When people ask me about Iran, about my memories, the first things that come to mind are smells: food, saffron, spices, the scent of my grandparents, and fresh herbs. There is something about memory that begins precisely with the small things, before you ever get to the larger stories, the politics, or the headlines. For me, Iran was always, first and foremost, a living, familial place, full of details that were etched into me long before I understood what they meant.
And then I remember the hijab.
I remember all the colors worn by all the women I knew, so many colors and so many different homes. I remember when we arrived in Turkey, and suddenly my mother was no longer wearing a hijab. At some point, I understood that she had not worn it by choice. That realization did not come all at once. It took shape slowly, through memories, questions, old photographs, and family conversations. Suddenly, things that had seemed ordinary to me as a child took on an entirely different meaning. I realized that even an innocent memory can carry within it an entire system of fear, coercion, and adaptation.
As I grew older, I learned more about Iran. I taught myself to read and write, to the point that my high school Arabic teacher would tell me that I read with too much of a Persian accent. The more I learned, the more I felt that I was drawing closer to the place I had left behind, while also realizing how far I had moved away from it. Language became a bridge for me: a way to read people, understand codes, listen to stories, and connect what I remembered as a child with what I learned as a young woman.
My dreams became vivid. I would actually dream that I was in Iran, without a hijab, running from the morality police, from the Basij.
But perhaps that was the universe’s way of preparing me for a role in the series “Tehran.” There, for the first time, I spent days wearing the blue hijab designated for female students. For me, the hijab was a costume, something I could take off whenever I needed some air, so I could drink my tea without feeling that tightness in my throat. The contrast was almost impossible to comprehend. I could remove the hijab when the scene was over. For millions of other women, you cannot simply call “cut” and return to another life. That knowledge stayed with me long after filming ended.
Three years later, a young woman who at the time was older than I was, Jina Mahsa Amini, traveled to Iran’s Kurdistan Province and from there to Tehran with her brother. Because her head covering did not conceal all of her hair, she was detained and later died from her injuries.
Today, I am older than Mahsa Amini was when she was killed, and I do not think she could ever have known just how profoundly she would become a catalyst for revolution in Iran. From that moment on, the hijab was no longer merely a symbol of coercion. It also became a symbol of resistance to it. Women removed it in the streets, in front of cameras, police officers, families, and an entire world that had grown accustomed to seeing Iran as a place where nothing could ever change.
Today, hundreds of thousands of women and young girls walk through the streets of Tehran without hijabs and ride bicycles. Perhaps that sounds trivial to us, but it represents the greatest degree of freedom Iranian women have experienced in the past forty-eight years.
That is why the regime is so afraid of new protests. They inspire courage in us as human beings. They always have. Because once a person sees that someone else has dared to act, something changes within them as well. Boundaries that once seemed permanent begin to look temporary. Fear that was once personal becomes a shared experience, and that shared experience can become a political, social, and cultural force.
Revolutions are psychological. The revolution in Iran has already taken place, in the way people’s thinking has changed, both in how they see themselves and how they see reality. Now all that remains is for the world to catch up.
One day, my daughter will be asked about Iran, and she will say that her memories are of the landscapes, the smells, the freedom, and the courage of its people.
