Some recent news stories regarding Iran.

1. Not surprisingly, Iranian filmmakers are facing censorship:

A few weeks ago, enigmatic posters of a green reptile sprang up all over Tehran, urging Iranians to cancel their traditional spring holidays and "Wait for the Lizard".

But Iranians are still waiting. "The Lizard", an award-winning movie comedy, has fallen foul of censors for poking fun at the conservative clerics who run the Islamic Republic.

The film follows the fortunes of Reza Marmoulak (Reza the lizard), a thief who disguises himself in clerical robes and turban to escape from prison. Ironically, the escaped convict proves a big hit as a preacher and brings worshippers flocking back to mosques.

"The Lizard" had audiences laughing at the privileges of the turbaned class as it won the best film award at Tehran's Fajr International Film Festival in February.

"I laughed so hard I could have split my sides," said Marziyeh, 20. "I couldn't believe my eyes."

But apart from being funny, the film carries an underlying message that God is accessible to all. Conservative movie critics deemed the film insulting.

It had been expected to hit public cinemas on March 18, but the reels are still with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

A spokesman, who declined to be named, denied on Thursday that it had been banned, saying: "The screening has only been postponed."

2. More concern about Iran's nuclear program:

A committee of senior Iranian officials is overseeing efforts to conceal important elements of Tehran's nuclear program from international inspectors, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday, citing Western diplomats and an intelligence report.

The newspaper said if the allegation was confirmed, it would bolster Washington's charge Iran was seeking to hide an atomic weapons program.

The United States says Tehran is using its nuclear power program as a front to develop an atom bomb. Iran denies that and insists its program is solely for the peaceful generation of electricity.

The diplomats told the paper Iran set up the committee late last year to coordinate the concealment efforts after inspectors found evidence it had tried to hide elements of its nuclear program, including research on advanced centrifuges that could produce weapons-grade uranium.

The newspaper quoted a diplomat, speaking anonymously, as saying the committee's work included trying to hide nuclear evidence at almost 300 locations. The committee is said to include senior officials of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization who report to high-level government officials.

3. Finally, a story about one of the leading intellectuals behind the democratization movement in Iran:

IF IRAN'S DEMOCRATIC REFORM movement has a house intellectual, it's Abdolkarim Soroush. A small, soft-spoken philosopher with fiercely expressive eyebrows, Soroush specializes in mysticism, Sufi poetry, Islamic theology, chemistry, pharmacology, and the philosophy of science. Although he once worked for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolutionary government, he now advances a powerful argument for democracy and human rights -- and he does so drawing not only on John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, but also on the deepest intellectual traditions of Shi'ite Islam. Religion must remain aloof from governance, he is fond of saying, not because religion is false and would corrupt politics, but because religion is true and politics corrupts it.

Soroush's work is heady, abstract stuff. And yet, its hold on throngs of young Iranians -- hundreds of students show up to the typical Soroush lecture -- is so strong that Iran's ruling mullahs consider him a threat, and pro-clerical militias regularly harass and beat him when he speaks in his native land. That's why these days, he makes his home at Princeton University, where he teaches a seminar of fewer than 10 graduate students and passes all but unnoticed through the halls of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy.

That is where I met Soroush on Feb. 23, the day the dismal results of the latest Iranian parliamentary election began trickling out. The Guardian Council, a body of clerics with far-reaching powers, had disqualified some 2,000 candidates, mostly reformists, from so much as running for parliament. Unsurprisingly, though the level of voter turnout and hence the strength of the new parliament's mandate is disputed, the election results were clear: Pro-clerical conservatives packed 156 of the parliament's 290 seats, with 50 still left to be decided.

But the success of the reform movement, says Soroush, will be measured not in parliamentary seats but in attitudinal shifts, as Iran's educated youth embrace such notions as "freedom, justice, political participation, and the rights of man."

"The reform movement actually had two dimensions, if you like, two sides," he explains as we sit in his bare visiting professor's office. "One side was the political. Some of the reformists were part of the establishment, of the government. Now they've lost their power. But on the other hand, the most important part of the reform movement was intellectual, theoretical, educational."

That intellectual reform movement finds expression in Soroush's own work, which attempts to reconcile revelation and reason, religious duties and human rights. Whether or not such a reconciliation is possible is the subject of much debate and experimentation in the Muslim world today. But perhaps no one has attempted to develop so ambitious and unique a philosophical framework for that project as Abdolkarim Soroush.

Read them all.