TEHRAN 5 Nov. -- With Western bombs raining down on fellow Muslims in neighbouring Afghanistan, noisy mobs of Iranians have taken to the streets in recent weeks.

The demonstrations, involving tens of thousands of men and women in several cities, all took place after World Cup-qualifying soccer matches. Instead of mere rallies for the national team, the gatherings have echoed with catcalls against the Islamic clerics who swept Shah Reza Pahlavi from power in 1979.

On one such night, protesters could be heard chanting, "We love you, America!" After smashing banks, public telephones, street lighting and bus stops, hundreds were arrested.

Perhaps most striking, the man emerging as an important figurehead of the nascent rebellion is none other than the late shah's son, Reza Pahlavi. The 41-year-old former fighter pilot has spent most of his two-decade exile living in obscurity in Maryland.

Long-forgotten in Iran, he literally materialized in many Iranian homes this year from thin air, over satellite-television broadcasts beamed in from Los Angeles. His agenda -- non-violent civil disobedience, secular democracy, separation of mosque and state -- is tailor-made for Iran's restive youth, fed up with the constant harassment and petty intrusions of the militia.

"We didn't know who he was", Mr. Sadeqi says. "But as soon as we heard him, we felt it was our own words that we couldn't say. He said them beautifully."

To be sure, the movement is in its infancy, and dissidents such as Mr. Pahlavi have no organizational base. Despite a reformist president, they face a ruthless foe in Iran's clerical rulers, who remain firmly entrenched in power. Prices for Iran's oil exports, its main money spigot, remain relatively high. Its relations with Europe are strong, and its borders are secure.

The Iranian regime responded with typical ambivalence -- condemning the terrorists but saying that the United Nations, not the U.S., should lead any war on terrorism.

Yet the truth is that ordinary Iranians aren't much bothered by events in Afghanistan, even though Iran's hard-line media plays up civilian casualties. Iranians see themselves as quite different from Arabs. Most adhere to the Shia branch of Islam, which is hostile to the Sunni Islam of Gulf Arabs and the Afghan Taleban.

For all its promise, the birth of a people-power movement in Iran poses a quandary for the Bush administration. After severing relations with Tehran in 1979 over the seizure of the U.S. embassy and 52 Americans during the hostage crisis, the U.S. has edged closer to reconciling with the Islamic republic in recent years.

As an oil executive in the 1990s, Vice President Dick Cheney, for one, argued for lifting economic sanctions against several energy-rich countries including Iran. President Bush has extended the sanctions, but, in recent weeks, diplomatic contacts between the two nations have grown particularly intense over the future of neighbouring Afghanistan.

"There are some things happening here that might bear fruit over time," Secretary of State Colin Powell said of the recent U.S.-Iranian talks in an interview last week.

Publicly, the Islamic regime has tried to quash talk of a rapprochement. In a speech last Tuesday, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, said, "We have reached the conclusion that not just relations, but any negotiation, with America is against the nation's interests".

This trend worries Iranian dissidents, who say improving relations at a time when anti regime protests are just gathering steam risks deflating spirits in the street. Mr. Pahlavi insists the U.S. shouldn't legitimise the clerics at a moment he sees as critical for democratic hopes in Iran.

"The people of Iran can use a much-needed boost of support from the free world," he said in a speech at Yale University last week. "They especially look to America as a beacon of hope, expecting her not to let them down by cutting a deal with the rulers of Iran for short-term gains".

Disaffection with the Islamic regime among Iran's huge population of young people has been building for years. It's partly due to the dismal economy. Four in 10 university graduates can't find jobs.

But there's a simpler reason for discontent: It's hard to be young in Iran. Public displays of Western pop culture are essentially forbidden. Lovers can hold hands in the park with the opposite sex but can't hug or kiss.

Local militia can break up pick-up games of soccer, like any other street gathering or private party. Women can push their headscarves far back on their heads but can't take them off. Restrictions on pop-music lyrics mean that young antiestablishment songwriters have to take refuge in the subtle anticlericalism of medieval Persian poets.

Meanwhile, four years of President Khatami's public criticism of this intolerance have made many Iranians lose their fear of speaking out.

From his apartment high above Seven Pools Square in eastern Tehran, Abbas Havaji watched the crowds of young people swarm into the streets after Iran lost a World Cup-qualifier to Bahrain two weeks ago.

National Iranian Television, known as NITV, a dissident satellite channel based in Los Angeles, had just reported an unfounded rumor that the regime ordered the Iranian team to throw the game and thus minimize street celebrations, which had challenged government control of the streets after previous wins. The crowd flowing from the lower-middle-class neighborhood around Seven Pools Square was mad.

The protesters' direct taunts of the clerical leadership were astonishing, particularly these: "We love you, America!" and "We love you, Reza Pahlavi!"

Ten days later, thousands of Iranians again filled Seven Pools Square, this time to celebrate Iran's 3-0 soccer win over the United Arab Emirates in Dubai. Men and women cheered, threw fireworks and lobbed handmade stun grenades that exploded with a thunderclap of smoke and light.

Riot police waited in side alleys with paddy wagons at the ready, apparently with orders not to interfere. In front of a mosque overlooking the square, unshaven men from a pro-regime militia held back. Jubilant boys mocked the Islamic revolutionary fashion with hairdos carefully gelled and coifed in Western styles. Girls let scarves slip nearly off their heads. Groups of male students formed lines to stage manic dances.

Not all of the demonstrators are angling for a return of the Shah's son. Tahmineh Sajedi, a 36-year-old businesswoman, who remembers mixing Molotov cocktails at the age of 13 in her father's kitchen for the 1979 Islamic revolution, is skeptical of Mr. Pahlavi's intentions.

"We want internal reform. We don't want to waste 10 more years with another revolution," she says. "Reza Pahlavi talks about democratic change but never apologizes for what his father did".

Mr. Pahlavi's studied Persian has become a staple on the dissident airwaves, particularly since Sept. 11. A 19-year-old fighter pilot when his father was driven into exile, the son studied political science at the University of Southern California and lived in Egypt and Morocco before settling down in Potomac, Md. He's writing a book expected out this autumn about the situation in Iran. His wife, Yasmine E’temad Amini, works as a lawyer for battered women in Washington and heads a foundation benefiting children in Iran.

His home base allowed Mr. Pahlavi to meet with several U.S. lawmakers and otherwise keep his cause alive. Still, he fell off the map politically, until, sensing a shift in the wind early this year, he launched his democracy campaign.

He has so far disavowed the goal of becoming shah himself, saying that's up to the Iranian people to decide in a future referendum on the sort of government they want.

He told the audience at Yale last week, for example, that, "The message from [Iran's] 50 million young is that an investment in the people of Iran and their rightful struggle for secularism and popular sovereignty is the best guarantee against continued regional instability and radicalism emanating from Tehran."

Likewise, Mr. Pahlavi has championed women's rights, long regarded inside and outside Iran as the Islamic regime's Achilles' heel. When asked about women's rights by a caller from Iran in a recent two-hour interview on satellite TV, he said, "Women's rights are human rights ... Under the clerics, however, the Iranian women have suffered the most by having been subject to the most humiliating social restrictions and laws".

It's easy to understand the Iranian government's scepticism. Iranian history is littered with foreign plots, as in 1953, when the U.S. and British intelligence agencies conspired to oust a nationalist prime minister and consolidate Reza Pahlavi's father's hold on the Peacock Throne. But it is often forgotten that the 1953 coup would have been impossible without widespread support for the shah by the Iranian public.

And for now at least, because of the regime's systematic annihilation of its domestic opponents, Mr. Pahlavi has an open field.