Traslation of the original in Farsi.
Professor Kazem Kazerounian
They asked why she wore the headscarf; they never asked why she stood tall.
Forough once declared: “I have sinned—a sin brimming with ecstasy, in an embrace that was warm and aflame.”
And in those words, woman broke through the wall of centuries—out of the cloister of shame, out of the fortress of masculine sanctity. Forough severed the body from sin. She neither repented nor surrendered. She was woman, and she rebelled.
She was neither the beginning nor the end. She was the continuation of awakening. She charged against the twin poles of possession and spectacle until she found herself. And when woman awoke, rebellion ignited. Every cry bore her own voice, poured into a language laced with her will and her anguish.
No rebellion mirrored another. Minds habituated to a single image recoil from this rupture of fetters, yearning to cage woman’s revolt within the bars of their own tastes. Rebellion is fine, they say, so long as it wears our colors.
In the streets of Tehran, Paris, and Berlin—in homes and in exile—another Iranian woman rose. One sheared her hair to make it a cry. Another bared herself and shattered gazes and hurled shame back upon its owners. She became neither spectacle nor instrument; she became revolt.
In the mountains of Kurdistan, women rose with hair whipping in the wind and rifles slung across their shoulders. They were Peshmerga—not for show, but for dignity and human liberty. Amid the mountain chill, encircled by death, they stood and forged weapons from hope. Alas, many never beheld the Iranian Kurdish Peshmerga woman in the raw truth of her peaks and blood, her vision and valor—preferring instead to applaud her in the dramatic guise of cinematic portrayal.
Yet in the Mojahed[i] woman, revolt strode into the arena—vast as the battlefield, profound as the suffering she inhabited. A revolt not in words alone, but in combat; not in display or dream, but in resolve. In a world that deemed the veil a mark of obedience, she transformed it into a banner of struggle. It was never about glimpsing a lock of hair; it was about agency.
For the Mojahed woman, the veil was no law—it was revolution; a cry from within, an utterance of woman in a realm that had made her body a field of domination. In a world where even the most enlightened men sought to frame woman in the portrait of beauty, she wrested the gaze from the body and fixed it upon the will. Her veil was neither the black shroud of submission nor a prop for the feast of Hazrat Abbas.[ii] Not for concealment, but for presence.
Against the woman who sought her freedom in others’ eyes, and the one who found her faith in blind obedience, the Mojahed woman carved a third path—one where faith and freedom stood shoulder to shoulder. The backward hid woman in the chador; the faux-modern displayed her in the shop window. Both craved the same: a woman stripped of choice. In their squabble over “choice,” there was no room for true volition. And the Mojahed woman stood firm between these twin deceptions. Her veil flew as the flag of war against both camps.
How myopic those reactionaries and pseudo-progressives who demand the Mojahed woman answer for their fatuous debate over seeing or not seeing a strand of hair. The Mojahed woman’s veil was no man’s decree—it was the shattering of man’s decree. Not a sign of subservience, but the seizure of the field. In an ideology scripted by men, she envisioned faith as the theater of emancipatory battle. She seized faith in her hands, redefined it, and proclaimed: If faith is the path, it is my path; if it is the arena, it is my arena—and the veil, my banner of war.
Her veil was no cloak of silence; it was the roar of awakening. In an organization where men once issued commands at the outset, woman inscribed the law. From that day forth, the veil ceased to be a curtain and became a flag—the flag of woman’s presence in a battlefield from which she had been banished for centuries. She stood in Tehran and Ashraf. She reclaimed faith from the mullahs’ grasp and forged it into a weapon of liberty.
This revolt sprang not from borrowed flames. It rose from the depths of her own culture and soil—from the very land that had shrouded woman in shadow for ages, yet from that shadow she wrought light. Her beauty was measured in the alloy of will, not in the hue of hair or the mirror’s gleam. She became the woman whose name made the guardians of darkness tremble: Commander Sara.[iii]
The Mojahed woman is the core of decision, not the periphery of power. In an organization forged from inner fire and faith, she is the pillar, not the shadow. And woe to those who still fail to grasp it—this woman is neither history’s mere spectator nor its hapless victim; she is its author.
[i] In modern Iranian political discourse, particularly within the context of resistance to the Islamic Republic, “Mojahed” specifically denotes a member or fighter of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), also known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).
[ii] Sofreh-ye Hazrat Abbas refers to a traditional Shia Muslim ritual during the month of Muharram, particularly Ashura, where a symbolic table (sofreh) is spread with food, sweets, and items like water and fruits to commemorate Abbas ibn Ali—brother of Imam Hussein and a revered martyr in the Battle of Karbala (680 CE). It evokes themes of unfulfilled hospitality, loyalty, and sacrifice, often tied to mourning processions in Iran and other Shia communities.
[iii] Commander Sara evokes the indomitable Sara Tolou, one of the fearless battalion commanders in the National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA). She led the charge against the Revolutionary Guards during the Mujahedin-e Khalq’s audacious Operation Eternal Light (Forough Javidan) in July 1988, which propelled the NLA to the very gates of Kermanshah, shaking the regime to its core. Captured in the fury of battle, she met a martyr’s end: slain by her foes, then desecrated by the mullahs, who hanged her upside down from a gnarled tree in Hassan-Abad Pass, a dagger plunged into her valiant heart as a grotesque trophy of their terror. Yet in her defiance, Sara Tolou etched an eternal emblem of resistance, her spirit unyielding, a beacon for every woman who wields faith as her sword and freedom as her shield.