The Wind in My Hair
by Masih Alinejad
She posted a photo without her hijab. It became a revolution.
For you if
you want to understand the Iranian women's movement through the woman who became its accidental symbol
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Alinejad grew up in a rural Iranian village, became a journalist and parliamentarian, and was eventually forced into exile after posting a photograph of herself running in a field without a hijab — a photo that launched a global movement. This memoir is the dispatch from inside the Iranian women's resistance movement — not the version told from Western capitals but the version lived inside the country, by women who remove their headscarves in public and hold them up as flags of protest knowing they will be arrested. Alinejad writes about courage as something ordinary women do in specific moments on specific streets. The most direct Iranian feminist dispatch on this shelf.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Iran • Middle East
- Voice
- Written by a Iranian author
- Themes
- exilewomen's resistance
Part of a Reading Journey
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
It Was Just an Accident(2025)
dir. Jafar Panahi
Is this the man who tortured him? He has to know.
A mechanic in Iran becomes convinced that a man he's crossed paths with is the blindfolded interrogator who once tortured him in prison — and enlists other former detainees to help him confirm it, with escalating and morally uncertain consequences.
Why it’s here: Punk in the literal sense that its own existence defies a state filmmaking ban — Panahi shot this clandestinely after his own imprisonment, and it's his most direct attack yet on Iran's security apparatus. Pedagogical in refusing easy catharsis: revenge here is morally murky, and the film makes you sit with that uncertainty rather than cheering a clean reckoning.
Persepolis(2007)
dir. Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud
Her own memoir, animated — testimony, not reportage.
Animated adaptation of Satrapi's own graphic memoir — a girl coming of age in Tehran during and after the 1979 revolution, then in exile, then back home as an adult reckoning with who she's become.
Why it’s here: Satrapi adapted her own story, so nothing here is secondhand. Punk in the plainest sense: the Iranian government denounced it, and she made it anyway. Pedagogical in that it teaches a kid what authoritarianism actually feels like to live through — not the textbook timeline, the daily compromises.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
