Born To Be Free

Masih Alinejad’s viral campaigns against Iran’s compulsory hijab laws have made her the face of a new revolution. As she releases her memoir, Bazaar speaks to her about feminism, advocacy, and the burden of hijab.

- Esha Mahajan

HOW DID THAT HAIR EVER FIT UNDER A HIJAB? It’s a sea of corkscrew curls too big to tame, too glorious to ignore. And it belongs to award-winning Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, who has spent the past decade advocating against compulsory hijab for women in her home country. Her hair isn’t incidental to her story— in many ways, it represents everything she stands for. “The Iran government thinks I have too much hair, too much voice, and I am too much of a woman,” she writes in her latest memoir, The Wind In My Hair: My Fight For Freedom in Modern Iran (Hachette).

When we meet at her home in Brooklyn, New York City, where she now lives in exile, it’s the first question I ask. More in wonderment than in journalistic endeavour. She laughs, loudly, and tells me her mother would cut her hair from the middle to make it smaller. Take away the ‘too-muchness’ so it could fit neatly and securely under a mandated symbol of her faith: The hijab, made compulsory for girls over seven years of age after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which deposed the Shah. A few errant strands could instigate verbal and physical attack by the Basij, Iran’s state-financed militia. And yet, questioning the hijab was never an option. Alinejad was just two years old when Ayatollah Khomeini came into power and stripped away women’s rights—she didn’t know a world of equality. Her upbringing in a small village, Ghomikola, in northern Iran didn’t encourage rebellion either.