When Iran’s morality police took Mahsa Amini into custody in September 2022 for the grave crime of wearing her veil improperly, little did they know they would trigger an uprising that may one day unwind the clerical regime entirely.
For months, the ayatollahs trembled as massive protests unfolded across the country after it became clear the regime had murdered the 22-year-old while she was in custody. And while the convulsion has not yet ousted the mullahcracy from its seat in Tehran, it laid bare the cruelty and deep unpopularity of the Islamic Republic’s repressive policies.
In Unveiled, Jonathan Harounoff’s engaging and well-sourced retelling of Mahsa’s abduction and the demonstrations that followed, we learn just how close the Iranian regime came to unraveling and what would be needed next time to push it over the edge.
The grandson of Iranian émigrés and Israel’s international spokesman to the United Nations, Harounoff has never visited Iran but understands the Persian language and culture fluently. He dedicates his book to “the irrepressibly brave Iranians, young and old, male and female, religious and non-observant, who never stopped fighting for a brighter future.”
Mahsa’s ordeal began when she, her brother, and her cousins were visiting family in Tehran. The Gasht-e-Ershad, Iran’s religious enforcers, seized her outside of a metro station and hauled her off to a local police station where her appearance would forcibly be “improved.” When her family members and others gathered outside the precinct, they were teargassed as an ambulance tore off for a nearby hospital. Two days later, the family was informed by the regime that Mahsa, just weeks away from beginning a pre-med microbiology program, had died in custody, supposedly from both a heart attack and a stroke.
Protests erupted immediately, as Iranians intuitively sensed the official reports whitewashed Mahsa’s death—by severe head trauma, we would later learn from forensic reports—at the hands of authorities. The demonstrations’ epicenter lay in her hometown in the Kurdistan province, but they rapidly mushroomed to nearly every region of the country, from Tabriz in the far northwest to Bandar Abbas in the southeast, near the Gulf. The hashtag “#WomanLifeFreedom” began to trend across the land.
The most intense outpourings took place in Tehran, where police cars and precincts went up in flames. A week later, the mullahs’ goons killed 66 people at one remote protest. The number of arrests ballooned as the clerics began to shut down the internet. Undeterred, women at a Tehran college doffed their headscarves and shouted, “Get Lost!” at Iran’s president during his visit. The uprising marked the first time women and girls found themselves at the forefront of a movement against a clerical Islamic regime. A prominent IRGC general claimed the average age of an arrested protester was 15.
In addition, young Iranians are uniquely online: According to a 2021 study, 73 percent of Iranians 18 and older regularly use social media and messaging applications, and most of them employ a VPN to circumvent the regime’s restrictions. Harounoff observes a troubling paradox for the mullahs: “To be economically viable, every country needs its young people to be technically savvy, which means making sure they have access to computers and the internet. However, doing so means losing absolute control over the information flowing into, and out of, the country.”
Also active in the protest movement was Iran’s artistic community. For instance, Shervin Hajipour’s song, “Baraye” (“For the Sake Of”), composed in the aftermath of Mahsa’s slaying, was awarded the Grammy for “Best Song for Social Change.” Among its stirring lyrics: “For all of these meaningless slogans / For the collapse of feeble buildings / For the sake of peace / For the rising sun after these long nights.” Harounoff also documents the courageous contributions of rappers like Toomaj Salehi, actresses like Taraneh Alidoosti, and visual artists like Parastou Forouhar, all of whom bore the consequences of their protest art. The sporting world, too, was not immune: During the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha, the Iranian national soccer team refused to sing the Islamic Republic’s anthem.
Indeed, the regime, consistent with its brutal practice in the face of previous uprisings, cracked down hard on the protesters, including through conducting show trials and executing prominent dissidents. Hundreds of demonstrators lost eyes to “crowd control” mechanisms like paintball bullets and tear gas canisters. As Harounoff concedes, the Islamic Republic “has been extremely successful at consolidating power and fending off populist or military revolts through periods of democratic or economic discontent.” (Unveiled went to press before the mullahs were humbled by Israel during the June 2025 Twelve-Day War and therefore doesn’t take its effects into account.)
There are green shoots. Harounoff interviews numerous Iranian activists in exile working nonstop to galvanize opposition to the ayatollahs, including Hamed Esmaeilion, who organized a 100,000-strong protest in Germany a month after Mahsa’s murder. “Berlin was a huge success,” Esmaeilion says. “All the trains and planes to Berlin that day were full of Iranians, chanting ‘Woman, Life, Freedom.’” He also quotes Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate currently under house arrest, who asserts, “Victory means establishing democracy, peace, and human rights and ending tyranny. We will not back down!”
And as Harounoff notes, “Three years on, women continue to defy mandatory headscarf rules by walking on Iran’s streets with their hair partially or totally uncovered.” He reckons everyday Iranians remain “optimistic of a full-blown revolution in the not-too-distant future” that will liberate the proud and courageous Iranian people and restore them to an honored place among the nations. If this becomes Mahsa’s legacy, it will be a sterling one indeed.
Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt
by Jonathan Harounoff
Black Rose Writing, 182 pp., $25.95
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.
