Masih Alinejad-Ghomi

Masoumeh (Masih) Alinejad-Ghomi was born in 1976 in Ghomikola, Babol. She is an award-winning Iranian journalist, broadcaster, blogger and founder of the My Stealthy Freedom movement. A 2011 graduate of Oxford Brookes University, Alinejad currently reports and presents a weekly TV segment on VOA, called Tablet, where she mixes hard news and satire.

 

Masih is well-known for her criticism of Iranian authorities. She has won several awards, including a human rights award from UN Watch’s 2015 Geneva Summit for Human Rights, the Omid Journalism Award from the Mehdi Semsar Foundation, and a "Highly Commended" AIB Media Excellence Award.

 

In 2014, Masih 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.

In 2015, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, which is run by UN Watch, gave her its women’s rights award 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".

 

She has said she is not opposed to the hijab, but believes it should be a matter of personal choice. In Iran, women who appear in public without a hijab risk being arrested.

 

Masih has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including Huffington PostTime magazine and the Washington Post. Her memoir, The Wind in my Hair, was published it 2018. It deals with her journey from a tiny village in northern Iran to become a journalist and create an online movement that sparked the nationwide protests against compulsory hijab. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.