Masih Alinejad

Masih Alinejad (, born Masoumeh Alinejad-Ghomikolayi, September 11, 1976) is an Iranian-American journalist, author, and women's rights activist.

Alinejad works as a presenter/producer at VOA Persian Service, a correspondent for Radio Farda, a frequent contributor for Manoto television, and a contributing editor for IranWire.

Alinejad focuses on criticism of the status of human rights in Iran, especially women's rights in Iran.

Time magazine named her among its 2023 honorees for Women of the Year.

Alinejad was politically conscious from a young age, and was arrested in 1994 for producing leaflets critical of the government.

Masih Alinejad wrote in her book that she started journalism with the help of Marjan Sheikholeslami.

She began her career in journalism in 2001 with the local daily Hambastegi, and then for the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA).

Other publications such as Shargh, Bahar, Vaghaye Ettefaghiye, Ham-Mihan, and Etemad, have also published her work.

During the sixth and seventh parliament, Alinejad was a parliamentary reporter.

In 2005, she wrote an article suggesting that government ministers had claimed they received pay cuts; they were actually receiving considerable sums of money as "bonuses" for everything from serving religious duties to ringing in the New Year.

The article generated controversy, and led to her dismissal from parliament.

In 2008, she wrote an exceptionally critical piece in Etemad, called "Song of the Dolphins", where she compared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's followers to hungry dolphins that make sounds and perform entertaining acts to grab a morsel of food from their trainer.

Some supporters of President Ahmadinejad expressed their sense of outrage and offense, eventually forcing the director of the newspaper Mehdi Karroubi, himself a relatively popular and very powerful establishment politician and cleric, to publicly apologize.

In the summer of 2009, during her stay in the United States, Alinejad tried very hard to get an interview with Barack Obama; however, she was refused the interview, although she had been granted a temporary visa on that very basis.

When her visa expired, she was forced to return to the United Kingdom.

While in the United States, she participated in some Iranian anti-government protests, and delivered a speech in San Francisco, where she said, addressing the authorities of Iran, "We have trembled for thirty years, now it is your turn to tremble."

Her interview with Voice of America was shown together with parts of the videos she had made, called "A Storm of Fresh Air".

After the presidential election in Iran in 2009, she published a novel called A Green Date.

Alinejad graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a degree in Communications Studies.

In 2010, she and a group of Iranian writers and intellectuals established the "IranNeda" foundation.

From 2012 to 2019, Alinejad created and promoted multiple campaigns including #WhiteWednesdays, #MyCameraIsMyWeapon, #MyPenIsMyWeapon, #MenWithHijab to mobilize anti-mandatory hijab movement in Iran.

Some feminists have supported Alinejad's campaign because, in their view, the Islamic veil is the most visible example of women's oppression in Muslim majority societies.

However, postcolonial feminists criticized the campaign for invoking the old "Orientalist cultural imagination" in the West, which was based on stereotypes of oppressed women in the Orient who need to be liberated by adopting Western ideals.

In 2014, Alinejad launched My Stealthy Freedom (also known as Stealthy Freedoms of Iranian Women), a Facebook page that invites Iranian women to post pictures of themselves without a hijab.

The page quickly attracted international attention, and has garnered hundreds of thousands of likes.

She lives in exile in New York City, and has won several awards, including the 2015 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy women's rights award, the Omid Journalism Award from the Mehdi Semsar Foundation, and a "Highly Commended" AIB Media Excellence Award.

In 2015, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, awarded her its women's rights prize for "giving a voice to the voiceless and stirring the conscience of humanity to support the struggle of Iranian women for basic human rights, freedom, and equality".

On June 13, 2022, she was awarded the American Jewish Committee's Moral Courage Award for speaking out fearlessly in support of the Iranian people being oppressed by the Iranian government.

Alinejad has said she is not opposed to the hijab per se, but believes it should be a matter of personal choice.

In Iran, women who appear in public without a hijab risk being arrested, imprisoned, and fined.

Masih Alinejad wrote in her book: "Marjan Sheikholeslami, the head of the political department of Hambastegi newspaper agreed to take me under her wing."

Since 2015, Alinejad has hosted a weekly 15-minute primetime show called Tablet for Voice of America's Persian Language Service.

"With original video from inside Iran, Tablet profiles ordinary citizens and connects them with Americans through short interviews on common themes illustrating both similar and different experiences. The program also has a weekly "timeline report", tracing the development of issues such as the international women's rights movement and relations between Washington and Tehran", the press release states.

She released a book in 2018 called The Wind in My Hair that deals with her experiences growing up in Iran, where she writes girls "are raised to keep their heads low, to be unobtrusive as possible, and to be meek".

In 2021, U.S. prosecutors charged four Iranian intelligence officials with plotting to kidnap a critic of the Iranian government; the target was not named, but Alinejad believes it was her.

Alinejad was born as Masoumeh Alinejad, but uses the first name "Masih" (Persian for "anointed" or "Messiah").

In 2019, Alinejad sued the Iranian government in a U.S. federal court for harassment against her and her family.

In July 2019, Iranian authorities warned the public that anyone sending videos to Alinejad faced up to 10 years in prison.

Musa Ghazanfarabadi, the head of Tehran's Revolutionary Court, told Fars News that those sharing protest videos with Alinejad could be imprisoned for up to a decade under laws relating to cooperating with an enemy of the state.

Alinejad has been critical of the Islamic Republic of Iran's laws making it illegal for women not to wear a hijab outside the home, but also making the broader point that in the current historical and political context – in previous decades it wasn't required or common in Iran and many other Muslim-majority countries – describing it as the most visible symbol of oppression, Journalist Kim Ghattas has described Alinejad as "spearheading" the campaign against the mandatory veil in Iran even from her residence in Brooklyn.