Between 1970 and 1979, the number of Americans in Iran jumped from eight thousand to fifty thousand. The scholar James A. Bill writes that “as time passed and the numbers grew, an increasingly high proportion of fortune hunters, financial scavengers, and the jobless and disillusioned recently returned from Southeast Asia found their way to Iran.” Conservative and rural Iranians who came to Tehran for work found themselves alienated and bewildered by the Western clothes, values, and behavior celebrated in their capital city, its magazines and miniskirts. “We found ourselves wondering,” one
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