(Dexter Filkins’s article from the NEW YORKER on 24 September 2022.)
Women from across Iran are pulling off their hijabs
and lighting them on fire, flouting the country’s gray-bearded theocrats in
dramatic scenes of a population struggling to set itself free. Of all the
astonishments pouring forth from the Islamic Republic, perhaps the most
remarkable is the fact that Iran was brought to this point, at least in part,
by an unpaid forty-six-year-old mother working from an F.B.I. safehouse in New
York City.
Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist who was driven into exile thirteen years ago, has helped galvanize the country’s women, amassing some ten million followers on her social-media sites and spurring them to trash the most potent symbol of the regime’s legalized gender-apartheid: the hijab, the hair covering mandated for every adult woman.
Most of
Alinejad’s followers live in Iran, making her one of the country’s most
powerful voices. Since 2014, she has worked a simple formula to devastating
effect. She has called on women inside Iran to record themselves defying the
hijab rule and to send her the evidence. Thousands of women have obliged, and
Alinejad has posted videos and photos of them showing their hair to accounts on
Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Those sites are
blocked by the country’s dictatorship, but, by making use of virtual private
networks, many Iranians have seen them anyway. Millions have been able to
witness the bravery of their fellow-citizens and to see how widely their views
are shared—which, in the stifling environment of modern Iran, would otherwise
be impossible.
Last week, when protests exploded following the
death of Mahsa Amini, who appears to have been beaten to death by the regime’s
morality police, Alinejad saw years of organizing finally coming to fruition.
Some of the videos from Iran have been electrifying, with women dancing and
pirouetting before tossing their hijabs onto bonfires. “It’s happening—it’s
really happening—and women are leading the way,’’ Alinejad told me when I met
her this week. “The hijab is the tool the regime uses to control the women and,
through them, Iranian society.”
Karim
Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington,
D.C., told me that as the popular legitimacy of the Iranian regime has
crumbled, its leaders have clung to antiquated concepts of female modesty to
prop it up. “There are three ideological
pillars left of the Islamic Republic,” he told me. “Death to America, death to Israel, and the hijab. Masih understands
that the hijab is the weakest pillar of the three. Not even Iran’s partners in
Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, or Caracas will defend it.”
Iranian law
dictates that any woman who has passed puberty must cover her hair down to the
last strand and wear loose-fitting clothing. The morality police routinely
arrest women for not wearing a hijab or for not wearing one properly; Amini,
whose death sparked the protests, was taken into custody for purportedly
allowing a few pieces of hair to slip out. Officials claimed that Amini, who
was twenty-two, died of a heart attack while in custody. Her father told the
BBC that Amini had been in perfect health. “[The authorities] are lying,’’ he
said.
When we met in
New York, Alinejad was bursting with excitement. Her wild shock of curly hair
stands as a rebuke to the dour rigidities of the regime she is confronting.
“They hate me because I am mobilizing women against them,’’ she said, and
likened the hijab requirement to the Berlin Wall. “If we bring it down, the
entire system will collapse.”
The regime’s
leaders clearly fear Alinejad. In 2009, after years of making trouble as a
newspaper reporter in Tehran, she was given a choice by the authorities: knock
it off or leave the country. She travelled to the United States for a
previously scheduled interview, leaving behind her twelve-year-old son, Pouyan,
and decided it was too risky to return. (Alinejad was divorced; her son joined
her in the United Kingdom a few months later.)
In 2014, she
moved to New York, and began to pressure the Iranian regime from the outside
using social media. That year, she launched her first campaign, called “My
Stealthy Freedom,” in which she encouraged women to videotape themselves doing
harmless but prohibited things, such as taking off their hijabs. Her efforts
expanded from there. “For three decades, Iranian women endured daily
indignities and had no recourse,’’ Sadjadpour said. “Today, they can film their
harassers and abusers and send it to Masih, and millions of people will see
it.”
The regime has been watching, too. In July, 2021,
the F.B.I. arrested an Iranian national in California for plotting to kidnap
Alinejad and take her to Venezuela, where she would have been transferred to
Iran, presumably to face imprisonment or death. A year later, F.B.I. agents
arrested a man carrying a Kalashnikov rifle outside her home, in Brooklyn; he
was allegedly sent by the regime to kill her. Alinejad and her husband, Kambiz
Foroohar, a former reporter for Bloomberg whom she married in 2014, have been
living in F.B.I. safehouses ever since. They have had to switch locations seven
times.
 |
| Masih Alinejad is being hunted by mad Iranian mullahs. |
Alinejad now rarely appears in public. Earlier this week, she led a crowd protesting the arrival of the Iranian President, Ebrahim Raisi, at the United Nations. The next day, she met me in a coffee shop on a busy corner. The F.B.I. is so worried about Iranian agents stalking her that they regard any encounter with another Iranian as a cause for alarm; when a friendly Iranian recognized her inside, Alinejad greeted the man warmly and then motioned for me to go. “Let’s get out of here,’’ she said.
The Iranian
regime has also tried to squeeze Alinejad from inside Iran. In 2018, her sister
Mina disavowed her on state television; Alinejad told me that Mina is married
to a Revolutionary Guard officer and a true believer in the Revolution. Soon
after, Alinjead’s brother Ali was arrested and imprisoned for refusing to
cooperate with government-backed efforts to kidnap her.
In 2019, Mousa
Ghazanfarabadi, the head of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, announced that
sending a video to Alinejad was a crime punishable by up to ten years in jail.
She is routinely denounced as a traitor and a stooge of foreign powers on
state-television programs. “I have never taken any money from a foreign
government,” she told me.
When I sat with
her, Alinejad was distracted by the deluge of videos and texts she was
receiving from supporters in Iran. She showed me her phone and scrolled through
some of the day’s offerings: a video of a young girl lying in a pool of blood
after having been apparently shot, another of a protester being beaten by
police, and another of a woman throwing her hijab onto a fire.
The regime is
stepping up its efforts to crush the protests, much as it did in 2017 and 2019,
when similar outbursts appeared to threaten its hold. On-the-ground reports
have been difficult to verify independently; cell service and Internet access
have been cut off or slowed down in many parts of the country.
Videos have shown crowds confronting police and the
Basij, the regime’s plainclothes militiamen, chanting “Death to the Supreme
Leader!” and “We don’t want an Islamic Republic!”
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| Beaten to death for wearing a hijab loosely. |
Hundreds of protesters have been arrested, including many journalists. One video showed a crowd defacing a billboard depicting Qassem Suleimani, the famed commander of the Quds force and a national hero, who was killed in a drone strike ordered by President Donald Trump in early 2020.
The scenes
captured on video echoed my own experience during a trip to Iran not long after
Suleimani’s assassination. Among the dozens of Iranians I spoke to, the regime
appeared to have lost almost all legitimacy. The little support that existed
seemed to come almost entirely from people, such as government employees, who
benefitted directly from the regime’s largesse. Checkpoints run by Baji
militiamen, who stopped and searched cars and people randomly, were ubiquitous.
I asked Alinejad
whether she felt responsible for any of the deaths, or for the treatment of the
many women who have been beaten and imprisoned. “It is very difficult,” she
said. “So many women are going to jail because of what I urged them to do. I
can’t believe I am doing this.” She began to cry. Soon, though, she was
checking her phone again, and the videos and messages were rolling in. “I’m
leading this movement,” she said, standing outside the coffee shop. “The
Iranian regime will be brought down by women. I believe this.”