When Tehran Ghazi watches the video of Neda, the young Iranian woman shot dead in Iran last month, he sees himself. When Sarah Iranpour and Farshid Moghimi consider their country's turmoil, they recall the revolution they witnessed three decades ago. The question remains about what the present means and what the future holds.
The local Iranian community is keeping their eyes on computer and television screens and their ears to telephones, trying to keep track of the protests and political strife roiling the country since its disputed national election on June 12.
While Moghimi prominently remembers newspaper headlines in 1979 in Tehran proclaiming the end of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's brutal rule, social media ranging from Facebook and Twitter to videos posted online have captured the attention of local Iranians, regardless of their generation.
E-mails between local Iranians as well as relatives separated by 6,300 miles fly back and forth. Iranpour said she has been invited to come back to the country where she also witnessed the 1979 revolution, and her father recently asked about getting a plane ticket to Tehran.
Most of all, there seemed to be a consensus among those who discussed the situation that a seminal moment, perhaps the most important in decades, has been reached.
"I have this feeling that Iran has been like an orphaned kid. She reached this level of frustration that nothing can stop her anymore," Iranpour said.
In Ghazi's mind, this emotion has become something like a natural force not matched even by the 1979 revolution.
"In 2009, it's the evolution of a people," said Ghazi, a 25-year-old law school student in Washington, D.C. who met with other Iranians to discuss the situation at Iranpour's downcounty home last Thursday.
Ghazi, whose mother is African-American and father is Iranian, speaks English and Farsi fluently and keeps in touch with thousands of Iranians via Facebook, as well as his TV and radio show.
Iran's relatively strong Internet presence is becoming Ghazi's most vibrant and active lifeline to the situation. Ghazi said 30 minutes after Neda was shot, he was watching the video on Facebook, and that the e-mails he gets from young Iranians represent a scared and frightened people. Iranpour, meanwhile, said she gets at least 10 e-mails a day about the situation from local Iranians.
"It's a small world after all," Ghazi said.
"I'm optimistic about the movement of the people and their activism. This has given me hope, especially the younger generation of the people in Iran," said Moghimi, a leadership and public policy professor at Strayer University and Silver Spring resident who lost friends in the 1979 Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq War that soon followed.
Despite the reported recertification earlier this week of the election that put conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power, the ultimate legitimacy of Ahmadinejad and the clerics behind him has been permanently undermined, according to local Iranians.
In a phone interview, Moghimi echoed the sentiments of Iranpour and Ghazi when he said Mir Hossein Moussavi, who finished second to Ahmadinejad in the voting and who has been in part directing the protests, was not viewed by many as the solution to the perceived problem of authoritarian Islamic rule.
He noted that women and non-Shia Muslims are precluded from running for president, and that from a pool of 500 candidates who officially entered the election, only Ahmadinejad, Moussavi (a former prime minister under the religious leader who seized power from the Shah) and two other candidates were even permitted to run.
"Democracy comes by the support of the people, not through various factions of government," Moghimi said.
Among the local Iranian community, Moghimi said that while there is a diversity of opinions about whether representative democracy or monarchical rule should govern Iran, there is little support for Ahmadinejad, a view echoed by Iranpour.
Ron Nasri, a technology worker from Prince George's County also at Iranpour's home, said it is basic knowledge about Iran that often eludes Americans. He said he saw his role as an Iranian in America to build bridges and convey "the sense of excitement that was the equivalent of ‘Yes we can' " happening in Iran.
"If the barrage of news media subsides, don't forget us," Nasri said.
For her own part, Iranpour hopes that the prominence of Neda and the leading role of Iranian women in the protests points to a new future for women in the country who will be defined by their freedom, not their clothes or their repression.
"Who knows? Maybe one of them is the next leader in Iran," she said.
