It is tempting to see this seamless combination of Islam and flirting and dating as a symptom of the repression of the Islamic Republic, but according to one of my mother’s friends, Ashura in her day was the same. Iranians have always had an irrepressible sense of fun and growing up in 1960s Iran, girls were sheltered; in the days before mobile phones and internet chatrooms, she told me how numbers were exchanged. If eye contact was made with a handsome boy in the procession, and smiles were returned, then the boy would announce the digits of his phone number in between the chanting and chest beating, so that she could memorize it and call him later. It would go something like this: ya Hossein—7—ya Ali—6