The official name of the course is Political Science 201:Problems of War and Peace, but in any given class session the underlying lesson is one of personal freedom and civic responsibility.

"I tell them, ‘You have to ask anything you want,’" says University of Hawaii doctoral student and lecturer Reza Mohajerinejad. "I want them to ask anything they want and also to understand how important that freedom is. As much as they use their freedom, they make a better country for their future."

The affable and unfailingly polite Iranian expatriate understands these concepts better than most, for he bears the scars of their inverse in his mind and on his body.

Mohajerinejad grew up in Babol, a town in Mazandaran province, in northern Iran. In 1999, while attending Tehran University, he helped to lead a weeklong protest sparked by an incident in which police and "plainclothes" officers attacked students involved in a peaceful demonstration a day earlier against the shutdown of a reforming newspaper.

Mohajerinejad and other student leaders were arrested and sent to the infamous Tohid Prison, where he was held in solitary confinement and tortured for 137 days.

"I thought I would lose my life," Mohajerinejad says.

Alone in his cell, unable to distinguish between the lingering aura of those who had suffered there before and the reek of his own sorry condition, Mohajerinejad says he could literally smell the desperation and the desire for reform of his political predecessors.

Following a stint in a police detention center and his subsequent release, Mohajerinejad fled Iran, intent on sharing the events of July 1999 with the world and working to promote secular democracy in Iran.

Mohajerinejad landed in California, where he earned a master’s degree in political science at San Francisco State University. He is in Hawaii as part of his continuing doctoral studies.

Mohajerinejad said there has been a groundswell of popular support for government reform since he left the country, as evidenced by the Green Movement of 2009.

"Change has to come from the people, not from outside military intervention," he says. "In 1999 we were 50,000. In 2009 it was millions."

Mohajerinejad says public dissatisfaction with theocratic governance and a desire for freedom of speech, equal rights for women and relief from poverty are driving the current push for democracy.

And while he understands that true political reform takes time — "Democracy is not one day; it is a process," he says — Mohajerinejad is confident that he will one day be able to return home to the family he has not seen in 15 years.

"When change happens, I want to go back and smell freedom,"he says. "It will happen."

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Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.