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BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week
Childhood in Iran – Episode 1
BBC Radio 4. picks The Wind in My Hair, as its book of the week. Masih Alinejad is a journalist and activist from a small village in Iran, who sparked against compulsory hijab. Across Iran, women started sharing pictures of their uncovered hair on Masih’s Facebook page in open defiance of the strict religious beliefs of their country – and often, their families.
But Masih’s journey began in a small and impoverished village in northern Iran before she made her way to some of the country’s top newspapers. Her writings angered many powerful people in Iran who forced her into exile.
In this first episode, she remembers the advice her mother gave her to overcome obstacles
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School Rebellion – Episode 2
School Rebellion – Episode 2
In this episode, Masih starts an underground political book group while at school. She continued to be a troublemaker, reading out a poem against the Islamic Republic during a Quran recital competition. The group soon decides to publish secret pamphlets calling for greater freedom in Iranian society, and word of their activities begins to spread alarmingly quickly. Meanwhile, Masih struggles with the question of whether she can bear to get married, purely in order to travel and live more freely.
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My Stealthy Freedom – Episode 5
My Stealthy Freedom – Episode 5
It is now years later and Masih’s journalism have turned her into a target. Masih finds that she is no longer safe in Tehran working as a political journalist. She is forced into exile during the Iranian elections of 2009 but finds a way to protest against the Islamic Republic with her online movement.
Press
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”
Press
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”
Press
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”