For Mahnaz Harrison of Fox Chapel, watching television reports and demonstrating to protest recent events in her native Iran is all too painfully familiar.

"It's like deja vu all over again," said Ms. Harrison, 53, comparing the ongoing unrest in Iran to her experiences during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. "It's horrifying. You watch the news and how people are risking their lives and it's very, very hard."

Anahita Firouz, of Shadyside, agrees, saying images of the uprising remind her of her childhood in Tehran.

"It's like I'm reliving the revolution," said Ms. Firouz, author of "In the Walled Gardens," a political novel about life in Iran before the 1979 revolution that transformed the country from a monarchy to an Islamic Republic.

"I lived through all that. ... I didn't think I would ever see it again," she said.

While the current protests in Iran point to significant divides in its social and political fabric, Pittsburgh's small Iranian community seems to have drawn closer during the crisis, its members bound by shared identity and love of Iran while they make their voices heard on the Web or at demonstrations of their own.

Known as Persia before the 1930s, Iran has been a focus of world attention this month as protesters have demonstrated against elections leading to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contested victory.

That unrest also is drawing interest to local Iranians, despite the reluctance of some to speak about their backgrounds for fear of political repercussions for loved ones who remain in Iran.

An exception is Simin Yazdgerdi Curtis, president and founder of the Pittsburgh Middle East Institute, who said it is important to raise awareness about the Middle East. Born in the United States, she lived in Iran as a child in the 1960s with her Iranian father and American mother.

"That's very much a part of my identity, I love the Persian community. ... I've always been proud of it," said Ms. Curtis, 49, of Shadyside.

Many of the Iranians who have settled throughout Western Pennsylvania came here to study, work and raise families.

"We haven't done an official census, but our estimate is that there are about 500 families or 2,000 individuals," Ms. Curtis said. "They're generally professionals. Iranians put a premium on education. They're doctors and engineers and architects."

Ms. Curtis, who has lived in Pittsburgh for more than 20 years, said she sensed a need for an organization to help develop ties between the city and the Middle East in America's post-9/11 environment.

In September 2008, she launched the Pittsburgh Middle East Institute. Its first guest speaker was Thomas L. Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist for The New York Times, who has written extensively about the Middle East.

"I think that there is a very broad misconception on the part of Americans about that part of the world," she said. "These kinds of ties are so important to bring people to your side."

Iranians who live throughout the region also come together often through events organized by the Iranian American Cultural Association, which holds holiday celebrations, music concerts and film screenings.

College associations, such as the University of Pittsburgh's Persian Panthers or Carnegie Mellon University's Persian Student Organization, also hold celebrations for the Iranian New Year (Noruz), which takes place in March and draws Iranians from across the city, and other holidays.

"Our last Noruz party, we had I think 230 guests and not all of them were students," said Amir Moghimi, treasurer of the Persian Student Organization.

Among the local Iranians who came to the United States to pursue their education was Ms. Harrison, who arrived as a university exchange student in 1977. But as Iran's revolutionary movement slowly gained momentum in the late 1970s, she went back to take part in the revolt.

Frustrated with increasing poverty, limited freedoms, the West's growing influence and the secularization of Iran, Iranians overthrew their ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979. That led to Iran's political transformation to Islamic Republic and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's rise to power as its first Supreme Leader.

"Iran's revolution did not go in the direction that Iran's nationalists, merchants, intellectuals and students took to the streets for," Ms. Harrison said, adding that she believed the revolution was "hijacked by the clerics."

In 1982, she returned to the United States, earned a degree in education at Pitt and settled with her husband and children. She is now chief executive officer of Harrison and Associates, a health-care consulting company she started in 1998.

"It's a privilege to be here," said Ms. Harrison, who has recently joined local demonstrations against the disputed Iranian elections. "The Pittsburgh community has adopted me and I've adopted the city as my own."

Ms. Firouz, who is also the vice president and a founding member of the Pittsburgh Middle East Institute, said she never intended to stay in the United States.

"When I left Iran, I did not plan to leave permanently. I went to Europe and I was supposed to be there only a few weeks and then it extended itself a few months at a time. That little bit has extended itself to over two decades," said Ms. Firouz, who moved to Pittsburgh with her husband when he was offered a job in 1982.

"I love the city. My children were born here and grew up here and I have the best friends I could have had," she said.

Her novel, informed by her childhood experiences in Tehran, takes place in the tumultuous years before the 1979 revolution, when Iran was on the brink of major change.

"My goal with the novel was to show two opposing worlds that come into conflict and then are split apart forever," Ms. Firouz said. "The book is about those deep rifts."

For many of Pittsburgh's Iranians, those cultural rifts remain throughout their lives.

Michael Mohajery, 66, president of M3 Consultants, an independent merger and acquisition firm, has lived in the region for more than 30 years but has not forgotten his Iranian roots.

"I think my decision to stay was strictly one of where I would have more satisfying work. The decision was perhaps in a lot of ways a selfish one," he said. "My emotional being is torn between here and Iran."

Born and raised in Daragaz, a small town in eastern Iran, Mr. Mohajery came to the United States to attend graduate school in 1966. He moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1970s and now lives in Fox Chapel.

Unlike many people living in the United States, he said he chose to be an American.

"I believe in the principles upon which this country is based. This is a much better place to live than just about anywhere else in the world," he said. "This is home."