Early morning on a weekend, Masih Alinejad waves to me over Skype, her thick, corkscrew curls tumbling over her shoulders. “We have the same hair!” she says delightedly. For her, hair is more than just her coloured curls; it occupies centre stage in her battle to push for the law on compulsory hijab in Iran to be struck down or amended. Hair means freedom.
An Iranian journalist living in New York, Alinejad has been in exile for nine years. She has always been a bit of a nuisance for the Iranian authorities — posing uncomfortable questions to leaders about policies, exposing large-scale corruption among Iranian parliamentarians in 2005, and now, from thousands of miles away, mobilising Iranian women to stand up for their rights through various hashtags. Her 2014 campaign, My Stealthy Freedom, sparked a movement that has grown so much that even she is surprised.
Always brainwashed
It began when Alinejad was photographed running through the streets of London without her veil. The picture was posted on her Facebook page by her partner, and within days garnered 100,000 ‘likes’. Alinejad invited Iranian women to share similar photos and they did — not always stealthily but also from cities. “Iranian women have always been brainwashed,” Alinejad says. “Their hair and their identity have been taken hostage because this is how the government controls society.”
But they have been fighting back through acts of civil disobedience rather than waiting for the change they have been promised by successive political parties. Women sat outside a stadium in Tehran, demanding to watch a football match on a screen in the stadium this World Cup. Women are not only posting photos of themselves without the hijab, but also videos of themselves dancing and singing in public.
This defiance has obviously led to arrests. Does she feel responsible? “Yes, I used to feel responsible, even guilty,” she says. “But one of them who got arrested said on camera in front of the police, ‘By threatening me, you can’t keep me silent’. Another came out on parole and took off her hijab in front of the prison. These women are telling the authorities, ‘I am not working for Masih, she is working for me’. They all want to be heard.”
She was born in Ghomikola in northern Iran’s Mazandaran province. When she was two, the Western-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was deposed and Ayatollah Khomeini took over.
In her new book, The Wind in My Hair, Alinejad writes that her story is “the story of modern Iran, the tension between the secular tendencies of its population and the forced Islamification of the society.” For women, the revolution was “many steps backward”: they were barred from becoming judges, they did not have the right to divorce, and they even slept wearing their headscarves. Beaches, sports stadiums and cinemas were segregated.
From childhood, this inequality bothered her.Alinejad was taught how to deal with hurdles even as a child. “Darkness is a monster, a shapeless black demon that feeds on your fear… Stare into the darkness and the shadows will disappear,” her mother had told her. She’s taken this advice seriously — when she was arrested at 19 for an underground protest; when her husband divorced her and got custody of their son; when her press card was rescinded; and when she fled Iran fearing arrest. All through, her resolve to fight the hijab law has only grown stronger.
“Unlike what a lot of people say, compulsory hijab is not an internal matter,” she says firmly. “The government forces non-Iranians to wear the hijab when they come to Iran. So it’s an issue for all women. When France banned the burkini, people condemned it. If a woman is forced to remove her hijab, people would get mad. Why don’t they get mad when women are forced to wear it?”
It’s about choice
The hijab should be a matter of choice, she says. She applauds efforts to stand up against the law — most recently by chess player Soumya Swaminathan who refused to attend the Asian Team Chess Championship in Iran in June, citing the compulsory headscarf rule as a “violation of her personal rights”.
The courage to protest for what she believes is right comes from her mother — a woman who cannot read or write, but who is independent, “a warrior” who even threatened President Mohammad Khatami once over the phone that he would have to “deal with her first” if any “harm came to even one strand of Masih’s hair”.
Speaking of her family upsets Alinejad; she hasn’t seen them in nine years. Her father has stopped talking to her. She is especially disturbed the day we speak. She had begun a new campaign, urging those who were getting arrested by the morality police to film their arrests. An angry government had approached her sister, a devout Muslim, and asked her to give a speech against Alinejad on camera. Her sister did. “It broke my heart,” says Alinejad. “In the 21st century, instead of giving women the freedom of choice, they are using my family to break me.”
But she refuses to be intimidated. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reacted dismissively to her campaign. “He said, ‘Oh, there are just a few women who take off their headscarves; they are insignificant’,” she says. “He is reacting to what I am doing. That is the power of women’s voices.”
