Camel Ride

The photo that sparked a movement is unassuming: Masih Alinejad sits behind the wheel of her car, sunglasses on, a scarf tied around her neck, smiling broadly. Being in public without a head covering—or hijab—could have landed Alinejad in jail in her homeland of Iran. In publicizing that unmasked moment, what Alinejad calls a “guilty pleasure, she has sparked an online revolution for thousands of Iranian women sick of the the government demanding they cover up.
On May 1, Alinejad posted her scarf-less picture on Facebook, hashtagging it #mystealthyfreedom. “Hijab is being forced on women not only by the Morality Police,” she wrote in the caption of Iran’s religious patrols, “but also out of consideration for family, through wanting to keep a job and because of fear of judgment from others.”
Did any other women wish to share a moment of stealth freedom? she asked. They did—before long it wasn’t just likes, comments, and shares piling on, but women were posting their own bare-headed pictures.
“I was sure that most Iranian women who don’t believe in the forced hijab have enjoyed freedom in secret,” she says. The response, she says now, “was staggering.” Two days later she built a Facebook page to serve as a home for the movement and to post submissions from Iranian women. Membership bumped by tens of thousands each day. Now, 230,000 people have gotten behind Alinejad’s crusade of bareheaded subversion. It turns out women have been loosening their scarves throughout Iran, from Persepolis to Tehran, while standing in the bustle of a city or the solitude of the ocean or a sandy desert dune. Supportive comments under each photo number in the hundreds, with messages of encouragement streaming in from Norway, Azerbaijan, Texas. “It had been the very fist [sic] time I had ever seen the desert. As sun was rising in order to respect her beauty, I took my headscarf off so that she could see me beautiful too . That feeling was great.. I was..fearless in the desert,” one woman, with her face upturned against a background of sand, writes. One brave woman unwound her red scarf and posed with her fingers making the peace sign in front of a billboard in front of the office of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei.