A year ago this month an estimated one million people poured onto the streets of Tehran. Those crowds – bazaari traders and academics, young and old, conservative pragmatist and fractious liberal – were drawn together by outrage over what they called a stolen presidential election: the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had been returned via ballot box numbers that appeared then, as they do today, fraudulent. The opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi told supporters that he had been cheated out of power.
It was, from the start, an impressive outpouring of political feeling. But amid a continued and vast street presence in the days following the June 12 election those crowds seemed to become something more: an embryonic movement that coalesced around 30 years of disillusionment and anger at the Islamic Republic and which now insisted on a new democratic politics, a liberalised society, and the primacy of human rights.
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