NILOFOR STUDENTS. FOR THE FUTURE.
On September 26, 2022 , I got my first email from Fatemeh in nine months. She had just been summoned and interrogated by the Ministry of Intelligence, who had threatened her with two years of jail time for her journalism at the BBC that was critical of the regime. “I am not scared,” Fatemeh wrote. “Something like hope is rising among us, hope for changes, for woman, life, freedom, for you visiting me in Tehran soon.”
The last time I had heard from her was in 2021, when she was preparing to return to Iran after a stint in London and told me she was cutting off contact with me completely. “It’s not safe to communicate with you. You won’t hear from me. Take care, abji joon. Boos boos,” she wrote, calling me
abji, her sister, and sending digital kisses my way. She knew that her return meant that intelligence and security forces would snatch her up and start interrogating her about her work as a journalist abroad, which had become common practice for the regime in our increasingly dictatorial homeland.
I got her email in the middle of my workday at
The New York Times, for which I had begun to cover the protests surging in Iran. I was working on my first story: a visual analysis of the themes of the demonstrations that were yet to swell into an uprising. My days were spent meticulously researching, organizing, and archiving videos and images shared by Iranians on social media as the street protests started to take shape. In the beginning, everything felt like a fever—nonstop, urgent, and somewhat surreal. I slept poorly and woke up with a heaviness in my body each morning, stopping myself from falling into a deep sleep for fear of missing something from a handful of time zones away. When I saw Fatemeh’s name in my inbox, I couldn’t believe that it was her. If the Islamic Republic found out that she was communicating with a Western journalist, Fatemeh could have been imprisoned for years for conspiring with “the enemy.” But like other Iranians who were flooding the streets at the time, Fatemeh was evolving into a more defiant version of herself—one who was willing to accept the very real cost of risking her life and freedom.
By November 2022, social media continued to be full of footage of the protests. Iranians were ripping and torching posters of the Islamic Republic’s cultlike leaders, women were cutting their hair while weeping in the middle of crowds, and mourners held funerals for people killed by the state during protests. In Tehran, the country’s capital, elderly women marched up to the police, daring them to put them in handcuffs; members of the brave working class led historic strikes that shut down the northwestern city of Tabriz’s grand bazaar; and even in Mashhad, a religious city in the northeast that has historically supported the regime, Iranians were chanting, “Death to the Islamic Republic!” in the streets.
Led by young women and other members of Gen Z, at least two million Iranians poured into the streets in the largest and most widespread uprising that the Islamic Republic has seen in its forty-six-year history. The government responded by restricting internet access to cut Iranians off from the outside world and by killing and mass arresting their own people. Since 2009, when Iran experienced nationwide protests over claims of electoral fraud, the regime has blocked access to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and countless other platforms. As a result, Iranians have for decades been forced into a game of cat and mouse with regime censors, finding creative ways to be online freely by using VPNs to change their IP addresses.
From afar, I monitored the drips of videos and information that Iranians managed to get out. On Telegram, an encrypted messaging app where many Iranians communicate with each other, I was particularly shocked at videos showing the rebellion of young schoolgirls across the country. One video showed a group of girls booing a member of the Basij, the feared volunteer paramilitary unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who was giving a speech about the protests at their school. The country’s most powerful security, military, and intelligence institution, the IRGC was created following the Iranian revolution in 1979 to protect the new Islamic Republic and its religious ideology. Now it’s a force loyal to Iran’s supreme leader with massive influence over economic and political affairs. As the Basiji spoke, the schoolgirls shouted over him, chanting, “Get lost, Basij!”
In Karaj, a big city half an hour from Tehran, a group of elementary school girls without hijabs threw paper and trash at a school administrator, yelling, “Bisharaf!” (without honor) at him as they forced him out of the building. In a culture immensely concerned with honor and dignity,
bi-sharaf is an incendiary phrase that cuts to the very core of our being. The morality police killed Jîna because of an improperly worn hijab, a perceived act of dishonor. And now these schoolgirls denounced their oppressors as dishonorable. In real time, I saw these tiny bodies rebelling against an oppressive system known for its cruelty and suffocating repression. I felt conflicted watching this from afar—proud to share a heritage with these powerful young girls but also aggrieved and resentful that their environment forced them into resiliency so early.
Watching the protests made me think and worry about Fatemeh, who I knew was at risk by virtue of her profession in a country hell-bent on suppressing the diffusion of information or any form of dissent. Fatemeh endured countless interrogations after returning to Iran, and she told me that in the last one, four days after Jîna’s death in September 2022, one of the intelligence officials told her that they would send her case to the often relatively harsher Revolutionary Court, which would likely imprison her for two to five years. The Revolutionary Court operates parallel to but separately from the regular judicial system, and its focus is on protecting Iran’s system of clerical rule. Political prisoners are often charged through the Revolutionary Court, facing vague charges such as “waging war against God” or “corruption on Earth.”
I felt helpless watching from afar. Then and now, I want to be in Iran. I don’t want to be in the diaspora, watching the cruel way that we fight with one another, blaming different factions for the current regime or being judgmental when some people don’t feel comfortable sharing protest videos on social media. I don’t want to play diaspora literature bingo with cheesy poems about my grandmothers and kebab and saffron and the idea of home. I want to finally learn Azeri, the language of the ethnic minority to which I belong. I want to trace my father’s steps in Tabriz, the place that is my namesake and the beginning of my story. I want to lose the Western accent that pains me when I speak Persian. Instead, I am banished to a digital-only sisterhood with Fatemeh. I decided that if I could not go, the least I could do was bring you their voices, their stories. I could make sure people like Fatemeh and our fellow Iranians are heard.
FATEMEHFOR NOT BEING AFRAID ANYMORE
For the first three days following Jîna’s death, I didn’t attend any protests. My family and friends all worried about me, given the risks. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, journalism is like tightrope walking. In the view of the state, I’ve committed infraction after infraction when it comes to adhering to the rules of its society. I worked for the
Los Angeles Times without official media credentials, wrote tweets critical of the regime, studied in the United States, and was a journalist for
BBC Persian. The regime considers diasporic Persian-language media its enemy. Above all, I am a feminist, and the regime hates us.
I asked my lawyer what would happen if I was arrested at the protests. “Well, you would get fifteen years in prison,” he responded. Though I hid it from my family, I was concerned.
Those days, walking around Tehran was fascinating. Graffiti was visible all over, each day painted over by officials, only to be rewritten again and again by young protesters. In the alley in front of my sister’s place, someone wrote “Jîna Amini.” After the officials covered it, the graffiti writer came back and scrawled “Woman. Life. Freedom. For Freedom” where Jîna’s name had been. It was like a hidden war on our city’s walls.
On the Monday after Jîna’s death, women activists called for a protest against the regime at the intersection of Keshavarz Boulevard and, ironically, Hijab Street. I did not go, but friends told me that the demonstration turned into a confrontation between several thousand people and the riot police. Keshavarz Boulevard was divided into two sides: On one side were protesters standing hand in hand, among them women and men of all ages, religious and nonreligious, facing off against a line of riot police. Late that night, after the protests had died down, I went to Laleh Park on Keshavarz Boulevard. The cats that typically roamed had been attacked by so much tear gas that their eyes would not open. One day, an old woman who went to feed them every week showed up as usual but could not find them. Even cats are not safe from the regime’s cruel repression.
When the interrogators summoned me a couple of days later, it caught me off guard. I didn’t think that they would summon me amid all this chaos. The day before the interrogation, my father texted me asking me not to go out. I responded that I would not, because I had an interrogation session the next day. “Good!” he responded. In my father’s eyes, being interrogated was better and safer than going to protest! The session took about four hours, and it did not go well.
Ms. Maryam Sedaghat, my main interrogator from the Ministry of Intelligence or, as she called herself, “the expert of my case” at the time, started the session by saying, “Your life will be divided between before and after this moment.”
“My life has been full of these moments,” I replied, laughing.
“Will you decide that you are pro–Islamic Republic or an opposition?” she asked. “I need your answer to decide about your future.”
“It’s so unfortunate that, after all, you have not realized that I am a journalist and cannot be pro or against it,” I said. I viewed my role as reflecting and reporting the truth of what I witnessed.
She never discussed Jîna by name; she talked vaguely about someone who had died and claimed that there was no evidence to back up the brutal murder. I lost my cool and yelled in response that she was
killed. She did not die a passive death. In response, my interrogator tried to humiliate and belittle me, calling me an extremist for contradicting the regime’s account.
She told me that she and her colleagues had spoken about observations I had shared in response to a question about what had changed in Iran in the year I was away. I had told them that the number of women without hijab I saw on the street had increased by four or five times. When I had shared my vision for a freer Iran for women, my interrogators had only listened in silence, but it seemed they were finally ready to respond, nine months later.
“Our religious husbands fall into sin when they see women without hijabs,” Ms. Sedaghat said.
“Well, the husbands should not look,” I replied.
“First, you request an optional hijab,” Ms. Sedaghat said. “Later, you want to get naked and walk down the street, and then you demand a sexual revolution.” She seemed to be trying to reason with me—to show me I was mistaken in calling for women’s bodily autonomy.
Then Ms. Sedaghat changed course. With an expression of feigned concern, she asked, “May I come to visit you in prison? Can we see each other after your imprisonment?”
I was shocked. I recognized a new level of manipulation in her words. It was a veiled threat.
So she finally decided to send me to prison, I thought. I was suddenly filled with hatred for Ms. Sedaghat. During our conversations, I had gone back and forth between feeling angry with her and feeling a sense of allyship with a fellow woman. When she was assigned to my case, I worried that the interrogations would become more difficult for me. When my interrogators had been men, it had been easy to lie and play the part of a blushing, subordinate little woman for protection. But it was harder to do this with Ms. Sedaghat, because I value sisterhood, solidarity, and the collective power of women. I knew it would be more challenging for me to sit in front of a woman and lie to her directly, especially one who would undoubtedly try to find common ground and build rapport and friendship with me, even if it was all an act.
Over time, I got to see a lot of Ms. Sedaghat and her collection of bright scarves, which highlighted her monochrome jackets and pants. She never wore makeup. Her hijab was always open enough so that I could clearly see her face: She had low-arched dark eyebrows that she left unplucked and unshaped, a slightly elongated nose, dark skin, and thin lips. I learned that we were the same age, and that she was married with a son. Once, we talked about feminism, and it seemed as if she were really reflecting on the injustices I was describing. There had been moments when I wondered if I was getting through to her.
But I realized in this final interrogation that any understanding she seemed to show was all a charade, not a genuine show of friendship or kindness. So I smiled coldly and, in response to her question about visiting me in prison, said, “No, ma’am. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Is meeting with me so annoying for you?” she asked. “I thought we had had friendly conversations?”
At this point, I had had enough of her pretending that our interactions were not built on an imbalanced power dynamic. “My problem is not meeting you. It is your position; my life is in your hands, and we both know that whatever you and your bosses decide, the judge will issue it,” I said. “Let’s switch positions. Then we will see if you like it. I have nothing to lose. Send me to prison,” I said.
Ms. Sedaghat stood and said, “You will be in jail soon, and I don’t have any regrets about it, because I did my best to lead you. It seems you are watching the news from women’s revolution pages. You have been radicalized again. But I will meet you on Sirat Bridge.”
According to Islam, after we die, there is a bridge over which every person must pass to enter paradise. It’s thinner than a strand of hair and sharp as the blade of a knife. Below it are the flames of hell that envelop the bodies of sinners. It was another moment of insanity and absurdity for me: While the regime is killing people on the streets, its representatives are talking to me about theological legends. I longed to help us out of the living hell we were living through every day in Iran.
At the end of this meeting, it was my turn to manipulate her. “May I hug you for the first and last time?” I asked. That’s my technique, either a last-minute ceasefire or a fight to the end. “Goodbye, Ms. Sedaghat,” I said as I hugged her.
But as I opened the door to leave, I turned back and asked, “Do you know what the difference is between my generation and Generation Z?”
“What?” she asked.
“We defended, but they attacked,” I said, before looking her in the eye for the last time and closing the door.
Leaving the building where my interrogation took place, I became more and more enraged. Thoughts raced through my head. Being threatened in this way and living a new life of imprisonment had begun to suffocate me. My rage propelled me forward. I decided that if I was going to prison anyway, I was going to do something meaningful for my people and myself first.
Copyright © 2025 by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
