Ours are stories about Iran that will not be found in Western media...

Excerpt from For the Sun After Long Nights IntroductionText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFor the imprisoned elites For feeling at easeFor the sun after a long nightFor all the nerves and insomnia pills For Woman, Life, FreedomFor Freedom For Freedom For Freedom—Shervin Hajipour, “Baraye”NILO AND FATEMEH

In September 16, 2022, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Jîna Amini was killed in Tehran by the city’s morality police. She was viciously beaten after having been detained by an officer who accused her of not dressing appropriately in public, in defiance of the country’s hijab rule, which broadly governs what women should wear. As this horrible incident was unraveling, details were quickly disseminated by a handful of local journalists on social media. Sajjad Khodakarami, an independent Iranian journalist based in Istanbul, broke the news of Jîna’s assault on Twitter, sharing that on September 13 she “was treated in Tehran’s Kasra Hospital due to severe injuries, including brain damage.”1 On the same day, Hamed Shafiei, a reporter who covered political and local news for Shargh, one of the largest and most prominent Iranian newspapers, posted an Instagram story. He wrote, “I went to Kasra Hospital. The atmosphere was tense there, and people were shouting, ‘They killed someone’s daughter. The police killed her. The morality police killed her.’ ” The accompanying image of Jîna lying unconscious in a hospital bed, with a swollen face, tubes coming out of her mouth, and dried blood on her ears, went viral.

As these threads of reporting began to come together, the regime tried to shut down coverage of the story. A police spokesperson told reporters at Shargh to disregard the incident with Jîna—that publishing what was happening at the hospital would only cause trouble for Shargh and for the police. But the regime couldn’t stop what was already in motion. The news continued to be shared all over various platforms, both by media outlets and by individual reporters. And when Jîna succumbed to her injuries on September 16, the Shargh reporter Niloofar Hamedi defied orders to keep quiet and told the world about her death in a tweet. Alongside a photo of Jîna’s grandmother and father wrapped in a tight, tearful embrace outside the closed door of the ICU, Niloofar wrote that “the black dress of mourning has become our national flag.” The Islamic Republic stood firm in its claim that Jîna had died due to a health issue, denying that the morality police had beaten her to death. But Iranians knew better, and the Friday after Jîna’s death swarms of people, mostly women, congregated in front of Kasra Hospital, overflowing with rage about seeing another one of our young women disposed of by the security state with such casual cruelty.

Morality police vans, plainclothes officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and riot police surrounded the hospital to try to prevent people from mourning and demonstrating. Authorities started to violently arrest people, shooting at and beating them. Elaheh Khosravi was one of the first journalists on the scene. After the commotion made it impossible to stay at the hospital, she walked down Alvand Street to Argentina Square nearby. There, she witnessed and reported on an act of protest and mourning that became a symbol of the 2022 movement that followed Jîna’s death: a young woman, scissors in hand, cutting off her ponytail while shouting, “You [the regime] are forever dishonorable!” The image was reminiscent of “Daf,” a poem by Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedA woman was running on the rigid beachesShouted: God, God, God, why have you forgotten Tehran’s sky?

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For those of us in Iran who have lived through destruction, war, and turmoil, poetry and literature have always been our shelter. In some cultures, poetry is for the elite. Yet in Iran, it’s for the masses. Nearly every Iranian, regardless of economic status or educational level, knows the great Persian poets. Even those who cannot read can recite, from memory, a favorite verse written by Hafez or Rumi. Poetry has seeped its way into our being; it’s part of our very Iranianness. And it isn’t only delicate or whimsical. It is now and has always been political. It’s fitting, then, that the legacy of Jîna’s death and the movement it would inspire would unfurl in real time through revolutionary songs and poetic slogans chanted at demonstrations and recorded in protest graffiti that covered the walls and streets that the authorities took from our people. For centuries, narrative expression has shaped how we bring life to the most urgent issues for our people. One of the earliest poetic works that collectively shaped us is the Shahnameh, an epic poem by the Persian poet Ferdowsi. In AD 977, Ferdowsi began writing a story in more than fifty thousand rhyming couplets about the mythical tales of ancient Iran. He takes the reader on a journey from the creation of the world to the seventh century, when the Arabs conquered Iran and brought Islam to the Persian Empire. It took Ferdowsi more than forty-three years to complete this narrative, writing amid the Arab invasion that imposed a new language and religion on our people. Taking care to intentionally use Persian words, Ferdowsi preserved our language and history at a time when it could have been lost forever. Word by word, story by story, we have survived our oppressors by force, with narrative as our lifeline.

At the core of the slogans created and spread during the 2022 protests, the morphing of our ideas and desires into melodies and verse, is the simple human act of expression. We’ve been killed, imprisoned, and exiled when we dare ask for basic dignity. Expressing ourselves is how we resist repression; it’s how we’ve resisted since Shahnameh. In the days and weeks after Jîna’s death, Iranians logged on to Twitter by the thousands to explain why they were facing off against ruthless, violent authorities in the streets every day.

A then-twenty-five-year-old singer named Shervin Hajipour began gathering our hopes, stringing them together into a ballad called “Baraye,” meaning “For.” As the guitar comes in to form a sparse music bed, Shervin’s powerful and graceful voice echoes Iranians’ longings. Transformed into a vessel, he runs down the endless reasons that pushed people out of their homes and into the streets in daily protest:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFor dancing in the streetsFor our fear when kissing loved ones For my sister, your sister, our sisters For the changing of rotted minds.

Perhaps accidentally, or instinctually, Hajipour joined the centuries- long tradition of verse as political commentary that is a foundational pillar of our national identity. When he posted the song to his Instagram in the early days of the movement, it was viewed more than forty million times in less than two days. In Persian we have a phrase, “khak-e pay-e mardom,” which directly translates to “the dust beneath people’s feet.” It’s a phrase used to say, “I’m with the people.” Though the phrase has been co-opted by politicians like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a pro-regime former president, to ridicule and disparage protesters, it has since been reclaimed. In writing and sharing this song, Hajipour was not only the dust beneath our feet, standing with us firmly and completely, but also our voice, our eyes, our hearts.

Two days after Hajipour shared “Baraye” online, he was summoned by the police and questioned for “encouragement to protest,” later released on bail in October 2022. He was barred from leaving Iran and lived life in limbo for two years while awaiting sentencing. In a video uploaded to Instagram on July 30, 2024, he finally informed his followers that he was ordered to turn himself in to begin serving a three-year-and-eight-month sentence for the lyrics in “Baraye.” Though his travel ban had by then been lifted, Hajipour said in the video that he would serve his sentence rather than leave Iran

“For me it’s a question of how else was I supposed to protest? How else could I have critiqued what was going on?” he said, speaking directly to the camera, his voice lightly trembling. “Was there a more peaceful, civil way other than ‘Baraye’?”

Even the most beautiful, nonviolent means of expression are unsafe in Iran. Songs, reporting, and the strengthening of community under unlikely circumstances threaten the regime’s existence. For each Hajipour who is silenced, new words, verses, and slogans will rise, finding their ways into our bodies as we shout them into existence at a protest or write them online to live forever.

This book is, for us, our own form of self-expression. If reporters are creating the first rough draft of history by bearing witness, then it only makes sense that the story of the women-led protest movement in Iran be told by two Iranian woman journalists. Our voices and journalistic work will tell the story of Iran from the ground through Fatemeh. And like many Iranians who have left or been forced to leave, Nilo will take readers through the uncomfortable upheaval of migration and what it means to reluctantly exile oneself in order to cover an uprising. Together, we represent two perspectives combining out of necessity.

Ours are stories about Iran that will not be found in Western media, the focus of which is always tied to geopolitical issues, the extraction of our natural resources, or whisperings of a looming World War III.

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At times, we will write separately in our own words. Our narratives combine when we meet each other and realize that we have to stitch our perspectives together to tell the full story of Zan, Zendegi, Azadi— Woman, Life, Freedom—the rallying cry and name of the 2022 protest movement. We bring these firsthand accounts to you to be the voice of our sisters. It is our life’s mission now to tell these stories; to watch from afar and up close; to report and write. We have suffered from survivor’s guilt, but we now realize that we are not merely survivors or estranged from our land. We are messengers.

Iranian women’s fight for liberation is neither new nor completed. Women have long been rallying together to oppose oppression and injustice, and we will tell the story of those historical and recent efforts here. We have made great strides so far. We have made it impossible for the Islamic Republic to implement its desire to cover our heads and our true selves, refusing to follow its draconian laws. We have shown that the people of Iran can expand beyond the confines of the Islamic Republic and its regime. This ongoing movement represents us, our power, our solidarity and sisterhood, a people and a nation that demand everyday life, justice, peace, hope, and an existence free from honor killings, the death penalty, and executions. We, Iranian women, are not the Islamic Republic’s enemy; we are its negation. In the words of Ahmad Shamlou, the contemporary poet,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIdiot men,I am not your enemy I deny your existence.

This resistance has not come without consequence. Two months before the movement took hold of Iran after Jîna’s death, a pro-regime woman wearing a conservative black veil confronted a young art student and poet named Sepideh Rashnu on a public bus for not wearing a hijab. In support of Sepideh, people kicked the woman off the bus. Sepideh recorded the incident on her cell phone and sent it to the media. It went viral, and in less than twenty-four hours Sepideh was arrested by security forces. They beat her and forced her to do a televised confession on the Islamic Republic’s state broadcaster with her bruised face in full, painful view. She was imprisoned for three and a half years for the crime of not wearing a hijab. Sepideh is our Rosa Parks, rebelling against Iran’s gender-based apartheid. We begin and end our book with her words and those of other imprisoned sisters in Iran to show that the regime cannot lock up their bright minds and free souls:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedA person who fights knows that revolutions will take a long time, but she does not fail. Standing for freedom is more beautiful than freedom itself. The person who fights is yesterday’s child. She knows that if she doesn’t taste freedom, today’s children will. A person who fights knows that revolutions will last, but she will not fail Excerpted from For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy.

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Nilo Tabrizy is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. She works for the Visual Forensics team, where she covers Iran using open-source methods. Previously, she was as a video journalist at The New York Times, covering Iran, race and policing, abortion access and more. She is an Emmy nominee and the 2022 winner of the Front Page Award for Online Investigative Reporting. Nilo received her M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University and her B.A. in Political Science and French from the University of British Columbia.Fatemeh Jamalpour is a feminist journalist banned from working in Iran by the Ministry of Intelligence. Jamalpour has worked as a freelance reporter for outlets such as The Sunday Times, The Paris Review and the Los Angeles Times, and has also held positions at BBC World News in London and Shargh newspaper in Tehran. She has two master’s degrees in journalism and communication from Northwestern University and Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran and was a 2024-25 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising by Thby Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo TabrizyPenguin Random House, 2025

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LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A moving exploration of the 2022 women-led protests in Iran, as told through the interwoven stories of two Iranian journalists

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s dress code. Her death galvanized thousands of Iranians—mostly women—who took to the streets in one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist covering political unrest, state repression, and grassroots activism in Iran—which has led to multiple interrogation sessions and arrests—Fatemeh Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime. And across the globe, Nilo Tabrizy, who emigrated from Iran with her family as a child, covered the protests and state violence, knowing that spotlighting the women on the front lines and the systemic injustice of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to Iran in the future.

Though they had met only once in person, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly, often through encrypted platforms to protect Fatemeh. As the protests continued to unfold, the sense of sisterhood they shared led them to embark on an effort to document the spirit and legacy of the movement, and the history, geopolitics, and influences that led to this point. At once deeply personal and assiduously reported, For the Sun After Long Nights offers two perspectives on what it means to cover the stories that are closest to one’s heart—both in the forefront and from afar.

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1Mahsa Amini’s Kurdish name is Jîna, which means “life” in the Kurdish language. The Iranian state legally recognizes names of Persian or Islamic origin, meaning that many members of ethnic minority communities must have a name in their local language preceded by a state-recognized name. To honor her name and her heritage and to respect how her friends and family refer to her, we will do the same by calling her Jîna throughout this book. Jiyan Zandi, “Why It’s Vital to Center Kurdish Voices in the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Movement,” Time, Nov. 23, 2022.

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Published on October 08, 2025 16:51
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