The Wind in My Hair

9 New Books We Recommend This Week

THE WIND IN MY HAIR: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran, by Masih Alinejad.
(Little, Brown, $28.) In her passionate and often riveting memoir, Alinejad — an Iranian-American journalist and lifelong advocate for Muslim women — unspools her struggles against poverty, political repression and personal crises. “Told poignantly and with a blunt honesty that seems a characteristic of Alinejad’s life and writing, here is a gripping tale that permits us to peek at the inner workings of the Iranian Revolution and consider the question of its health and longevity,” our reviewer, Rafia Zakaria, writes.

The Woman Whose Hair Frightens Iran

When Masih Alinejad was a girl in the tiny Iranian village of Ghomikola, her father — who eked out a living selling chickens, ducks and eggs — once brought home a thick yellow stick. Her mother, the village tailor, cut it into six tiny pieces at her husband’s instruction. Each child got one, including the youngest, our author. Read more “The Woman Whose Hair Frightens Iran” →

one Iranian woman’s courageous struggle against being forced to…

Masih Alinejad has paid a high price for letting her hair down and criticising her government. She’s been sentenced to prison, fled her native Iran and is unable to see her family. Here, she reveals why all she wants is to give women the choice to wear the hijab or not Read more “one Iranian woman’s courageous struggle against being forced to wear the hijab” →

4 Writers to Watch This Summer

A Memoir That Came to Life When She Removed Her Hijab

The first time Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist, walked in public without her hijab was in 2006. She was a 30-year-old columnist for Etemad-e-Melli, a now defunct Iranian daily newspaper, and working on a series of articles in Beirut, Lebanon. Ms. Alinejad, who was on her first trip outside of Iran, was immediately struck by the city’s relatively relaxed attitude toward women’s appearance in public.

10 best books of May: the Monitor’s picks

“The Wind in My Hair,” by Masih Alinejad

Gutsy Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad tells her life story in a chatty, confiding tone. Right from her childhood in a small village in rural Iran, she was a rebel. As a young adult, she chose the unusual (for an Iranian woman) career of journalism and was exiled to Britain, where she created My Stealthy Freedom, a Facebook page for women who reject the compulsory hijab. Alinejad’s experiences make for a compelling and eye-opening read.
Christian Science Monitor

My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran

Publishers Weekly
In this intense memoir, Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and women’s rights advocate, writes about her life of resistance in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Alinejad chronicles her teenage years in a rural village in the 1990s, pulling pranks as a kind of rebellion against the supreme leader (in a high school Quran-reading competition, she recited an epic poem by Ahmad Shamlou in Persian); as an adult, she became a prominent, globally recognized advocate for women’s rights in Iran. Read more “My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran” →

THE WIND IN MY HAIR

Pointed memoir by an Iranian journalist who has been a longtime advocate of women’s rights in the Islamic republic.

Alinejad, who has largely lived in exile for years, was born in a village in northern Iran. “I couldn’t imagine a better place anywhere else in the world,” she writes of her hometown. Born two years before the ouster of the shah, the author never knew the relative freedoms women enjoyed in Iran before the revolution in a state so secular that a law was passed forbidding women from wearing the hijab. “If I was alive then,” she writes, “I’d have opposed it not because I believe in the hijab but because I believe in freedom of choice.” Read more “THE WIND IN MY HAIR” →

An Iranian Activist’s Gutsy Story

The Wind in My Hair, by Masih Alinejad

Alinejad, creator of the My Stealthy Freedom campaign, celebrates ‘the moments of small rebellion, the tiny acts of defiance that allow us to breathe, the guilty pleasure of breaking unjust rules.’

In her compelling memoir, The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran, journalist and activist Masih Alinejad describes several occasions when she was castigated for how she was dressed. The first occurred when she was a teenager who traveled from her tiny northern Iranian village, Ghomikola, to the city of Babol to attend high school. When she saw that many young women in Babol did not wear the chador, the large cloak that leaves only a woman’s face visible, she decided to stop wearing one herself.
Read more “An Iranian Activist’s Gutsy Story” →