by Kim Ghattas
Across Iran, many families had led double lives since 1979—a public one, where they abided by the rules, and a private life, where they broke all of them. Publicly, alcohol was banned, as was music. But there were still private parties where women and men danced together, everyone drank, and music played. Formal concerts were forbidden but there were private performances and garage bands. Satellite television dishes were banned but everyone owned one and hoped the neighbors wouldn’t tell. Morality police patrolled the street, but boys and girls found ways to go away on weekends together. The secrecy was schizophrenic. As a result, children, unable to discern this intangible barrier, sometimes outed their parents without realizing it.
Masih’s family had not led a double life. They had been true believers. Once clean shaven with a mustache, her father had grown a beard after 1979 and lectured young men about attending prayers. In 1989, at the age of twelve, Masih thought her world was going to end when Khomeini died. And yet, under her veil was not only rebellious hair but also a rebellious mind. The youngest of six, she was a tomboy and had asked her mother why she couldn’t ride a bike like her brother. In high school, she asked her teacher why boys didn’t wear the veil. Then came small, rebellious acts, like shedding the all-black chador she wrapped herself in to walk to school. Though she was still veiled, her father told her she had dishonored the family and refused to speak to her for two months. She soon began to aim higher, asking for more freedoms in what was the beginning of a lifelong quest to challenge authorities posing as wardens of the law of God. With a group of friends, she started writing and distributing an underground pamphlet; they spray painted the words “Freedom of Speech for All” on walls of a nearby town.
They were just teenagers from a small village, rebelling and pretending to be intellectuals. But in the Iran of the 1990s, that amounted to sedition, and she landed in jail for a month. More shame for the family. In jail, she found out she was pregnant before being officially married to her fiancé. She married and divorced before she was twenty-five. The rebellious streak that kept propelling Masih forward eventually led her to Tehran, where in 2000 she became an intern, later a parliamentary reporter, for Hambastegi, a national newspaper that was part of Iran’s burgeoning reformist press under president Khatami. Masih wore red shoes and incensed her superiors. But she was good at her job: she knew where and how to dig to uncover scandals in parliament and make front-page headlines.
Despite the oppression ushered in by the Islamic Republic, Iran had never become a fully totalitarian state. Iranians were simply too argumentative, too cultured and cultural: within the sanctioned parameters, there were still surprises in elections, lively parliamentary debates, reformist media that pushed the agenda, and intellectuals of all classes, who kept writing, meeting, and sketching a different future. There was even a bold, controversial magazine, Kiyan, which published articles addressing religious pluralism and the role of clerics in politics. The publication had been founded by an intellectual of the revolution, Abdolkarim Soroush, who had played a key role in the cultural revolution that Islamized university curricula. But since the early 1990s, Soroush had been challenging the system from within, asking the same questions that the Egyptian intellectual Nasr Abu Zeid had been wrestling with. Soroush, like Nasr, wrote about hermeneutics and tried to understand the context in which the Quran had come into existence rather than accepting it as the uncreated word of God. And like Nasr, Soroush faced the wrath of those who saw themselves as true believers—he would be harassed and beaten by groups like Ansar-e Hezbollah, armed thugs that operated with the tacit approval of the state.
Kiyan would eventually be shut down, and Soroush would have to leave Iran in 2000. There had been hope that Khatami, a moderate, affable cleric, could steer the country out of its rigidity and transform the system without overthrowing it. But he wasn’t delivering. Student protests in 1999 demanding more rapid reforms led to five days of rioting that turned Tehran into a battle zone as thousands of students chanted “Khamenei, shame on you, leadership is not for you.” The Basij and other paramilitary groups were let loose into the crowds and beat the protesters. The unrest spread across the country in what was the worst challenge so far to the twenty-year-old Islamic Republic. But the system survived. And despite his failure to deliver change, Khatami was given another chance and reelected in 2001 for a four-year term, because even while he was one of the founders of the Islamic Republic, he was more moderate than his predecessors who had ruled since 1979.
In Tehran, as a journalist, Masih went into parliament, veiled like all Iranian women in public, and exposed a slush fund for legislators. With a black piece of cloth wrapped around her hair and a manteau made of blue denim, she caused a stir when she made public the salaries of legislators, revealing that they had not taken the promised pay cut. She kept pushing the envelope and making the front page. After rejecting the chador, Masih had begun to question the veil, but she still regarded the piece of cloth as a secondary problem in a country beset with more pressing issues. When she had called out for freedom of expression in Iran as a teenager, she was still endowing the Islamic Republic with her dreams. She believed you could fix the system, and then the issue of the veil would take care of itself. But increasingly she found that officials who were trying to deflect her questions would challenge her attire: she had a strand of hair showing, her shoes were red, her manteau was too colorful. They told her they would answer her questions when she practiced “good hijab.” The veil was being used to shroud the country with a semblance of homogeneous unity, keeping women docile and silencing those who dared ask questions.
Masih began asking politicians about the veil. From the former president Rafsanjani to Khatami himself, she asked each man what he would do if, on a trip to France, where the veil had been banned in schools, his wife was asked to bare her hair. They responded that it would be an insult not only to Islamic values but to their wives’ right to choose the veil. She had trapped them: What about the wives of foreign leaders who visited Iran? Didn’t they have the right to choose? The politicians fidgeted. Rafsanjani admitted reluctantly that she had touched on a sensitive issue. Masih understood then that the veil, the hijab, was not a secondary issue, it was one of the ideological pillars of the revolution envisioned by Khomeini, part of the scaffolding holding up the structure—but it was also the Islamic Republic’s Achilles’ heel, because the women were suffocating. The women who had marched in 1979, chanting “in the dawn of freedom, there is no freedom,” were still there, and with them a new generation of daughters, along with all those who had embraced the revolution before being disillusioned by it.
Iran’s youth had big dreams, but those dreams were stuck in 1979—this was the legacy the Supreme Leader was trying to uphold and renew. Iran’s youth were defying the system daily, even with strands of hair that showed from under a veil that was slipping farther back on their heads. Boys and girls were daring the religious police by holding hands on the street. Masih was pushing even harder, going too far with her questions and her scoops. She was harassed, interrogated, and finally her newspaper was pushed to fire her. She left the country to study English in London. When she tried to return in 2009 to cover the presidential elections, she was told she would end up in jail if she flew to Tehran.
In these elections, Ahmadinejad, Khatami’s successor and president since 2005, had been headed for a loss and a moderate candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was expected to win. But Iran was consolidating its gains in the region in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and Ahmadinejad was serving the cause well. In the eyes of the Supreme Leader and people like Suleimani, this was not the time to change course with a softer image. The official results were announced soon after the polls closed: Ahmadinejad had won.
Three days after the election, two million people took to the streets in support of Mousavi, asking, “Where is my vote?” The spirited soul of the Iranian nation was alive and well—but again it was no match for the ruthlessness of a
system ready to deploy all its weapons to stay in power. The Green Movement protests went on for three months; at least sixty-nine people were killed and hundreds imprisoned. Mousavi was put under house arrest and would remain so, with his wife, for years. All the while, Masih was unable to return to Iran. She had made waves abroad, writing about the repression inside her country and making a very public quest to interview Obama. In public, and whenever she gave television interviews, she still covered her hair—not with a veil, but with a hat or a cap. She was still unable to fully shed her second skin in public. And she still didn’t want to disappoint her parents, who she knew could be watching.
In 2012, almost ten years after the US invasion of Iraq, two years into the Arab uprisings, Ahmadinejad’s second term as president was coming to an end and Iran was feeling secure about its regional gains. But Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards were increasingly worried about the sanctions that were squeezing Iran’s economy—not only because they feared popular protests but because there was less revenue for them to siphon off. Khamenei decided to test the promise Obama had made on his first day in office to offer an “unclenched fist” if Iran extended its hand. Secret, direct negotiations between Iranian and American officials began in 2012 in Oman to explore lifting the sanctions on Tehran in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear program. To help seal that much-needed deal, the Supreme Leader was ready to present a gentler face of Iran to the world. He watched as Hassan Rouhani was elected president in June 2013—another cleric from deep within the system, a centrist with a reputation for running the clock in negotiations with the West, letting talks drag on to maintain the impression of moderation and engagement but without making concessions. Rouhani promised hope and diplomacy and Iran’s youth were ecstatic. They honked their horns as they drove around cities across the country. The pace of back-channel negotiations picked up and the talks soon became public.
In September 2013, a month after Obama backed down from launching strikes against Assad to punish him for using chemical weapons, he and President Rouhani spoke on the phone while they were both at the UN General Assembly. The Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, and the US secretary of state, John Kerry, sat down for a tête-à-tête. It was the highest level of contact between the two countries since 1979.
The Saudis were shocked and felt deeply betrayed. They had long since moved on from the era of détente in the 1990s and had a particular aversion to back channels between Iran and the United States. They’d felt betrayed before by such talks, and it made them feel deeply insecure about their place in the Middle East and their role as America’s top ally in the Arab world. The Saudi-US alliance, based on oil for security, had its limitations, and the relationship had been sorely tested by events like the September 11 attacks. Meanwhile, there were policymakers in Washington who felt Iran held more promise of turning into a democracy than a desert kingdom with an absolute monarchy. The Saudis were apoplectic when they heard such musings. The Obama administration also believed that if a deal could be reached while the reformers were in power, an improved economy would further strengthen the reformers and show how much the hardliners had failed the people.
Obama was hoping to bring more balance to America’s posture in the Middle East. If Iran was less of a threat, the United States could decrease its military presence in the region. American troops had begun pulling out of Iraq in 2009, and there were none left by the end of 2011. Obama hoped to loosen the embrace that America had been locked into with Gulf states. He wanted to step back, to stand at equal distance from both Iran and the desert monarchies. Although the ultimate goal was to freeze the threat of an Iranian nuclear program, there was some merit to the broader approach. But it would ultimately fail—in part because, in its obsessive pursuit of a deal, the Obama administration did not appreciate how much the regional context had changed between the time the talks began in 2012 and the time they concluded in July 2015 and how this had adversely shaped perceptions of the deal and of America’s standing among its allies in the region.
* * *
When the nuclear negotiations got under way, Masih was still in London, writing about repression in Iran and finding ways to connect with prisoners inside Tehran’s infamous Evin prison so she could tell their stories. The abuses were continuing under Rouhani, an indication of the limited power of reformers. After living in the West for a few years, Masih was able to finally, fully embrace her wild, curly hair, and even posted a picture on her Facebook page that showed her running down a London street with cherry trees in full blossom. The wind was blowing through her hair, and she had her arms spread out. In the caption, she described how her hair was free after being held hostage for thirty years by those in power in the Islamic Republic. She had unknowingly started a campaign. Soon she was flooded with responses from women inside Iran who complained they did not have her freedom. But Masih remembered the moments of clandestine freedom that she and her friends would steal while she still lived there. So she posted pictures of her younger self with her hair cut short looking like a boy and hiking without a veil. A picture of herself driving from her village back to Tehran, without a veil. Iranians were constantly finding breaches in the fortifications that the Islamic Republic had built. And so Masih called on women inside Iran to send her pictures of their moments of stealthy freedom, azadi yavashaki.
The women were creative: they took pictures from behind, with glasses, their faces half turned away, in the shadow, or facing the camera with their heads bent back so only their chins would show, as well as their hair, hanging loose. Although their faces were not visible, the women were still taking a risk. But they had tasted freedom, and it was hard to let go. The pictures kept coming in. By the end of May 2014, the Facebook page that Masih had created, My Stealthy Freedom, had more than five hundred thousand fans. She had started a movement. Clearly, the veil was not a small issue—without a veil, women could not be outside, go to school, or get a job. As she explained her campaign to the Western press and Persian-language media, she kept emphasizing that she was not objecting to a piece of cloth but to the mandatory veil and the lack of choice. She was protesting against the men in power who stamped their ideology on women’s bodies, on their hair. She dismissed those who told her about the progress women had made since the days of the shah, thanks to the Islamic Republic—when it came to female literacy rates and university enrollment, Iran had moved at the same pace as most of the region. But new limitations had been imposed since 1979: women judges had all been fired within weeks of the revolution, including Shirin Ebadi, the first female judge in Iran’s history, who would go on to win a Nobel Peace Prize for her relentless human rights advocacy. In the 1960s, Iran boasted the first female cabinet ministers in the region; there were none after the revolution, until Khatami came to power in 1997. Although women were elected to the first parliament under Khomeini, segregation limited job opportunities for women. And, of course, the ban on music had severely undercut the art world, keeping divas like Googoosh at home, hoping endlessly for permission to return to the stage. She eventually went into exile in 2000.
The campaign that Masih had inadvertently launched took on a life of its own inside Iran, picking up momentum as women became more daring and sent pictures of themselves with their faces showing. Then they began sending videos, filming themselves walking on the street without a scarf. Often it was a husband, brother, or father filming them proudly, declaring solidarity with the women. There were women who wore the chador and declared their support for those who wanted the freedom to unveil. There were videos of altercations with religious police, clerics, and other women who believed in the necessity of veiling for all. Masih sifted through the videos and pictures and posted them on her social media channels. Soon her Instagram account would have more than two million followers. In one video, filmed in the female-only section of a metro car, a woman clad in black challenged the unveiled woman in front of her: “You’re provoking the regime. Our men did not go to war so you could go out
naked.” Masih knew that argument, she’d heard it when her own brothers went to battle against Saddam’s Iraq in the 1980s. The Iranian government had used the sacrifices of the thousands of men who died in a senseless war to silence dissent and demand submission as a show of respect for the martyrs who gave their lives for the nation. Iran’s involvement in Syria to help Assad meant that Iranian men were again fighting and dying outside their own borders, and nationalism was once more wrapped up in a woman’s modesty. Masih was incensed when she heard the widow of the IRGC officer Mohsen Hojaji, who had been beheaded by ISIS in Syria in August 2017, declare that her husband had lost his head so the women of Iran could keep covering theirs. How ironic, thought Masih, since he had died fighting in a country where women aren’t forced to veil. By then, Masih was living in Brooklyn, and her campaign against the veil was beginning to unnerve the authorities. Hojaji’s widow was wading in: “I’m asking people, for the sake of a wife of a martyr, a mother of a martyr, a sister of a martyr, to keep their hijabs.”
