My quest for an answer led me to another post-revolutionary attraction: the Shah’s summer palace at the foot of Tehran’s magnificent Alborz mountains. Set on manicured grounds replete with peacocks, the palace is crammed with overwrought Louis xiv—type furnishings, a 1970s take on Versailles. All that remains of the statue of the Shah is a pair of tall bronze boots—a monarchy cut off at the knees. By opening the palace to the public, Iranian authorities intended to expose the Shah’s extravagant lifestyle, entertaining the powerful while the people starved. Instead, it has become a pilgrimage site for young Iranians born after the revolution, who see not corruption and abuse of power but a symbol of their nation’s past glory.

Understanding the role and significance of Iranian youth is crucial to developing a complete picture of the forces now shaping Iran. After the revolution, birth control was sharply restricted. In the following decade, the population nearly doubled. Today, 70 percent of Iran’s seventy million citizens are under thirty, making it one of the world’s youngest nations.

Shortly before his death in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini recognized the looming housing and employment shortages and reversed course. Iran has since become a model of family planning. It now operates the only government-approved condom factory in the Middle East, and a month’s supply of the pill is readily available without prescription for the price of a cup of tea. University students are required to take a sex-ed course in order to graduate, and couples must take contraception classes to receive a marriage licence. Most families now have no more than one or two children, even in the villages.

Ayatollah Khomeini had envisioned the baby boom as a twenty-million-member army of “soldiers for Islam,” but in Iran things rarely turn out as planned. Through sheer strength of numbers, the revolution’s children are pushing an agenda at odds with their elders. The new generation—a modern version of America’s postwar baby boom—is more interested in good times than guns, in ecstasy over Islam. At the royal palace, students and young couples snap pictures in the gardens and speak in hushed tones outside the gaudy palace chambers with their mirrored walls. They have no memory of the Shah’s rule by fear, no recollection of the savageries of the secret police, of the disappeared, the maimed, and the permanently silenced. Gazing at the photographs of world leaders that adorn the palace, they recall an era when Iran was a global player, a respected member of the community of nations. Reflecting on the 2,500-year history of the Persian Empire—a superpower that stretched from Anatolia and Egypt across western Asia to northern India and Central Asia—they envision a future in which Iran is no longer an international pariah. One man summed up the overriding sentiment: “We don’t want a wall around our country.”

Despite the murals of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei who watch, godlike, from the sides of high-rise buildings (alongside Calvin Klein and Nokia ads), most Iranians are busy doing their own thing. They are buying bootlegged booze, from fine French Cabernet Sauvignon at $20 (US) a bottle to the Tuborg beer and Absolut vodka that supplement readily available homemade arak. They are watching the latest Hollywood movies on dvd, smuggled in from Malaysia, or mtv, the bbc, and Fashion Television via satellite. They are holding dance parties with the blinds drawn and text-messaging their boyfriends and girlfriends. An underground sexual revolution is raging, and legal and cultural prohibitions on dating simply mean that young couples tend to meet in private. “When you meet in someone’s home, it’s all about sex,” a young man told me. A young woman, alluding to the oral sex that preserves their chastity, said coyly, “The girls here are very skillful.”For the wealthy, at least, lost virginities can be reclaimed by a trip to the surgeon.

“Where else in the world would you have your drugs, your booze, your rock ‘n’ roll delivered to your door This country is like a giant boarding school,”joked a former journalist who had left the profession after too many nights spent in prison for assisting foreign correspondents.

For embattled journalists and young Iranians, the Internet has become a source of unprecedented freedom. With at least seventy thousand active blogs, about half belonging to women, Farsi is the third most common blogging language in the world. Iran’s hardline judiciary, which has closed more than one hundred newspapers since 2000, hasn’t figured out how to cope with the Internet. Websites that are deemed “un-Islamic” (like the popular international dating site Orkut.com) are shut down or filtered, but alternative sites or workarounds arise just as quickly and word spreads.

Omid Memarian, a prominent journalist and blogger, is a handsome, clean-shaven young man who’s part of the new generation of Iranians that seldom part with their laptops. We met at Jaam-eJam International Food Court on Valiasr Street, the hippest hangout in Tehran. A replica of the shiny neon food courts found in any American shopping mall, it was the perfect setting to observe the generation gap. Sitting at a plastic table surrounded by sirens in tight jeans and form-fitting manteaus (the shirt-dresses urban women prefer to the chador) busy smoking cigarettes and reapplying lip gloss, I found it impossible to imagine that this giant boarding school might be on the brink of war.

In a culture where black is the colour of piety, and the hijab is required by law, women tested the outer limits in lime green and fuchsia. Despite restrictions on mixing with the opposite sex, they flirted provocatively with young men in goatees and longish hair, one of whom had an American flag patch sewn to the butt of his jeans. The occasional guy or girl showed off the fresh white bandage of a recent nose job, an obsession among the middle and upper classes.

“So much has changed that the generation born before the revolution can’t keep up,” observed Memarian. We spoke of the social freedoms that followed the Khatami presidency—from sweeping changes in women’s fashions to diminishing crackdowns on male-female relationships that once were grounds for arrest. Lashings have all but disappeared and unmarried couples now hold hands in public. “Everything used to be underground,” said Memarian. “Now you see it on the street.” He pointed toward two heavily made-up young women whose teased blond highlights made a mockery of their flimsy scarves. “The previous generation was idealistic, but the new generation is materialistic and self-involved. They don’t remember revolution and war. They aren’t interested in the ideals of the Islamic government.”