Extreme is easy; after all, it’s all downhill. And being extreme in Iran — well, who wouldn’t? It’s one of those perfect petri dishes for the reactionary way of life and thought.

Like Ireland and Israel and Serbia and Darfur and too many others, Iran is a place where it is historically easy for revenge to be permanently affixed to a lot of darn good reasons and then acted out ad infinitum. Saddle up your fatwa to a dogma and go blow shit up.

But, it’s not happening that way with the anti-government protestors in Iran, the Green Movement. They seem to be thinking carefully and tactically and even brilliantly about who they are and what they want the world to know about them. Under a vicious crackdown, they are coming up with new and devastatingly human ways to reach into the heart of a world that has moved on.

The latest? Iranian men are wearing headscarves.

The arrest of anti-government protestor Majid Tavkoli, and the subsequent publishing of a photo of him taken while in custody and apparently wearing a full-length women’s garment called a chador, is the impetus. Cross-dressing is considered shameful in this patriarchal society, not to mention against Islamic law. After the photo of Tavkoli appeared in the news, Iranian men began posting pictures of themselves wearing traditional women’s headscarves to their Facebook pages and other websites, as a show of solidarity with Tavkoli, and perhaps an indirect a show of solidarity with the women who have been so surprisingly visible as faces of the movement.

This is a protest — triggered by the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June — that refuses to go away or be hidden. The video of Neda Agha-Soltan’s tragic death during protests this summer was instantly accessible to anyone with an internet connection and generated worldwide sympathy and outrage. Watching it then, I was struck by details — Agha-Solton had on Western clothing and she was attending the protest with her teacher, a man who was not her male relative or husband. She was a seemingly free adult student perhaps on course to a fulfilling career. She was neither an activist nor the culturally sterotypical person that we expect to attain martyrdom status in the Middle East, but she has been embraced as a person and heroine.

The wearing of headscarves by men is another clue that this is not your father’s Iranian revolution. The Green Movement is taking on the shape of something even bigger and more powerful, something informed by reason and humanism in the best sense of the words . . . and playing to one of the toughest crowds in the world. It has somehow become that increasingly rare thing — a voice of moderation, creative non-violence, and utter resistance. I am having trouble thinking of any recent incidents that better exemplify ‘turning the other cheek.’ This is what should earn Nobel prizes.

Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia University, posted his own headscarf photo to his Facebook page, writing, “Proud to wear my late mother’s rusari, the very rusari that was forced on my wife in Iran, the very rusari for which my sisters are humiliated if they choose to wear it in Europe, and the very rusari that the backward banality that now rules Iran thinks will humiliate Majid Tavakoli if it is put on him — He is dearer and nobler to us today than he ever was.”

A headscarf forced and a headscarf banned. Somewhere in the middle — truth, freedom, faith, democracy . . . hope?

This gets my vote for a Christmas miracle, so needed during these last few days of the very long nights. I am again in awe of a story coming out of the East that tells us so powerfully about bravery, fragility, love, and humanity.  Listen, can you hear it?

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