Recent images from Iran -- of ferment, of impassioned young men and women on the streets -- take me back to 1979. That fall, I was teaching "The Great Gatsby" and "Huckleberry Finn" in spacious classes on the second floor of the University of Tehran without realizing the irony of the fact that, in the yard below, Islamist and leftist students were shouting "Death to America," and that a few streets away, the U.S. embassy was under siege by a group calling itself "The students following the path of the Imam."

Their Imam was Khomeini, who had waged a war on behalf of Islam against the heathen West and its internal agents. This was not a purely religious war. The fundamentalism that he preached was as much based on religion and tradition as it was on the radical Western ideologies of communism and fascism. Nor were his targets merely political; with the support of leftist radicals he led a bloody crusade against "Western Imperialism": women's and minorities' rights, cultural and individual freedoms.

The Islamist ideologues were also to attack my curriculum, and my intellectual foundations. "Gatsby" was deemed a symbol of American decadence, Kafka a "Zionist," and in the universities some vocal and persistent students and faculty demanded to replace Shakespeare, Racine and Aeschylus with works by Marxists or Islamists. The ayatollah had called the war with Iraq, which started in 1980, a blessing for his regime and many students volunteered to become martyrs, certain of the day they would march victorious into the holy city of Karbala.

By July 1988, Khomeini had agreed to a dubious peace, an act which he likened to drinking poison. Many of the eager youth who had gone to war wearing symbolic keys to heaven had either died, been taken captive, maimed, or returned to a country that was becoming less and less interested in their war, or their holy texts. Many of their former Islamist comrades who had been given absolute power in the universities had become disillusioned with the corruption and broken promises of their leaders. Their contact with professors and classmates who were formerly branded as "Westernized" had opened their eyes to the attractions of a forbidden world, one they used to call the land of the Great Satan. More than my secular students, it was this group that craved the banned Western videos and satellite dishes; they craved also to read works of Western literature, along with the heretical modern and class! ical Persian poets and writers.

In June 1989, a year after the war ended, the Imam was dead, leaving them alone with their rage against unfulfilled dreams, unspoken desires. The same former revolutionaries -- who in 1979 had anathematized all forms of modernism and democracy -- had now to turn inward and question their own ideology. This questioning became all the more urgent because they knew how isolated they were among the Iranian population, and how fast their revolutionary ideals had lost credibility -- because the revolution had turned the streets of Tehran into cultural war zones, searching and punishing citizens not for guns and grenades but for other, more deadly weapons: lipstick, a strand of hair, a colored shoelace, trendy sun glasses. Because the morality police had raided private homes -- arresting, flogging and jailing citizens for giving parties, for having forbidden videos and alcohol in their homes -- the! regime had politicized not only a dissident elite but also every Iranian individual. People like me were energized, not because we were political, but in order to preserve our sense of individual integrity and identity as human beings, women, writers, academics -- as ordinary citizens who wished to live their lives.

In less than a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini's death, these illuminated revolutionaries -- the former young veterans of war and revolution -- were demanding more freedoms and political rights. They turned to reading Heinrich Boll, Milan Kundera and Scott Fitzgerald, alongside Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper. My book on Vladimir Nabokov could not have been published without the support of those individuals in the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance who had come to realize, as Nabokov had done, that "Governments come and go; only the trace of genius remains."

Soon the younger generation of Iranians, the "children of the revolution" whom the Islamists had hoped would replace their parents' modern aspirations with fervent revolutionary ones, were pulling off their scarves, and singing and dancing in the streets -- in defiance of the law, and under the guise of celebrating what was called Iran's "soccer revolution." Mohammed Khatami's election victory in 1997 was more a vote against the rulers of the Islamic Republic than in support of an obscure cleric with impeccable revolutionary credentials. President Khatami was not the cause of the movement for change but a symptom of it.

And now in the first years of the new century, Iranians, foremost among them the young Iranians, the children of those who once had railed against "Gatsby," have taken to the streets, protesting totalitarian rule, asking for political, social and cultural freedoms, demanding more open relations with the world, as well as a secular constitution. The same people who made Mr. Khatami's victory possible now ask for his departure. The cries against the Great Satan have been replaced by the protests against domestic despots.

But Iran's fate will not be resolved by a political "fix," or simple regime change; it goes much deeper than that. Over the past two decades, the anger against despotism has gone far beyond the political arenas of elections and public demonstrations. By reading and quoting the great thinkers and philosophers, by crowding lecture halls to discuss Flaubert and Rilke or great Iranian writers, Hedayat or Farokhzad, by breaking into riots to see films by great directors, Iranian or Western, by going to jail, quoting Kant and Spinoza, by refusing to act according to the dress code no matter how many times they are thrown in jail, the Iranian people, ordinary Iranian people, are making their statements, and revealing their civilizational aspirations.

Whatever might happen in Iran -- and what happens there will have a profound effect on the rest of the region -- would not be because of the violence of desperate Iranian rulers or their half-hearted promises and pledges, but through that urge for freedom expressed today by the Iranian youth, reminding us once more that the desire for liberty and the right for a better life is not the monopoly of a few countries called "Western," but the heritage of all mankind.

It is to the advantage of not only the Americans, but of all those who believe in freedom and democracy, to support the Iranian people's desire for a peaceful transformation toward democracy. For has not the most important lesson of Sept. 11 been that fundamentalism and terror, as well as democracy and human rights, are universal, and that stability and liberty in one part of the world will not be secured without their guarantee in other parts?