t fondling anyone or even drinking booze. But by the standards of the Islamic Republic, they were enough to destroy him, and he knew instantly that he could never go back to Iran. So Kaveh cancelled his onward flight and disappeared.

Kaveh was one of the world’s leading experts on water conservation. He had returned to Iran less than six months earlier at the request of the government — then led by semi-reformists — to deal with the country’s catastrophic water shortages, a crisis so bad that its leaders have talked about evacuating the capital. But paranoia and repression won the day.

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Around the time that was happening in 2018, I flew down to Kerman province in southern Iran, a place of beige dirt and rock where I saw the true, momentous scale of Persia. I drove with my team to a deserted village consisting of three lines of mud-walled buildings whose bulbous, domed roofs gave it the air of an abandoned alien colony. I walked through the rubble into one of the homes to escape the heat. The walls and ceilings had collapsed, and there was no sign of past life.

“Yes, it’s cool in there,” my cameraman shouted. “But they also have the deadliest snakes in Iran around here, and they like the shade too.” I yelped and tried to levitate above the ground as I hurried back into the sun.

A couple of hundred people had once lived here, growing Iran’s famed pistachios, until the water entirely disappeared. They had watched their livelihood turn to dust before their eyes. It was impossible to imagine that these fields were once a bright green. All that existed now were the bleached-white carcasses of pistachio bushes, hundreds of them in twisted shapes, their desiccated branches crunching under foot. I realised how hard it would be to distinguish them from a snake and picked up my pace.

The only surviving structure was a brick storehouse, and we were surprised to find a beat-up old Peykan car parked behind it. Inside were two startled junkies, a man and woman. “We are right in the middle of the drug route from Afghanistan to Turkey here,” my cameraman said. We left them to it.

After the revolution, farmers had been given land here, our local guide explained. Unschooled in how to preserve the water stored underground, they had simply shoved taps into the earth and flooded the gardens whenever their pistachio bushes needed it. The underground reservoirs had lasted a couple of decades. Then came the drought in the 2000s – year after year of low rainfall that still shows no sign of abating. A survey in 2013 said Kerman province, the heart of the industry, was losing about 20,000 hectares of pistachio farms every year to desertification.

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Perhaps more than any other factor, water has defined the history of Iran — its politics, its social relations, its greatest endeavours and most terrible crimes. One of its leading historians, Homa Katouzian, argues it was the lack of water in the desert plains that prevented the creation of large settlements, of lords and their courts, that were necessary for European-style feudalism. Instead, there were just all-powerful kings, sitting atop a sparsely populated expanse, with no need to cater to their underlings. Katouzian argues this bred a tendency in Iranians to be outwardly deferential and inwardly resentful and rebellious — anyone who has spent time in Iran or with Iranians may know what he means.

This pattern persisted from the last of the great Achaemenid dynasty, Darius III in the fourth century BC, right through to the last Shah of all in 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Century after century produced kings whose power appeared absolute on the surface, but which was always brittle. They could rarely count on the support of society; few mourned their passing, at least until they got a good look at what replaced them. This made for a deep-seated sense of insecurity and uncertainty, compounded by the constant threat of foreign invasion, and it is from these roots that emerged the famous Iranian habit of tarof — the extreme shows of courtesy and politeness — and taqiyeh (‘dissimulation’), by which Shi’ites were allowed and even encouraged to hide their true feelings and beliefs in order to escape danger. It was easy to see how this culture also became infused with paranoia and conspiracy, in which everyone imagined everyone else to be engaged in plots and intrigues.

The shortage of water also produced some incredible feats of engineering: a web of underground canals known as “qanats” that carried water from under mountains to the arid plains were one of the world’s most sophisticated irrigation systems in their day. But then came the electric pumps and chaotic politics of the late twentieth century. The need to preserve water was little understood and secondary to survival at a time when Iran was isolated from the rest of the world.

A few farmers still clung on out here in the rocky desert. We met one with a pistachio tree that dated back, he said, to the Persian golden age of Shah Abbas in the seventeenth century. It was still alive but its leaves had turned yellow-green from the salty water now being dredged up from the soil.

“The well was about six metres deep when I was a child, but now it’s 150 metres,” he said. “This used to be a village full of people. Most have left to become labourers and drivers. Ten more years and there will be nothing left.”

Further down the road, we stopped suddenly at the sight of a string of enormous craters, each around 50 feet across and 20 feet deep. It looked as though a giant on a pogo-stick had bounced along the side of the highway. Farmers had sucked all the water out of the ground for the adjacent fields, and the subterranean reservoirs had finally emptied and collapsed, creating these huge sinkholes.

The regime’s reaction to all this was depressingly predictable.

“Foreign interference is suspected to have played a role in climate change,” the head of the Civil Defence Organisation, Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, told reporters in Tehran. “ Israel and another country in the region (Saudi Arabia) have joint teams which work to ensure clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release rain.” He said there was a scientific study to prove it, though he didn’t share the link.

When heavy flooding hit a number of provinces the following year, hardliners took the unorthodox approach of turning to the moronic 2017 movie GeoStorm, starring Gerard Butler, for answers. “The GeoStorm film gives us a special message,” wrote Tasnim, the in-house news agency of the Revolutionary Guards, in an in-depth report by its investigative unit. “The United States has a specific programme for manipulating the climate.”

Unhelpfully, the regime was also busy arresting anyone who claimed there was an environmental crisis. As with earlier intellectual and scientific trends — reformism, blogging, the tech industry — the authorities started from the assumption that environmentalism was a foreign conspiracy. And sure enough, once enough people had been arrested and the right combination of beatings and psychological pressure had been applied, a conspiracy had miraculously revealed itself from the recesses of Evin Prison.

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The semi-reformist government of the time had encouraged experts in the diaspora to return to Iran, and Kaveh was exactly the sort of person they needed. He gave up a tenured position as an expert in water science and policy at London’s Imperial College to come help with the water crisis, joining the goverment’s environment department as a deputy vice-president.

But to hardliners in the regime, Kaveh’s expertise made him a threat, precisely because he was an expert who cared about improving things, and was good at his job. They suffered by comparison.

The Revolutionary Guards had been suspicious from the start. His foreign education and Western ideas about policy planning and social media campaigns and transparency — these must surely be the signs of a foreign infiltrator that the supreme leader had warned them to look out for. They were on him from the moment he arrived to take up the job in 2017. He was taken straight from passport control to a special room they had prepared in Imam Khomeini Airport, with interrogators and cyber-security operatives. It was the first of many grillings: Why are you so close to people in the government? Why is this minister phoning you? Why are you all over the media?

“For them, it was obvious I was being promoted by the Americans and the Brits to make a star out of me, put me on the radar of Iranians so that I would become a big figure who can shape narratives, misadvise them, affect the development plan, stop them building dams, and so on and so on,” Kaveh told me, months after his escape.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Your scientific papers are available for anyone to see. Your work is not political, and so obviously useful to the country.”

Kaveh sighed: “This is why people end up in jail — because they think like you. You are thinking according to the rules of logic.

“The first day they stopped me at the airport, they took everything… They hacked into everything straight away. They broke into my Android phone in a snap. They immediately had access to 14 years of my emails. They could see everywhere I had been, every ticket I had bought, every invitation to a conference. They kept insisting that I was a dual national and a spy and that I had ten other passports somewhere.

“They asked the same questions over and over in slightly different ways. Interrogations in Iran are a game of consistency. They are looking for little flaws in your statements, picking out small parts of your story and putting these pieces together to make their own story.”

Over the following months, a battle played out behind the scenes between the government — which wanted to encourage skilled Iranians to return to the country — and the paranoid apparatchiks of the intelligence services.

Unfortunately, Kaveh’s return to Iran was very badly timed. Just one day after he was formally appointed to Iran’s environment department, a billionaire named Thomas Kaplan gave a speech in New York. Kaplan hated the Islamic Republic and wanted even tighter sanctions than already existed. Awkwardly, however, he was also passionate about wildlife conservation, and founded Panthera, an NGO aimed at protecting the world’s wild cats, including the last remaining Asian cheetahs in Iran. Its website proudly stated it was one of only two Western NGOs able to operate in the country — and they did so through the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation that would soon bear the brunt of the Revolutionary Guards crackdown on environmentalists.

Kaveh was more interested in water than cheetahs, but he had spoken at a conference organised by the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation in London a few years earlier — a point that was raised again and again by his interrogators. Such things were never coincidences to them.

“For them, everything is about guilt by association — networks,” Kaveh said. “Of course, given that we’re all only seven degrees of separation from everyone else on Earth, it’s not too difficult for them to find connections.

The interrogators were “very emotional, young people from the suburbs, who did not have wealthy backgrounds, had not seen the outside world apart from maybe Karbala, and didn’t know how the world works,” he said. “They had been told there were cases of infiltration and they were determined to find them. I compare it to a newly graduated medical doctor, who sees a symptom he remembers from his textbooks and immediately diagnoses some fatal illness… They don’t manage risk — they remove risk. That’s the policy in Iran.”

The interrogations often veered into farce, a mix of half-understood theories sellotaped together from things the interrogators had read on the internet: the West was looking to engineer a water war; genetically-modified crops would kill Iranian agriculture; the United Nations was trying to lower the birth rate to eradicate the Iranian race. The story for Kaveh eventually coalesced into the idea that he was trying to limit Iran’s use of water so as to prevent the country becoming self-sufficient in food. That was more rational than some of the other attacks: one parliament member argued that Kaveh was a spy because he had done his PhD in Britain, where, as everyone knows, graduating students must pledge allegiance to the Queen. (The fact that Kaveh had actually graduated from Berkeley in the United States was not considered pertinent).

He said jealousy was another factor, not least the sexual obsessions of his repressed interlocutors, who looked through his emails and saw the usual pictures of a young student having fun, and conjured bacchanalian images of all-night orgies awash with alcohol. They found it hideously unfair that such a person, who had indulged in all their most debauched fantasies, should also get to parachute into a position of authority in the Islamic Republic, with the ear of the president no less; while they had sacrificed so much for the revolution, endlessly chanting ‘Death to America’, binding themselves in moral strait-jackets, and giving their souls to the supreme leader, only to remain lowly peons.

The smear campaign against Kaveh was smartly planned. They would show him taking advantage of his government post by claiming that the hacked photos were from a party he had thrown at the Iranian embassy in Malaysia. It would annoy not just the revolutionaries, but also the anti-regime Iranians who already hated Kaveh for choosing to work with the government.

Missing his flight back to Tehran — he had actually been delayed to go over some scientific studies with his hosts in Bangkok — became a stroke of immense fortune. The other environmentalists were not so lucky. There was a wave of arrests targeted people from the sector. Among them was the head of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Fund, a much-loved man named Kavous Emami, who was later found dead in his cell. The authorities said he had committed suicide, which his family disputed. For more than a year, Emami’s wife was barred from leaving Iran to be with her sons in exile. Other environmentalists remained behind bars. Amnesty International said there was evidence of torture — a family member who visited one of the inmates said they had broken teeth and bruising on their bodies — and prolonged isolation to extract confessions. When one of them, Niloufar Bayani, finally appeared in court, she stated that her interrogators had threatened to beat her, inject her with hallucinogenic drugs, pull out her fingernails and arrest her parents; that they showed her a piece of paper claiming it was her death sentence as well as pictures of Emami’s dead body, implying she would meet a similar fate. She was ejected from the court and banned from further appearances. Eventually, she and the others were sentenced to between six and 10 years for espionage.

Kaveh resurfaced at Yale University, where I met him a year after his ordeal. I see he has since become head of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. He had tried to offer his expertise to the Islamic Republic in a time of desperate need. It was rejected.

One autumn evening, I went with my family to Mellat Park in north Tehran where celebrations of the 1980s war with Iraq were in full swing. They were indeed celebrations, for the Islamic Republic likes nothing better than its own wounds. A screeching tannoy reeled off names of the long-dead, and cardboard cut-outs of men praying in the dirt of the front line were dotted around, while ladies enveloped tightly in black robes sat at tables covered with photos of martyrs, souvenirs from the front, and miniature anti-aircraft guns.

My four-year-old daughter Margot was well-catered to. She rushed over and began digging around in a sandpit until we realised that it was dressed up as a minefield, with little pink explosive devices strung together with trip wires. There was also an octopus-shaped colouring table, though this seemed unrelated to the war.

Above a stall selling toy helicopters were yellowing photographs that showed what the war had meant for the youth of a previous generation. I looked at the images of teenagers, barely able to push a little fluff out of their chins, drilling with fake rifles, lining up to board buses to the front, and lying dead in trenches, one with a tattered photo of Ayatollah Khomeini pinned to his chest.

Here in north Tehran, an area known for high-end restaurants, fast food joints and Iran’s clutch of tech firms, the event felt like a mini-invasion by the devout south of the city. The fashionable denizens of the area walked with studied blindness past the military fetishisation. Not that they were unaffected by the eight-year war with Iraq of the 1980s: for many, it was still a first-hand trauma, at the very least in the form of childhood memories of air-raid sirens and household deprivations. Despite being the longest conflict of the twentieth century, it was often overlooked in the West, yet it loomed over modern Iran’s consciousness as powerfully as the revolution, perhaps even more so. When the judiciary wanted to chastise people for their latest moral shortcoming, it was not in the name of God or the revolution, but the fallen soldiers of the war. “Did the families of the martyrs give up the lives of their children for this?” moaned Mohammad Jafer Montazeri, Tehran’s prosecutor-general, after some women were allowed to watch a World Cup match on a public screen.

Many resented the way the war was appropriated by the system, the way it was suffused with religious imagery for political ends. In different circumstances, perhaps it might have served as a lesson in the horrors of conflict, just as the 1914-18 war, to which it was so often compared, did for Europe. But since Saddam Hussein thrust the conflict upon Iran without warning or provocation — Iranians called it “the imposed war” — they had the freedom and right to indulge their taste for victimhood without indignity or dissembling. They have used that name again for the US-Israeli campaign.

It was tempting to see in all this a nostalgia not just for war — so familiar from the Western infatuation with its own conflicts of the twentieth century — but also a nostalgia for the Islamic Republic’s youth, when the revolution still made sense as a collective endeavour and a fight against real oppression. It was also a warning to the decadent wastrels of today’s north Tehran of the horrific price paid by that first generation. To an outsider like me, it was a reminder that the revolution could not be separated from the war; how the conflict had hardened and legitimised the clerical strong-arm, and precluded any hope of a more liberal path.

I had a meeting on the western outskirts of the city. It took about an hour to break through the worst of central Tehran traffic and out to the highway. The landscape of desert and mountains was broken up here and there by clusters of new apartment blocks, many of them half-finished from ill-advised housing projects. But as always in Iran, there was an oasis of calm and beauty nearby.

The Botanical Gardens were practically empty that day; the fauna was still shaking off the dried-up leaves and dust of the hot months. Omid met me in the car park, a compact, sturdy man with eyes that shone with kindness under his baseball cap. He worked here, tending to the plants and wildlife, showing around visitors. We had met by chance during a previous visit and I liked talking to him. He was an avid storyteller who had studied film as a young man and spoke in images, with an eye for little, cinematic details.

I had met other veterans and heard plenty of horror stories. One who had witnessed the mass electrocutions in the marshlands of Majnoon in 1984 — how the Iraqis built pathways from the littered corpses. He still had friends with rasping shortness of breath from the gas attacks of that terrible battle. But such savagery was too awful for my cosseted mind to comprehend.

Omid had not seen the worst of the brutality during his 13 months on the front line in Kurdistan, yet I found his recollections all the more affecting for their strange, surreal bent. What haunted him most, he told me as we found a clearing in one of the wooded areas and took a seat on a couple of stumps, were the frogs.

“I would be doing my ablutions before prayer in the evening, and I would put my foot down on a meaty, warm thing,” he said, screwing up his face and shivering. “I would look down and it was a big frog. I couldn’t stand it! Another time, I was praying and a frog jumped right into my hand! People always talk about the guns and missiles and tanks, but this was the shocking thing for me, this is what I remember. It was so dark and I just wanted to be back home in my bed and not having a frog jump into my hand.”

I pointed out that now he worked with nature every day, and it was surprising that he would be so upset by a frog. He considered this for a moment, and agreed that it was strange. “I have never thought about this but it’s true. Now I love nature, all forms of nature. If I see a frog it doesn’t bother me. In fact, I like them very much. But back then… I don’t know… I just couldn’t stand it.”

Omid had been studying in the Philippines when the revolution happened, and felt guilty not being part of the action, particularly when the war broke out. He returned to Iran in 1983 and signed up as a volunteer for the infantry, but his education meant he was immediately given the rank of second lieutenant and housed with the officers who had all been part of the army before the revolution. “They were trying to get rid of them by sending them to the front. They couldn’t execute them all,” Omid said.

Most of the volunteers were like him, drunk on the excitement of the revolution, of their divinely-ordained destiny and the chance to save their ancient motherland from disintegration. Every single night of his deployment on the front line, Omid would put on his dress uniform and volunteer for guard duty, stalking up and down along the perimeter. “I didn’t sleep for 13 months. I would stand there with my arms wide, saying ‘You will not take this land!’ I pictured myself defending the country in the way that our ancestors had done for thousands of years.” He chuckled at his youthful self.

The career officers in his unit had joined up for the paycheck long before the revolution or any of this horror was on the cards, and they were much less excited about sacrificing themselves for the glory of the motherland. They hated Omid’s enthusiasm and made his life difficult; hiding his gun, his mosquito net, his rations. To them, Omid was precisely the sort of religious nutcase that was going to get them all killed. “I was fighting on three fronts. We had the Iraqis of course, and then also the Kurdish insurgents in the area where we were posted. And then my own men. They didn’t like me because I was a true believer and devout.”

The great irony was that Omid was not so devout. He had grown up in a family that had strongly supported Mohammad Mosaddegh’s secular National Front in the 1940s and 1950s, fighting to take control of Iran’s oil from the British. Omid’s uncle had been shot and wounded trying to defend Mosaddegh during the CIA-backed coup in 1953. This had badly shaken Omid’s father, especially as rumours started to spread of the Shah’s terrifying secret police, the SAVAK. “My father hated talking about politics. He tried to ban it, but my brothers and I did it anyway. He was so scared of the SAVAK that if my mother complained about how small our house was, my father would tell her to shush – he really believed the walls had ears and he didn’t want them to think we were complaining about our situation or the state of the country. Of course, it turned out the SAVAK was not so strong, but they had good — what do you call it? Ah, yes — good PR.”

Their lack of religion did not stop the family supporting the revolution as a way to get rid of the Shah and his secret police. Omid even took on the trappings of Islam when he returned for the war. He prayed five times a day, never touched alcohol, refused to listen to music. This was a considerable change for someone who had become a disco maniac during his time as a student in the Philippines. He had particularly loved Ottawan, the feather-boa-sporting French-Caribbean duo who had hits with “Hands Up” and “Crazy Music”.

But his religion was always a bit superficial. “I never accepted all the rules of Islam into my heart. I didn’t really agree that you couldn’t like music. Back in the Philippines, I remember asking the DJ in one club if I could use his dressing room to pray. I used some newspaper to kneel on.” At the front, though, he felt the need to play by the rules and kept his disco tastes to himself.

These days, he recognised how much his whole Islamic identity had been about maintaining a sense of unity with his comrades, tentatively at first while he was away from home, and later with full fervour when faced with life in the trenches. “I never had a strong connection to God. It was a tool we used for solidarity. I saw other people were dying for their religion and I thought I owed it to them to pray. It was also how I kept my authority with the men. I didn’t believe in it much but I thought it would help keep the country together and was necessary for the revolution. I was happy to pretend. But it only works if everyone keeps pretending.” That last sentence was thrown away, but it struck me as profound.

The disco played with his mind, however. “I would be lying in the trench at night, listening to the rockets and I would lose the ability to tell where I am — am I in the trench or the disco? Even before I was asleep. I had to reach out and touch the cold metal wall to know what was true. There was always this battle between reality and the dream when I was there.”

There was horror, too, of course. For Omid, it was the beautiful boy whose face was slashed open with shrapnel, unable to breathe for all the blood in his black and swollen nose and mouth, full of broken teeth, left to suck in air through the gash in his cheek, making a terrible rasping, sputtering sound. Omid begged the doctor not to make him ugly. The doctor didn’t know that Omid was a lieutenant since no one wore identifiers — partly in case they were caught by the Iraqis and partly to encourage a sense of equality in God’s army. So the doctor responded angrily to Omid: “Who the hell are you to tell me how to do my job?”. Taken aback by the anger, the desperation and the gore, that was the moment when Omid thought, fully for the first time, that nothing — no land, or border, or God — was worth this scene.

He served out his three years and went travelling, trying to find something pleasant again. Eventually he returned to Iran and looked for work. Ever the moralist, he refused to cash in on his status as a veteran, but finding himself blocked at endless recruitment offices, he grudgingly accepted help from some old army friends, which quickly landed him a nice job in the parks service. He had lived a happy, peaceful life since.

He found the severe attitude of the authorities bemusing, but he had too ironic a mindset to worry much about politics. “Our country has existed for thousands of years, it’s in our inheritance to survive,” he told me. “People don’t want another revolution. You know, the Shiite people are never dissatisfied with their governments in the way that European people are dissatisfied. Shiites think the only right ruler is the Mahdi and whoever is in power right now has just stolen power temporarily. If a British person is unhappy with his government, there are many things he can do. But if an Iranian taxi driver or shopkeeper or bazaari is unhappy with his government, he doesn’t care too much because he knows whoever might replace them will be just as bad.” This was a sentiment I found often in those of his generation — a resigned shrug. Many younger Iranians were less acquiescent.

We walked through the park and came to a crossroads where signs pointed to gardens inspired by different parts of the world: Himalayan, Japanese, African, and American. Omid followed my gaze and guessed what I was thinking. “It is very sad. When children come to the American garden, they straight away start chanting ‘Death to America’. This is really bad, you know, that they have this automatic reaction like this. I tell them no, we don’t talk about death here. It’s a negative energy.”

The children were only chanting a refrain, of course — a ditty. They had little idea what it meant, and many would be embarrassed by it in later life. But for others, it would become a filter through which they would see the world, another generation being primed for war, and it was, in the end, the same war: Iran alone — gloriously alone — against the world; the plucky Shiite underdog taking on great and powerful evil.

Initially, Iran had the moral high ground in the war against Iraq, having been the victim of an unprovoked assault. But that quickly dissipated. Having heroically defended itself against the initial Iraqi onslaught (much to everyone’s surprise, not least Saddam, given that Iran’s armed forces were in chaos after the revolution), Khomeini’s Iran decided to harness the momentum and push towards Baghdad, rejecting Saddam’s almost total capitulation in 1983 and bogging the two sides down in five more years of grinding, fruitless barbarity.

Not that Khomeini eschewed pragmatism: ideals were easily cast aside for the greater good of the revolution. He was happy to accept Israeli military supplies in the early phases of the war, when Israel saw Saddam as the more dangerous threat, and greatly benefited when Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981. Israel also helped facilitate the Iran-Contra deal in which Washington sold weapons to Tehran in exchange for secret cash that could be funneled to CIA-backed death squads killing commies in Nicaragua. Details to be quickly forgotten when it was all over.

War also had its advantages: like all conflicts, it demanded a terrible loyalty to those in power. Even the restive minorities paid allegiance: Saddam’s expectation that the Iranian Arabs would rise up against Khomeini was badly misplaced. It would be another 20 years before the war started to lessen its grip on the conscience of Iranians, and a generation came of age with no personal memories of the terror and unity it inspired. When Khomeini accepted the ceasefire in July 1988, he described the decision as “more deadly than poison”. He never really recovered – never spoke again in public – and neither did his vision of the Islamic Republic.

Most Iranians, when asked, would get rid of their Islamic Republic rulers if they could. Many utterly despise the murderous regime that has turned a country known for its delicate, sophisticated culture into a by-word for religious thuggery. Yet, as I write this in the early days of the US-Israeli war, enormous crowds have packed streets and squares of cities across Iran to mourn the ever-lengthening list of dead regime hardliners. The wartime rally-around-the-flag effect is part of it. But as I saw when I lived in Iran, a very large number of Iranians still just love the regime.

One spring day, I walked into a rally at a prayer hall for Ebrahim Raisi, then a budding presidential candidate billed as a possible future supreme leader (an ambition cut short by his death in a helicopter crash in 2024). I got an immediate sense of the vibe from the video screen above the entrance. A looped film showed a line of women in black chadors in a rocky desert location, blasting away with machine guns on a target range. The film cut to a close-up of a woman shooting off a rocket-propelled grenade. Then a missile taking off, followed by lots more missiles and big explosions, and the Iranian flag, and amphibious vehicles, and stern-looking troops in formation, and then back to the ladies unloading their AK47s. If some right-wing Washington think tank had made this video about Iran, it would have been declared alarmist, silly and possibly racist, but here it was the perfect mood-board for a Raisi rally.

The supporters streaming into the prayer hall all wore the regulation greys and browns of the faithful; the clumpy shoes and black chadors. I mingled with the crowd. They all hated the president of the time, Hassan Rouhani, who was slightly less hardline than their man Raisi. The last four years, they said, had been nothing but an orgy of corruption and moral degeneracy, in which officials had ransacked the treasury, thrown the revolution under the bus and directed a sewage pipe of Western decadence at the country’s youth. Outsiders believed all Iran’s presidents were essentially the same, but Iranians saw wide chasms of difference, even if they also had a phrase — ‘khar too khar’ (donkey to donkey) — to express their ultimate disappointment with all of them.

Even at a rally full of war-lovers and West-haters, most people were ebulliently hospitable, as was typical of Iran. I got talking to a man named Ahmad Shahidi, a 48-year-old veteran of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. “You are from France? I love the French! Bonjour, bonjour,” he beamed. “I met a group of French people recently who were on a tour and I invited them all to my home for food. They were very nice people.”

“Why do you like Raisi?” I asked.

“Raisi is close to our goals and values and he obeys the supreme leader,” he said.

“What are your goals and values?”

“My biggest hope and wish is to kill 40 Zionists or kill Salman Rushdie,” he said, happily.

“Hmm,” I said, wondering if those counted as values.

“That’s a bit scary,” I said eventually.

He didn’t seem to understand my concern, and I got the feeling he was just show-boating for his friends and parroting lines he had been ordered to believe for decades. He was the type that enjoyed the aesthetic of the revolution, all the defiant lack of shaving and so on. Before I could ask him more he was ushered into the main hall by his buddies.

Some were less friendly. I tried to stop a young cleric, who was sweeping up the stairs with a small entourage. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand and without slowing down: “We are not friends with the French.”

Others sounded unhinged. One guy had an advertising billboard covered in pictures of Jerusalem, various ancient verses and military paraphernalia, and images of some sort of cosmic battle happening in the clouds, which he said was a battle between Jews and Muslims that had already taken place hundreds of years ago and would soon be recreated on Earth, culminating in the eradication of all Jews.

“Do you think it can attract a lot of voters?” I asked.

He was not bothered: “Don’t ask me – talk to God,” he said, so I walked away.

But many of the attendees were neither bloodthirsty warriors nor religious maniacs. Many were simply fed up with the state of the economy and unconvinced that the government’s neoliberal austerity policies would do much to help them, on which point they sounded similar to populist movements everywhere at that time. The issues that obsessed Western journalists — all the hand-wringing about headscarves and burning American flags — were a distraction from more tangible issues.

“Raisi is honest, he cares about the poor,” said Bahman Azami, a goldsmith in his thirties. Everyone he knew was struggling and the endless drip-feed of stories about elite corruption were more than they could tolerate.

What about civil liberties, I asked.

At this, Bahman’s wife jumped in. She was smartly though conservatively dressed, and had been watching impassively as we talked, but the last question was too much.

“If my headscarf can go a little further back on my head but my husband is unemployed, what’s the point?” she snapped.

These people had not given up on the hope that a truly Islamic leader would do what truly Islamic leaders were supposed to do, such as not steal, and care for the poor. Even for those who rejected the constant ranting against the West, the moves to Westernise Iranian society only took them further away from the just government that would take care of its oppressed people. Raisi was a seyed – a descendant of the prophet – and he ran a huge charitable organisation which looked after the most popular pilgrimage site in Iran, the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, which many of these people had no doubt visited and which was probably among the most spiritually rewarding experiences of their lives. Surely, if anyone could help them, it would be this guy, whose eyes were too busy looking up to heaven to be grubbing around in the cash register.

When Raisi took the stage, he was met with the sort of whooping and hollering that seemed rather out of character for these conservative types. He hit the right notes. “One million jobs need to be created each year,” he thundered, and the crowd roared.

He played up nationalistic themes but denied he would drag the country back to the isolation of its darkest diplomatic days. “They say we won’t interact with the world. That’s a big lie. We believe in interaction with all countries, but an interaction with dignity.”

I thought of the interaction one might have with the rocket-propelled-grenade-launching women on the screen outside.

Around that time, I also attended a Quds Day parade in Tehran, in which thousands take to the streets for the annual celebration of how much they hated Israel.

It was common among Iranian liberals to say that people at these rallies were forced to come, that government workers had their attendance checked by their bosses and so on, but again, people seemed quite enthusiastic.

Not everyone was a regime supporter, of course. One woman looked distinctly out of place, with her black chador wrapped tightly around her waist, bright red lipstick, dramatic eyebrows and a sashaying of the hips that seemed like an invitation to be lashed. I stopped her to ask why she had come and she was wonderfully blunt: “The police picked me up when I was working the street a few nights ago, but they said they would release me if I came to this rally today.” She swaggered off, fearlessly.

Others came because it was packaged as a fun family day out in a city that didn’t have many great options in that department. There were stalls where you could line up to throw darts at pictures of Binyamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman, and there were children singing anti-American songs on a stage alongside a truly terrible Donald Trump lookalike. People seemed to be having a reasonable amount of fun.

Naturally, there was lots of “Marg bar Âmrikâ” - Death to America. Ah, that phrase, over and over for nearly half a century now. It often feels like America’s murderous obsession with Iran is built on little more than the memory of the embassy siege and those three little words. The American ego simply cannot bear them, and like any good troll, the Islamic Republic cannot stop repeating them. What does it really mean? I certainly never encountered anyone who dreamed it might involve destroying the United States, even though some people in Washington seem truly to believe that. The idea was always more about kicking American influence out of Iran and the Middle East. The author Hooman Majd was right to equate it with the usual hyperbole of Iranian speech — they do, after all, wish death on themselves daily with the phrase ‘khak bar saram’ (dust upon my head), used to express the slightest regret or embarrassment.

There was also plenty of “Death to Israel” too, of course. On the eastern side of Qods Square a big neon sign read 8,240 days. That was how long the state of Israel had left to exist, based on a speech the supreme leader had given a while back, saying that Israel would be gone within 25 years. If it is still intact, the number must be much lower now.

There was a sudden commotion: one of the local TV station journalists had spotted some people with a lighter and an American flag. The cameramen all sprinted over to catch their favourite shot.

I was more struck by the pounding bassline that had started from some speakers on the nearby stage. It didn’t sound very Islamic, though the chorus was fairly on-point: “USA are the murderers, mothers losing children, we stand up to you.”

“Is this music allowed?” I asked a young woman in military fatigues, who was sporting a “Defenders of the Shrine” badge on her chest.

“The words are political,” she replied. “There is nothing un-Islamic about it because it doesn’t make people dance. It is more like chanting music.”

Her point was undermined by the fact that she had to shout to make herself heard over the pounding beat, and that many of her peers were subtley swaying in time to the tune. Many were also wearing make-up and taking selfies, which they did, per the regulations for young women worldwide of the time, by pouting at the camera held high above their heads.

There was another strand of regime supporters whose figurehead I glimpsed at the parade. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president from 2005 to 2013, was so mobbed by fans that I could not get anywhere near him. People lined an expressway to shout their support as he passed below.

Many working class Iranians still nostalgically referenced Ahmadinejad’s socialist policies, that included monthly cash handouts and “justice shares”, which reserved a portion of the proceeds from privatisation for the poor. Raisi and other hardliners had tried to copy his populist schtick, but with his shabby suit and rough diction, Ahmadinejad was much more convincingly a man of the people than any of them.

Whether he was sincere was hard to know. He often appeared to be doing a pastiche of the revolutionary aesthetic, gaming the system with self-promoting stunts like a Holocaust-denial conference attended by the head of the Ku Klux Klan, or claiming that a halo of light had surrounded him as he spoke at the UN General Assembly, which he insisted had caused the audience to stare at him without blinking for almost half an hour. Serious clerics hated the way he banged on about the imminent return of the Mahdi for political gain, but it was the sort of folksy religion that played well in the sticks. The poor loved the nose he thumbed at intellectuals and his thrillingly deranged approach to international relations. When Donald Trump was elected a few years later, Iranians recognised the type immediately, but Ahmadinejad, the son a village barber, was the realer deal.

Of course, his economic policies drove Iran’s economy off a cliff and his behaviour abroad was embarrassing even for a country in deep pariah status. The liberal elite was horrified and rose up in protest in what became known as the Green Movement of 2009, ostensibly over claims that his re-election was rigged, but really because he was seen as an uncouth moron. The violent crackdown that followed reflected the same class divide, with working class security forces unleashed on protesters depicted as corrupt, Westernised brats seeking to destroy the country’s religious culture. The crushing of those protests sent a permanent chill over any hopes of significant reform from the top, while the regime’s hardliners became evermore paranoid.

Ahmadinejad turned out to be just as much of a thorn in the side of the establishment as the reformists. Inflated by his personal popularity, he increasingly refused to play by the rules. In one famous episode, the supreme leader refused to let Ahmadinejad sack his intelligence minister, so he went into a sulk and refused to come to work at the president’s office for several days. He was allowed to ride out his second term, but when he made a bid for a comeback in 2017, he started to look like a serious problem. He ignored the leader’s order not to run, ostentatiously showing up to register for the election and forcing the scowling clerics of the Guardian Council to ban him. He started making outrageous suggestions — that the judiciary should be reformed; that there should be actually free elections where anyone could stand. Within a few months, his deputy had been given a 15-year prison sentence on corruption charges, and another deputy locked up for burning a copy of the verdict in front of the British embassy, reflecting his belief that the campaign against Ahmadinejad was a British plot ordered by the Queen of England. If that sounds insane it’s worth remembering that many in Iran still saw the British — and not the Americans — as the real string-pullers in the endless conspiracies against the country, a worldview lampooned in the much-loved book My Uncle Napoleon.

When all that failed, Ahmadinejad tried social media. This proved weird. He surprised the world with a hitherto undisclosed penchant for US sports (“Congratulations to the young men of the @Patriots on winning the #SuperBowl”) and 2Pac lyrics (“They got money for wars, But can’t feed the poor”). Better-calculated appeals to Persian history, such as a picture of him visiting Cyrus’s tomb, were balanced against birthday messages for the late Michael Jackson (“I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways”).

So there was plenty of lunacy and division among the Islamic Republic’s loyalists. But that is true of political families all over the world. Like all families, the regime supporters fiercely disagreed with each other but shared certain core beliefs. Their’s were built around redemptive suffering, Palestine, American predation, the corrupting influence of liberal modernity, and the need for tough but selfless rulers who would care for the downtrodden. In a culture obsessed with martydom, the decades of misery and failure that these policies had occasioned only reinforced their conviction.

However aggressive it seemed from the outside, the atmosphere amongst them was always disconcertingly friendly and soft-mannered. A man came up to me in the middle of Quds Day parade and offered one of the toffees he was handing out. He gave me a big smile, and gently whispered a sweet, little “Death to America” as he moved on.

Members of the regime were rarely keen to meet foreign journalists. I tried for a long time before I finally got a bite. Massoumeh Ebtekar was one of the vice-presidents and head of the environment agency, but more important to me was her role decades earlier, when she was still a teenager, as the spokesperson for the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line. This was the group that stormed the US embassy in November 1979, taking 66 Americans hostage and triggering an international crisis that lasted 444 days and poisoned relations with the West for decades. For a certain generation of Americans (some of whom now control the US military), the hostage crisis was an affront that has never been forgiven.

Ebtekar’s office at the environment agency in Tehran conformed to the requisite dour functionality of the Islamic Republic: brown couch, brown table with a little Iranian flag on it, bowl of pistachios. Ebtekar herself was full of warmth as she bustled in: a short, smiling ball of a woman in a severe version of the government-issue uniform that covered all but the narrowly-framed features of her face. She spoke near-perfect English with an American accent. This is what had landed her the spokesperson gig back in 1979, justifying the actions of that earnest brigade of students as they established the blueprint for years of hostage-taking foreign policy to come.

We only had a short slot, so I got straight to the point: “Did she think the hostage-taking had been worthwhile, given that it destroyed Iran’s global reputation?” Her answer was impressive, if only for her politician’s ability to hear a completely different question from the one posed. She was not, it was immediately clear, overly saddled with self-doubt.

“The students were selfless, they weren’t looking for any personal interests,” she recited, calmly. “They were considering the history of the region, the history of America’s interventionist policies, particularly what had happened to Dr Salvador Allende in Chile, that was a story we all knew… what had happened in Vietnam and Korea… and also what had happened in Iran in 1953, an American-instigated coup d’état that had overthrown a popular prime minister. This was the mentality of the young students — Muslim, revolutionary, but also very intellectual. They were not militants, radicals.”

The hostage-takers saw the fragility of the Islamic revolution, only a few months old, its government and security apparatus still in disarray, and feared a counter-revolution by Washington, she argued.

“Their initial plan was to stay there two or three days and they thought the security forces would ask them to leave. But that didn’t happen. The Imam (Khomeini) called the event ‘the second revolution’ and there was this overwhelming response,” said Ebtekar.

In reality, Khomeini was playing a political game. He recognised an opportunity to sideline his more liberal rivals at a time when the outcome of the revolution was still in flux. It worked: the prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, resigned over the incident, removing one of the last moderate voices standing in the way of Khomeini’s hardline vision for the revolution.

The irony is that Khomeini had not wanted to destroy relations with the United States for good. In fact, he had personally prevented an earlier attempt to seize the embassy shortly after his return to the country in February 1979, dispatching an armed rescue squad to end a brief siege by leftwing activists, and his associates met with US representatives multiple times through that year. Even after the embassy siege was long finished, Khomeini objected to a plan to set up a Revolutionary Guards base on the site, telling the head of his security detail: “Why do you want to go there? Are our disputes with the US supposed to last 1,000 years?”

Ebtekar’s rationalisations were astounding. “The students took a very non-violent approach,” she told me. ”They used the same techniques that the people had used in the Islamic revolution: no arms, no violence, just a peaceful sit-in and demonstration as a sign of protest and a message on behalf of the Iranian people that they’re not going to give in to these pressures.”

In her autobiography, there is one point — just one — at which she shows some recognition that perhaps holding people hostage is not a non-violent thing to do. The passage is laughably vanilla in its interpretation: “Though we saw ourselves as humane and compassionate in our dealings with the hostages… in the final analysis we held the keys to their locked doors… We had established a relationship in which we exercised almost complete power over our involuntary guests,” she wrote.

Accounts by the ‘involuntary guests’ themselves suggest Ebtekar’s memory had been carefully expunged of the less humane moments from that time. Michael Metrinko, for example, who was singled out due to his ability to speak Persian, describes months of solitary confinement, weeks in tiny cells in freezing temperatures, beatings and endless interrogations by what amounted to arrogant children. John Limbert was among those woken in the middle of the night, marched down to the basement and lined up before a firing squad, only to hear the click of empty chambers. Limbert’s guess was that the mock execution was carried out because “they thought it would be fun.” As for Ebtekar, her nickname among the hostages was “Screaming Mary”. Metrinko reportedly said of her later: “If she were on fire on the street, I wouldn’t piss on her to put it out.”

With me, Ebtekar did at least recognise, when pushed, that the whole episode, for all its wonderful intentions, had been damaging to Iran’s international standing, though her English began to fail her as she scrambled around for a careful way of expressing her regret without ending up as an involuntary guest of the regime herself.

“Today, looking back, that strong position that Iran had, after what happened… urr… the position that the government has taken in different consecutive governments… urr… that’s open to a lot of discussion and even criticism,” she said, eyes searching around the room. “Even the students who took part in that, many of them believe that maybe in some aspects, relationships could have been maintained in a more… urr... rational manner in certain stages later on.”

Although a couple of the hostage-takers later joined the Revolutionary Guards and became hardline politicians, most regretted their involvement in the embassy siege and became reformists. Several were even jailed, particularly for backing the Green Movement protests in 2009. Ebtekar had managed to skirt a lucrative middle line as a reformist who never openly challenged the central dogmas. One of her children reportedly went to study in the United States and stayed there, but then so did the off-spring of many hardliner elites, apparently unconcerned that the Satanic vibes might rub off on them.

The point at which my eyebrows almost departed from the top of my head was when she tried to justify the hostage-taking with reference to the documents they recovered from the embassy. This had involved an insanely painstaking effort to gather together millions of strands of shredded documents and piece them together by hand. Once started, they must have been really desperate to find something that would make this enterprise feel worthwhile. However, when I asked what she felt was the most important discovery, she spoke only in tragic generalities.

“It was the Wikileaks of its day,” she said. “The students had access to very interesting information about what was being done in the different embassies in the world in terms of confronting national and popular uprisings. Revealing these documents was a very important milestone in terms of global politics.”

“What precisely?” I asked, but she seemed not to hear the question and just continued in the same vein: “The people have a right to access this type of information which is very, very important.”

Before I could ask again, the interview was over. She stood up, beamed at me, didn’t shake hands with a man, of course, and left the room.

In fact, only one piece of evidence from those shredded files had any real impact. It was the discovery of a senior “US agent”, Abbas Amir Entezam, then assistant prime minister in the new revolutionary government. Not that the evidence against him was very strong — all the students had uncovered was an innocuous letter from an American diplomat addressing Entezam as “Dear”. For that, he was convicted of treason and spent 27 years in prison.

Before I moved to Iran, I had assumed that religion was leeching out of it like the colour from a picture left in the sun, that Islam had become just a way for the mullahs to continue justifying their authoritarian control, that too many Iranians saw Islam as complicit and sullied by association.

There were plenty of moments where the regime appeared to acknowledge that view. Arriving at Imam Khomeini Airport, the tourism billboards were determined to avoid any reference to Islam or the revolution. They featured ski resorts and royal homes, and Persepolis, venerating the monuments of ancient Persia that some early revolutionary leaders had tried to bulldoze. Gypsies received more attention than religion. The branding experts had spoken.

Atheism was common, particularly among the wealthier and artier types — a trend that only deepened in the 2020s. The dour and brutal Islamic regime had been a disastrous public relations exercise for religion. My apartment in the upmarket neighbourhood of Tajrish was near one of the city’s biggest mosques, yet the call to prayer made only a gentle intrusion, often mistaken for something playing on my stereo — a far cry from the deafening loudspeakers in other Muslim countries, even secular Turkey. Rumours that the muezzins had been turned down years ago due to noise complaints seemed entirely plausible.

It took some time for me to discover the Islam in the Islamic Republic. There was still plenty, never more so than during the holy month of Muharram, the festival when Shiites mourn the death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, who was betrayed and massacred in 680 AD at Karbala in what is today Iraq. Hussein had been leading an uprising against the wicked caliph Yazid, and his plucky band of warriors were first cut off from supplies, driven to desperation by hunger and thirst, and finally riddled with arrows, with Hussein beheaded. It is a tale of injustice still experienced as a recent tragedy by Shiites more than 1,400 years later — see the way Khamenei’s supporters cried “Ya Hussein” in the streets after his assassination — with a strange co-mingling of grandeur and humility that feels peculiarly Iranian.

I had been living in Iran for a few months when Muharram arrived. A friend, Ali, invited me to see its epicentre in the warrens of old Tehran one day, and so I met him near the Grand Bazaar at one of tekiehs — the houses of worship dedicated to the Hussein that come to life during this period.

The tekiehs, Ali explained, had gained prominence in the 1930s at a time when the first Pahlavi shah was seeking to crush the traditional clergy. They were often hidden in the homes of rich merchants — bazaaris, as they are known in Iran. The shah had been suspicious of such places, and he was right: his son was overthrown a few decades later in part thanks to the vast spread of these underground houses of worship — there were 322 in Tehran alone by 1979 — a network that powered the revolution.

These days they were, of course, legal, but often still hard to find. The tekieh we visited was deep in the bazaar, indicated only by pretty blue tiling and calligraphy around the door, with little to indicate the scale of the space that lay behind it. Four men were working the chai stall, pouring dozens of glasses of tea, arranging vast bowls of sugar cubes, and pulling the wrapping off baskets full of sweet noon-kandi bread. Tea and sugar were a nineteenth century import to Iran — the ceremony had been a more bitter affair in the days when this particular tekieh was first established under the Qajars, when the cups would have been filled with acrid black coffee to match the emotions of the festival.

The small doorway transported Ali and I into a vast room covered by tight white canvas. The floor was covered in red patterned carpets, and the walls in black and mauve sheets decorated with wild images of peacocks, and lions with suns on their backs, and angels that appeared to be shooting fire out of their hands. A group of women, clustered like black pawns on a chessboard, knelt around the foot of the manbar, the staircase with a chair at the top that served as the podium for the clerics and eulogists.

“What are those women doing?” I asked Ali.

“They are waiting to pray underneath the manbar, or just to pass through it,” he said. “They think their prayers will be answered more quickly if they do that. But the mullahs don’t like it. They say it’s superstitious nonsense.”

Ali, around 30, was non-plussed. Like many of his generation, he had responded to the endless crisis of Iranian politics by turning inwards. He focused on work and his passion for languages, trying to live as though the regime did not exist.

We asked a man who appeared to have some sort of official position about the images on the wall. His cropped salt-and-pepper hair, dark stubble and friendly face matched around three quarters of the other men in the room. They sat cross-legged on raised platforms along the sides, the centre being given over to the rows of women, uniformly wrapped in black chadors, which they tugged down at the chin.

“The lions are Imam Ali. But they are also Iran,” the man said. “It’s complicated.”

But it was not complicated. It was typical. Pride, fire, defiance, the constant blurring of religion and nationalism: this was Iranian culture through and through.

I relaxed against the wall. A child went one further and lay down completely, shutting his eyes. I always loved the element of relaxation in Islam. None of the harsh wooden pews of Christianity forcing you to stare forwards at the altar, where only your buttocks could go to sleep. This felt like a big bed, inviting you to relax and contemplate, engage at your own pace, drift in and out of consciousness: surely the best way to commune with the divine. People came and went, engaged and disengaged. One woman sat playing with her phone; some men were having a snack. Another man, lost in reverie, slowly nodded forwards, and I thought he was going to fall asleep, but his fingers moved to the bridge of his nose and he began to cry in light, shaking sobs. This was pure Muharram: the cued tears for the memory of Imam Hussein, the thing for which I found no real parallel in my own culture. A short while later the man was finished, stood and picked up his plastic bag and his glasses case and headed off to work, perfectly content again. Religiosity was only a part of the experience. Muharram was also the time when public displays of melancholia were encouraged, giving the Iranian penchant for melodrama free rein.

It was deeply embedded. The French jeweller Jean Chardin, in his travelogue of seventeenth century Persia, records: “I would never have believed the grief that people show; it is unimaginable. They beat their breast; they shriek and howl, especially the women, tearing at themselves and sobbing.” A preacher explained to Chardin that there was some strategic advantage to all this, to which his mercantile instincts could relate: “A tear shed during this commemoration wipes out a pile of sins as big as Mount Sinai.”

Iranian melancholia pre-dated Islam. There were parallels between Hussein’s story and that of Siyavosh, the chivalrous nobleman whose story is recorded in Ferdowsi’s epic Shahnameh (‘Book of Kings’), written around the turn of the eleventh century. The book is seen, with only slight embellishment, as the literary crutch by which Persia managed to hold onto its identity despite the territory being overrun by Arabic-speaking Muslims.

Despite being a fearsome warrior, Siyavosh refused to massacre a neighbouring king and his men who had sued for peace. But the king threw his mercy back in his face, turning against Siyavosh on the devious advice of a rival. Siyavosh was tracked down and beheaded. A plant later known as Blood of Siyavosh grew on the spot where he fell. For centuries afterwards Iranians marked his death with rituals and mourning ceremonies that bore striking similarities to those of Muharram today. Those links were vital — they ensured the roots of Shiism in modern Iran ran deeper than even the arrival of Islam, and certainly earlier than the current regime.

The relationship of these traditions to the current system was tricky. Khomeini had brilliantly weaponised the story of Hussein against the Shah — a popular slogan during the revolution was “Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala”. But Khomeini’s interpretation of the story was actually something of a novelty, with the sacrifice re-spun as an act of rebellion against an unjust ruler. Historically, Hussein’s fate had been seen as inevitable. His sacrifice was a lesson in bravely submitting to God’s plan and gladly accepting the role of martyr. Khomeini’s interpretation was different — that Hussein was actually trying to win against the wicked Yazid, rather than humbly accepting his fate. This bordered on the blasphemous in its suggestion that man might wrest the reins of his destiny from God.

Once Khomenei had overthrown the Shah, this new version of the story became more problematic. Promoting Hussein as a rebel was risky once the clerics had taken over. This was one reason it became so important to find a new enemy to replace the Shah, with the West — and America in particular — becoming the symbol of tyranny and injustice, lest anyone propose targets closer to home.

I watched as an old-style chanter took a seat on the bottom step of the manbar. He wore thick black robes and a black skullcap, and lay heavily ringed hands purposefully on his knees as he began a simple keening lament. In the age of Insta-religion, some modern chanters had become celebrities by adding flourish and embellishment to their performances, to the consternation of traditionalists, but this guy was sticking to the trance-like, curling incantations of old. A couple of women roused themselves and went to stand in front of a carpet hung on the wall, woven with a long prayer to Imam Hussein, their palms facing upwards.

The place was filling up. There were far more women than men, which was why they were given the whole of the central floor space. “It used to be much more even between men and women, but now the men have to go to work,” Ali said. Another intrusion of the profane foreign ways — in the olden days, work would have been a secondary consideration at this time of year, slotted in around devotion. Now the rigours of Western timekeeping were messing with Muharram. Time-keeping had been a touchy subject for decades. The decision by the last Shah to impose a new calendar based on the coronation of the pre-Islamic ruler Cyrus the Great in 559 BC was seen as one of the last straws for his regime.

A group of tourists walked in — not foreigners, but Iranian tourists, immediately distinguishable by their jeans and fashionable shoes, which poked out from under the black outfits they had dug out for this expedition. They pointed and took photographs, and pestered their guide with questions. The Iran they had come to visit, devout and unaltered, was as alien to them as it was to me. In Iran, the past was indeed a foreign country, but it was also just a twenty-minute taxi ride from your suburban duplex.

The chanter stopped and an aging mullah took his place. He had the frown of a man who had spent a lifetime lambasting people. He was not tired of it. “Looking at female strangers is forbidden!” he offered as an opening gambit. “Men shouldn’t look and women shouldn’t show. Keep your beauty hidden.”

He quickly found his stride: “Muslim men must not marry non-Muslims, unless it’s temporary,” he said, snorting loudly into the microphone. He broke off to look at the group of women, who were still bustling around the staircase behind him, waiting patiently for their turn to pray under the sacred steps that would fast-track their entreaties to God’s ears. The cleric did not hide his disdain for them: “It’s just a wooden seat – this isn’t Mecca,” he growled at them.

“It’s no use,” Ali whispered to me. “Even the mullah can’t stop these women’s superstitions.”

We left and made our way through the alleyways to the Grand Bazaar nearby. All the Chinese tat in the world could not detract from the workaday splendour of its desert-yellow walls, broken up by long lines of three-pointed arches, domed ceilings and occasional bursts of Islamic blue-tiled calligraphy.

At this time of year, the bazaar’s deep connections with the faith were on full display. We walked into its innards, everything dressed in black for Muharram, stopping in some of the countless shrines and small mosques along the way. Each guild, each ethnicity, each group of any kind, had their own small place of worship. The tin workers’ guild had their own mosque lined with large pots and other utensils. A spate of falafel stalls indicated we had found the Kurdish corner of the bazaar, whose mosque marked the spot they had laid down roots after fleeing Saddam Hussein’s chemical atrocities in the 1980s.

The alliance of the bazaar and clergy was forged in the nineteenth century, a time when the Qajar dynasty had managed to impose some stability after generations of chaos and carnage, allowing a new middle class of traders to emerge. Bazaari patronage was lucrative for the clergy, who began using increasingly lofty titles to burnish their credentials (it was at this stage that the term ‘ayatollah’, or ‘sign of God’, was first used), while the bazaaris enjoyed the spiritual licence they were given to pursue riches. Both disliked foreign competition, be it in textiles or souls.

Bazaaris edged out the monarchy as the traditional patron of the clergy, with ultimately devastating results. It undermined a relationship between turban and crown that stretched far back into Iranian history: one of the great writers about Iran, Said Amir Arjomand, points to a text from the pre-Islamic Sasanian period, in which the king is warned against ignoring his symbiotic relationship with religion, then Zoroastrianism: “Religion is the foundation of kingship, and kingship the protector of religion,” the author writes, before rather spookily predicting that a monarch who disdains religion will give rise to a hidden religious leader who will emerge from the masses and usurp his powers.

Ever since the Safavid dynasty had made Shi’ism the official religion of the state in the sixteenth century (in part to distinguish themselves from the Ottomans they were seeking to boot out of their territories), kings could largely count on the men in robes to support them. A few disliked the royals’ fondness for wine and pushed for the most senior clerics, the mujtaheds, to rule instead, but they were outliers. Even Khomeini didn’t want to remove the monarchy in his early days, until the Shah started to chip away at clerical sources of money and influence. So instead, he leaned on the bazaar. That was why it was so significant when the bazaar launched the protests against the regime in December 2025. There could be no bigger threat to the Islamic Republic than losing bazaari support, and the brutality of the crackdown — the worst in the regime’s history — reflected the desperation.

That day in Muharram, the bazaar had an intensity that teetered between crowded intimacy and crushing claustrophobia as various religious processions toured the narrow avenues. Thick clouds of incense, drumming, chanting, lamenting, men pounding their chests, carts ramming my ankles, cries of “Ya Hussein!” Finally I found an exit and gulped down the semi-fresh air outside.

Ali and I walked to our final stop of the day, the most beautiful tekieh in the area, one founded by the laats in the mid-twentieth century. The laats were a sort of old-school mafia, local toughs who dominated trade but also loved their faith and their mothers: a style and code of conduct that would later see strange parallels in The Godfather, with the suits and moustaches to match. Their Muharram processions back in the 1950s and 1960s were shows of machismo in which competing communities would try to muscle rival processions out of the way. Many famous laats were pictured on the wall of the ornate tekieh, whose golden walls were still sparkling decades later. The most famous portrait was there: Mad Mustafa, the spitting image of De Niro as a young Corleone.

Of the small band of expats in Tehran, most worked for the embassies, since there were few foreign businesses and just a handful of us correspondents. The senior diplomats had very serious responsibilities — nuclear talks, hostage negotiations, etc. But Tehran was also a great place for a first-time posting, the sort of job that an ambitious young diplo could secure with minimal competition and that looked impressive on a resume. Most gave the impression of having been very well-behaved during their upbringing, and Iran was their first taste of freedom. The atmosphere at their parties was like entering a nerdy frat house where everyone’s drinks had been spiked.

I went to one in my first weeks in Tehran, in the upmarket neighbourhood of Elahieh, where entrances were often flanked by 20-foot Ionic columns. The kitchen table was awash with booze. Alcohol is illegal everywhere in Iran, so this was a wondrous sight. Having not yet secured myself a dealer, I had spent my first weeks in an enforced detox. Diplomats were given annual shipments of anything they wanted from home, placed in containers that even the Iranian customs were not permitted to search, so their residences tended to have crate upon crate of expensive liquor piled up in spare bedrooms.

There had been problems lately, however. Two tonnes of vodka destined for the Russian embassy had been held up at Imam Khomeini Airport for a year, a Belgian diplomat said as he served me a gin and tonic. Apparently, the Iranians had taken to x-raying the boxes to check if they contained liquid. Some embassies had reported the arrival of containers full of smashed bottles, looking suspiciously as if they had been dropped a couple of metres in the customs warehouse.

Later, I secured myself a dealer. I would text “Ali” on Telegram and he responded with photos and prices for various whiskies, vodkas and wines. They were very expensive, but within a couple of hours, he would show up at my door clutching two clinking garbage bags. He even had a card machine and provided a receipt. It was widely understood that this trade was controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, along with much of the illicit economy.

It was a good sign if the bottles were dusty or sandy — it meant they had travelled over the mountains on the Turkish border or via the beaches of southern Iran. You didn’t want anything that originated in Iran. I once gave a neighbour some bottles of a wine called Pinvert that I had yet to try. When I saw him next, he looked unwell.

“I’ve been on the toilet for three days,” he said. “I don’t think you should drink any of that Pinvert you gave me.”

A few weeks later a report on the Iranian news wires said Tehran police had busted a bootlegging gang who were producing and distributing grape juice mixed with medical alcohol, and bottling it with labels from foreign brands. The picture showed a huge pile of Pinvert bottles.

At the party in Elahieh, a Swiss political officer told me there were increasing concerns about raids, especially after an intervention by Basijis on a high-class gathering in northern Tehran involving Western ambassadors and some well-known Iranian society figures. The Basij are an enormous volunteer brigade overseen by the supreme leader and Revolutionary Guards; essentially religious Brown Shirts, many of them poor kids who had been raised to believe that the fellow Iranians they assaulted were infiltrators on the payroll of foreign governments. As in any such organisation, it attracted a mix of honest zealots, out-and-out goons and opportunists (one former member later told me he joined so he could get out of trouble whenever he was caught drinking), as well as plenty who were just going along with the crowd. They offered the regime deniability for its more outrageous activities — beating protesters to death; storming foreign embassies — and enjoyed a dangerous level of impunity in return.

You had to hand it to the Basij: they were equal opportunity thugs, unimpressed by social and international conventions. When they raided the high-society party, the Australian ambassador had refused to get off the phone, so one of the Basijis simply grabbed it out of his hand, pushed his arm up behind his back and shoved him against the wall. The newly arrived Japanese ambassador could not believe what he was seeing. Everyone was released in the end, but their phones had been confiscated for the duration of the raid and later people started to notice their Google Maps location would occasionally switch to some position out in the desert.

The hosts of the party, a famous gallery owner and his wife, were less fortunate . The judiciary said they found 18,000 litres of booze in a storeroom underneath their swimming pool. The Swiss diplomat telling me this story said the real reason for the raid was to seize their house, “probably worth more than $10 million”.

I refilled my drink and went out on the balcony where some business people were talking about the hell of finalising deals in Iran. It was an optimistic moment for Iranian trade — the nuclear deal had just come into force and hundreds of delegations from Europe and Asia were flooding into the Islamic Republic looking to capitalise on the lifting of sanctions. But they were unprepared for the Iranian negotiating style.

A French lawyer was bemoaning her efforts to broker an agreement between Renault and a local firm: “Everything takes ten times longer than it needs to, because the person you are negotiating with is never the real person you are negotiating with,” she said. “They fight over every footnote as if the pride of the Persian race was at stake, and when you think it’s all finally settled and they’ve even signed the contract, they come back that evening and say they need to start again from the beginning.”

“No one negotiates harder than the Iranians,” agreed someone from a major German firm. “They always leave blood on the table.” A guy from British American Tobacco shrugged: the Islamic Republic hated Britain and America, he said, but it loved smoking.

A band struck up in the main room — a bunch of locals playing Chuck Berry and swing classics. They were much better than I would have expected from a live band in Iran, considering the dearth of gigging opportunities, but later I found out they had grown up in Canada. The singer’s father was a famous environmentalist and academic. Some months later, he was arrested as a spy and died mysteriously in his prison cell.

There was a hot tub on the roof where diplomatic relations were being explored. As I stepped out of the elevator, I saw a flash of half-naked man sprinting across the rooftop to projectile-vomit over the edge of the building with such force that it was only the quick reactions of a Belgian diplomat that kept him from tipping over the edge. I remarked to my new Swiss friend that this whole scene was a lot more debauched than I was expecting from my first days in the Islamic Republic. But he said this was nothing compared to earlier years. The real bacchanalia had been during the era of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when relations between Iran and the world were so atrocious that the diplomats had nothing to do but get wasted and join in orgies in north Tehran mansions. The Islamic Republic’s view of Westerners as a bunch of decadent drunkards was, it turned out, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The regime hardliners had also felt more in control back then, and didn’t feel the need to hassle foreigners and their bourgeois Iranian friends. The diplomats from that time had all played up their dangerous assignment in the Islamic Republic, the Swiss officer said, and used it to land cushy positions in New York, Paris or Berlin. “People who spent their whole time here taking drugs and going to orgies are now working senior positions at the UN,” he said, laughing.

We were not the only ones partying. From the edge of the roof I could hear heavy bass and the screams of happy drinkers drifting across from adjacent terraces, and Turkish pop blasting out from cars full of young people as they wound their way through the back-alleys of Elahieh. The enormous apartment blocks were all sealed off from the Islamic Republic by what looked like huge blast walls. Pavements were almost non-existent, of little use to a class of people that moved from the cocoon of their homes to the cocoon of their SUVs to the cocoon of luxury malls. I knew enough to know this was all pretty new — that the idea of multiple, loud parties happening at once in Tehran would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier. I knew, too, that these were the sounds of extreme privilege. A very different culture, with very different rules, still held sway in most of the country.

Much later in my time in Iran, two close friends saw first hand how little the regime cared for diplomatic rules.

A pair of young Dutch and British diplomats attended a party in an apartment in north Tehran, far enough from the road that the DJ could barely be heard. They had been there about an hour when suddenly a girl came running in from the balcony, shouting that the cops were outside. There was the usual panic as the girls rushed to the cloakroom to throw on their outdoor outfits: headscarves, trousers and mantos (long coats). My friends, let’s call them Daphne and Bridget, decided they would answer the door so that it appear to be a foreigner’s home, pay the bribe of a few million tomans and the cops would go away. But when they heard the huge crash from downstairs, they realised this was not the usual petty shake-down. Suddenly the banging was at the front door, and they leapt back as around 20 men and women rushed in along with a full camera crew. The men were in civilian clothes and the women in strict chador, highly efficient and organised as they ordered everyone down on the ground.

In any other country, Daphne and Bridget’s diplomatic passports would have allowed them to walk free, but Iran does not play by those rules. “We don’t give a fuck about your immunity. You’re going to prison with the rest of them,” shouted one of the men as he snatched the passports out of their hands, speaking in fluent, American-accented English.

They were nonetheless treated less roughly than the Iranians and kept separately in the kitchen. But the camera was constantly shoved in their faces and questions barked at them: “Are you drunk? Did you bring alcohol? Why did you come to Iran? What is your mission here?” At first, they laughed, high on the adrenaline and telling themselves this would be a great story for the next diplomat party. But as time passed, and they were still not being released, and the questioning and tone grew increasingly aggressive, they started to panic.

The agents had taken everyone’s phone, but they had not noticed Daphne had a second mobile. Bridget distracted their guards with a hysterical screaming fit while Daphne called her boss, the Dutch ambassador. Just as he picked up, one of the agents spotted her through the window and rushed at her. She was able to shout that they were in trouble and gave their location before the phone was grabbed out of her hand.

They were held for hours in a bedroom, the camera still trained on them for long stints as the girls huddled together on the bed, terrified. They decided they needed to act. Bridget asked to go to the bathroom, taking one of the chadori agents with her, and since the remaining men were not allowed to touch women, Daphne ran past them to the living room. The chadori burst out of the bathroom and shoved Daphne up against the wall, her forearm against her throat. There followed a moment of utter strangeness: their faces inches apart, hearts racing, the young woman made a bid for some sort of psychopathic Stockholm Syndrome connection.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” the woman said. “I studied in California. We could have been friends. You just need to obey the rules of our country, that’s all.”

Daphne regained her composure. “What the hell made you want to leave California and come and do this for a job?” she said. The chadori’s veneer cracked immediately. “I’m asking the fucking questions,” she shouted.

Some time later, Daphne and Bridget decided they could wait no longer and just ran for the front door. A violent struggle ensued: the female agents dragging Daphne by the armpit until she lashed out with an elbow to the chest and broke free. Downstairs, one of the male agents was trying to shut the smashed gate before they could get through. Bridget grabbed it and slashed her hand open on broken glass. Both women managed to scramble out to the street, where they found a member of the diplomatic police — the Iranian force that is supposed to protect foreign embassy staff — just standing there with his arms folded, looking overwhelmed. Amid the blood, the endless screaming and shouting, now out in the quiet residential streets, the agents realised they had lost control of the situation and relented. It struck Daphne that none of the 20 people who had burst into that apartment had really been in charge. They were just thugs, as usual.

The diplomatic policeman finally clicked into gear and convinced the agents that they needed to return Daphne and Bridget’s passports and phones. There were a hundred messages on Daphne’s phone — the whole embassy was awake, as was their team back in The Hague and Iran’s ambassador to Holland. Eventually, an older Iranian officer appeared on the scene, took one look at the two shaking women and told the agents to release them.

Daphne was overcome with guilt at leaving 50 of their friends in the hands of these goons. She found out later they were taken to a prison and given the full humiliating experience: strip-searched, hosed down naked, forced to spread their arsecheeks, brutally interrogated for hours. Most were released a few days later, but the host spent a month in prison. He paid a financially crippling fine to win his release. He and his wife had their passports confiscated, and their plans to move to Holland, where they had already bought a house, were finished. His theatre career was finished, too.

“The worst thing is that my Iranian friends were completely unimpressed by my story,” Daphne told me later. “For me, this was the most traumatic thing that ever happened, but to them, it was completely normal. They just shrugged it off. This is what they have lived with all their lives.”

Our Tehran bureau in those days was a dump. An inch of dust lay on every surface, the very air seemed stained by three decades of heavy smoking. Iranians and journalists: a tobacconists’ dream. Its fetid atmosphere put everything behind a grimy filter that reminded me of 1970s Hollywood movies, and it fit the look of the city outside with its endlessly beige buildings, beat-up sedans and guys in moustaches leaning against them, smoking, always smoking.

I arrived in Tehran in 2016 as a correspondent for an international news agency, one of the very few foreign media organisations allowed to operate in the Islamic Republic. We were kept on a short leash, liable to be expelled at a moment’s notice, though expulsion was preferable to the hostage-takings that had recently befallen the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian and many others. I tried to comfort myself that the regime only ever imprisoned dual nationals, but around this time they took hostage a Chinese-American scholar from Princeton, Xiyue Wang, who had no Iranian heritage at all, ripping away my comfort blanket.

My Iranian colleagues in the bureau lived permanently on a tightrope and faced pressures they were not allowed to divulge. They ran the typical gamut of political opinion from pragmatic indifference to outright detestation, and ranged from secularist to practising Muslim, although even the latter had little truck with the politicised brand of religion peddled by the country’s rulers. One of them was considered to be “the spy of the office” — reporting back to the authorities about our activities — but the question of whether he was keeping us in line or keeping us out of danger would never be satisfyingly answered. Although all these colleagues have since left the agency, I won’t name them even now. Who knows what risks they might still face.

On my first night, they took me for dinner at the Cinema Museum in the trendy, wealthy suburb of Tajrish in north Tehran. It is a stately old mansion dating back to the days of Mohammad Shah Qajar in the early nineteenth century when Tajrish was still surrounded by countryside, a separate town for summering aristocrats in the shade of the Alborz mountains, a day or so’s ride from the newly established capital. It has since been engulfed by the heavily polluted city, the last stop on the metro and the end of the eleven-mile Vali Asr Street that chops Tehran in half along its north-south axis, where cars funnel into some of the world’s most irritating traffic.

The museum itself was uninteresting since the Islamic Republic did not encourage much celebration of its brilliant filmmakers. A few days after I arrived, the great Abbas Kiarostami died, and his friends organised a small commemoration in the grounds of the museum. No one from the regime came or even acknowledged it.

But the grounds around the museum were lovely, with a long avenue bisected by a blue-tiled gully and fountains, and had become a hang-out for the young and wealthy. This was several years before the massive women’s rights protests of the 2020s that fundamentally undermined the regime’s dresscode, but already in this part of town the rules had weakened. If there were any beards to be seen, they were the eccentric whiskers of an artist rather than the rough stubble of the hezbollahi militants. The headscarves were generally chiffon or patterned, pinned at the back of wild hairstyles or tossed loosely over the head and forever falling back to the shoulders — vastly outnumbering the severe black ‘chador’ (literally, ‘tent’) worn by conservatives, and which hid every last, lust-inducing follicle.

The youngsters, mostly in their teens and twenties, smoked cigarettes and ate burgers from the cafes that surrounded the museum, took selfies in front of the twisting columns of the mansion house and compared the results of their plastic surgery, nose jobs being a hugely popular passtime among Iran’s well-heeled. Little stores tucked under the arches sold exquisite home-made ceramics and jewellery, hand-carved puppets and movie memorabilia. Further up the avenue, some groups crowded around their phones, listening to French rap and Swedish party tunes.

It was an optimistic moment in Iran. The nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers had come into force a few months earlier, lifting sanctions and seeming to promise investment, peace and normality. It was an empty promise, even before Donald Trump came along to trash it all. Global banks never did allow Iran back into their systems, and the regime insiders who controlled the Iranian economy had little interest in opening themselves up to foreign competition. But all that disappointment, and far worse horrors, lay in the future that evening in the summer of 2016.

We had finished eating in one of the cafes and I was trying to acquire the taste of saffron ice cream when some particularly daring teenagers fired up a large amp and began breakdancing in the middle of the open space. It did not take long for the police to show up. Two cops in white and green uniform stepped out of their car and marched over to the adolescents. One picked up the speaker and started walking back to the car. Immediately, there was an uproar. The young crowd that had been watching the dancing were joined by dozens of others who had been milling around nearby, people of all ages, men and women, all crowding round the cop and berating him angrily. The cop looked startled, tried to regain his composure, and held his ground for a moment, but soon placed the speaker back on the ground. He issued a few warnings to the dancers and then jumped back into the wagon with his colleague and drove away.

“What sort of authoritarian regime is this? They just let them go?” I demanded.

“They know when to pick their fights, “ my colleague said, smiling.

Regular cops were already abandoning the idea of moral policing, especially in wealthy areas where there was a good chance they might upset the offspring of a powerful person. The enforcement of Western-style behaviour, as it was seen, was left to the basij, the footsoldiers of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards. People were fed up with being scolded by thugs, and were no longer afraid of standing up to them. The pillars of the revolution were visibly eroding by this point in the 2010s and would crumble further in the following years , forcing a horrific and desperate retaliation by the regime and its enforcers.

The youngsters may have seen off the police that night, but their fun could not continue. A middle-aged man came over to one of the group and put his hand on his back, telling him it was best not to push his luck. The group sat down and hung their heads, lighting cigarettes, the dancing over for now.