A Case of Warring Perceptions

The Tehran regime's TV and radio has appealed to Iranians not to allow their country to be turned into another "grim and miserable" Lebanon. But unlike Lebanon, riven by deep religious differences, Iran is a nation of 34 million people who are more or less homogeneous and overwhelmingly (98%) Muslim. What divides Iran today is warring perceptions of the Shah and the direction in which he has pushed his oil-rich remnant of the old Persian empire. A cross section of Iranians interviewed by TIME:

Rajab Motamedi, 45, is a shopkeeper in Tehran's central bazaar, focus of some of the most violent anti-Shah protests. Like other small merchants, Motamedi has been hurt by Iran's cruel inflation (currently 50% annually) more than he has been helped by the prosperity that has expanded the country's middle class, and he believes that the Shah's drive to make Iran a modern industrial state has led to foreign domination. Jailed three times for anti-government activities, he has closed his shop and vows not to reopen until the Shah is overthrown.

To blame "foreign saboteurs" for Iran's troubles is nonsense, Motamedi insists: "This is a heaven-sent movement. What we want is an Islamic republic. The aim is freedom and true independence."

Mohammed Amini, 33, the son of a Tehran mattress maker, supports his wife and daughter by driving a heavy Mercedes truck. On runs that may take him as far as Turkey or even West Germany, he likes to shove a cassette into the tape deck on his dashboard to listen to his favorite commentator: Ayatullah Khomeini.

A strict Shi'ite, Amini believes what he hears on the Khomeini cassettes. "The Shah must go," Amini says, "and a government faithful to the Koran must replace him. The army must change too. It has too much arrogance." He believes "Iran must be Iranian. Too much Iranian money ends up in America. Too much Iranian oil ends up in Israel, to be used against our Muslim brothers."

Amini, who was taught to read by mullahs, spends at least $10 of the $700 he earns each month on Khomeini pamphlets, magazines, books and tapes. When he is home he teaches what he has learned to his neighbors. He says proudly, "All of my friends follow Khomeini because they are opponents of the Shah."

Mashhadi Mohammed Nik-Dehghan, 39, lives in Lashkar-Abad, a farming village (150 families, most of them related) 75 miles from Tehran. Nik-Dehghan's family was struggling until the Shah launched his land reform in 1963. The family received 125 acres under a complicated system that bars it from subdividing the land into small, uneconomic plots but provides a good income. Mashhadi Nik-Dehghan's crop of grapes and apples last year earned him $9,000, four times Iran's per capita income. Other programs have provided his town with a paved road, a clinic, a school and self-rule through a village council set up by Tehran. Nik-Dehghan's son Zakriya can read and write (unlike his father) because the government sent four teachers to Lashkar-Abad. The Shah, says the farmer, is "khehlee khoob " (very good).

Abalbashar Farmanfarmaeien, 61, is, like many other upper-class Iranians, U.S.-educated: Colorado State University, University of Chicago and Columbia University, where he got his doctorate in law. But Farmanfarmaeien, a successful corporation lawyer, is not slavishly devoted to the Shah. "Both sides have made mistakes," he says. The Shah's was to modernize too rapidly without considering fundamentalist views. The mullahs, on the other hand, have no concept of what a modern state ought to be.

"The issue is not the Shah or Khomeini," says Farmanfarmaeien, munching caviar before a crackling fire in his Tehran home. "I don't believe a change in the regime would solve our problems. The basic dispute between government and religion has gone on for more than 400 years. Until each side overcomes its defects, there can be no understanding."

Despairing of any solution soon, he is withdrawing from his lucrative practice to write a book on 19th century Iran -long before the oil that brought the country its new wealth and its belated, wrenchingly difficult entry into the 20th century had even been discovered.

Sadigha Shaghayeghi, 23, dark-eyed and svelte, looks more like a student than the Tehran schoolteacher she is. Like many other liberated young Iranian women, she has taken to hiding her jeans beneath a chador, the head-to-foot Muslim veil. Shaghayeghi says she will continue wearing the shapeless chador as a symbol of protest until the Shah is toppled and Iran enjoys what she describes as "an atmosphere of freedom where human and democratic values count."

Mahrokh Saadat, 40, is another example of the new times in Iran. Though unmarried, she left home, a Caspian seacoast city where her late father was a pro-Shah customs official, and began a career in Tehran; she now earns $900 a month as the assistant personnel director at a publishing house. She has eagerly joined the demonstrations against the Shah. He is "isolated," she says. "He has never known what was happening to his country and never listened to anyone."

Still, Saadat is no longer a practicing Muslim and refuses to don the chador, even as a symbol of protest, insisting that Iranian women will never go back to the old ways. She opposes the mullahs' aim of creating an Islamic republic; she wants a social democratic system instead and is "convinced that it would work."

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