Eighty-eight million Iranians, a diaspora of seven-plus million across every continent. Tehran alone is the size of New York, Chicago, and Houston combined.
The country you see in the news is not the country where people live. In the Tehran metro, under harsh white light, a bank clerk on her way home reads a Simin Behbahani poem on her phone. A father in Isfahan folds his daughter into the back of a Pride and drives to her flute lesson. A grandmother in Rasht arranges fesenjan in a pot the size of a bicycle wheel. None of this makes the headlines.
A young, urban majority
Sixty per cent of Iranians are under forty. Seventy-five per cent live in cities. Literacy stands above ninety-six per cent, and for decades more women than men have entered university. This is, by any demographic measure, one of the most literate and urbanised nations in its region.
The country you see in the news is not the country where people live.
The diaspora is older than most people think. There have been Iranians in Los Angeles since before the Revolution; in London since the nineteenth century; in Mumbai for a thousand years. Today, more than seven million Iranians live outside Iran, from Toronto to Gold Coast, from Stockholm to Dubai.