Emmanuel Todd, a demographer who predicted the fall of the Soviet empire back in the 70's, has noticed several intersting aspects about Iran.
This is an extract of an interview (in french):

The question of Iran appears as a flood of images and facts difficult to interpret from France. There are the absurd remarks of president Ahmadinejad, the images of veiled women , and the ambiant islamophobia. All that masks the major reality of Iran: a country with a fast cultural development, in which the women are more numerous than the men at the universities, a country in which the demographic revolution brought back the number of children per woman to two, as in France or in the United States. Iran is giving rise to a pluralist democracy. It is a country where, certainly, everyone cannot be presented at the elections, but where one votes regularly and where the swings of opinion and majority are frequent. Like France, England or the United States, Iran lived a revolution which has stabilized and where a democratic temperament shows. All that is to be connected to a religious matrix in which Islam's Shiite variantof develops interpretation, the debate and, possibly, the revolt.

What Todd also wrote.