Many believed the election results were preordained, if not precooked. For months it had been a foregone conclusion that the next President of Iran would be Ali Akbar Nateq-Noori, the Speaker of the Iranian parliament, a staunch conservative backed by the country's most powerful political machine. He even had the implicit support of Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, successor of the Ayatullah Khomeini.
But something was happening that Iran had never seen before. It was exemplified last week in Fadiyian Islam, one of south Tehran's poorest neighborhoods and a former bedrock of support for Khomeini. Thousands of ecstatic Iranians...