Iranian journalist protests compulsory hijab, bringing numerous women together

Discussion about Iran’s compulsory hijab is nothing new — just last week, a sleeveless dress left Iranian actress Sadaf Taherian out of the job and on the run to the United Arab Emirates.

But little by little, plenty of Iranian women are still making a difference.

Back in 2014, exiled Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad started an online community called My Stealthy Freedom, Today, the site boasts almost 900,000 likes.

In the Western world, 39-year-old Alinejad is well known — her page has been featured in Vogue and praised at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. But as is the case with a lot of online activists hailing from the Middle East, it’s not the same back home.

These days she lives in Brooklyn and works at Voice of America, the official broadcast institution of the US government. There, she operates “Tablet” with Iranian-American satirist and journalist Saman Arbabi, also known as the “Jon Stewart of Iran.” The 15-minute weekly video series draws on stories from the My Stealthy Freedom community.

The site’s Farsi name, yavoshaki, derives from the Farsi word for hidden — the prefix to almost any imaginable “normal” activity for Iranian women. Alinejad says My Stealthy Freedom has created a space online for women to celebrate what’s deemed yavoshaki back home.

“When they take your true identity away from you, how can you control what’s going on inside your head?,” the activist told The Huffington Post. “When you don’t control your head, you don’t control anything.”

Check out these postings on My Stealthy Freedom below.  

By Elizabeth Tarbell