And yet it was Ahmadinejad’s second term, which was in many ways even more destructive than his first for Iran’s economy and status in the world, that helped bring about the election of the reformist Hassan Rouhani. No less importantly, Iran’s new politics was born of the clerical regime’s relentless effort—stemming from the Islamic Republic’s founding principle of Velayat-e faqih, or rule of the Shiite jurist as the representative of Allah on Earth—to micro-social-engineer life and culture in Iran. When a country’s rulers try to dictate everything from sartorial style to sexual ethics—as Iran’s Islamic conservatives have consistently done by, for example, mandating that women wear headscarves in public and pressuring men not to wear ties—then every one of those details of daily life becomes a potential flashpoint of resistance.

The people of Iran have cleverly, and daringly, learned to turn these restrictions into tools for social and political resistance and change—so much so that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his conservative allies have repeatedly referred to what they call “culture wars” in the country. His anxieties, it appears, are not just the paranoid fears of an authoritarian.

The trend is perhaps most clearly visible in Iran’s popular culture. Authors, for example, need government permits before publishing their books, and getting such permits requires excising any mention of sex, praise for Iran’s pre-Revolutionary government, or criticism of the current regime. Yet in the past few years, a small but growing number of writers have opted to publish limited copies of their books privately and distribute them through informal networks without government approval. Though in function these materials are similar to the samizdat literature of the Soviet era—secretly distributed works by dissidents, which were often crudely and hurriedly produced—in form they are far more polished. From nude sketches by a prominent artist, to sensual or satirical poems, to experimental stories in the vein of noir novels, a new and daring publishing domain has emerged outside the regime’s prescriptions.

Plays, too, need government permits before they can begin rehearsal, and can be shut down even so, sometimes mid-performance. But there has emerged in response a small industry of uncensored plays staged in private houses for audiences ranging in size from a few dozen to a hundred people. Similarly, Mehran Modiri, a popular satirist whose program—a kind of Persian Prairie Home Companion set in rural Iran—was taken off the air, chose to privately finance the show and sell it through the underground DVD market. This market has, in the last two years or so, grown large enough that some of the producers and directors who privately finance their programs to get around regime restrictions are reported to be able to pay large sums to their actors.