Abbas Amanat

And this is middle class not only anymore in the capital,

but this is smaller towns and cities, places that used to be villages.

Now you look at them, they have a decent population, 50,000, 100,000, and they live an urban life and they don't want to be

subjected to that old pattern of agrarian society when you had 10 children or eight children.

And of course, it's much more advanced in terms of health and medicine.

So you don't lose children as they used to.

The antibiotics, there's all ways of kids to survive.

And therefore, if you have 10 kids, you stick with 10 kids.

You don't end up with four as it used to be in the past.

Six of them would have died after the age of five, actually.

But now, because of that, you see that this urban population in the cities have completely different demands.

And of course, the education is important.

That's another area of how the social engineering of the Islamic Republic went away because they were thinking that, you know, the growth of the population, the growth of the educated, higher educated middle classes in their benefit, or they could not even control it in a sense.

Now, Iran in my time probably had

In the 1970s, probably by the time of the revolution, it had 10, 12 universities.

Now it has 56 universities all across the country.

And there is something referred to as the free university, Azad, which has campuses all over the country.

It has 324 campuses all around Iran.

What does that mean?

In many respects, this youth...