This is an extract from For the Sun After Long Nights by Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
For the imprisoned elites
For feeling at ease
For the sun after long nights
For all the nerves and insomnia pills
For Woman, Life, Freedom
For Freedom
For Freedom
For Freedom
—Shervin Hajipour, “Baraye”
NILO AND FATEMEH
On September 16, 2022, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Jîna Amini was killed in Tehran by the city’s morality police. She was viciously beaten after having been detained by an officer who accused her of not dressing appropriately in public, in defiance of the country’s hijab rule, which broadly governs what women should wear. As this horrible incident was unraveling, details were quickly disseminated by a handful of local journalists on social media. Sajjad Khodakarami, an independent Iranian journalist based in Istanbul, broke the news of Jîna’s assault on Twitter, sharing that on September 13 she “was treated in Tehran’s Kasra Hospital due to severe injuries, including brain damage.”† On the same day, Hamed Shafiei, a reporter who covered political and local news for Shargh, one of the largest and most prominent Iranian newspapers, posted an Instagram story. He wrote, “I went to Kasra Hospital. The atmosphere was tense there, and people were shouting, ‘They killed someone’s daughter. The police killed her. The morality police killed her.’” The accompanying image of Jîna lying unconscious in a hospital bed, with a swollen face, tubes coming out of her mouth, and dried blood on her ears, went viral.
As these threads of reporting began to come together, the regime tried to shut down coverage of the story. A police spokesperson told reporters at Shargh to disregard the incident with Jîna—that publishing what was happening at the hospital would only cause trouble for Shargh and for the police. But the regime couldn’t stop what was already in motion. The news continued to be shared all over various platforms, both by media outlets and by individual reporters. And when Jîna succumbed to her injuries on September 16, the Shargh reporter Niloofar Hamedi defied orders to keep quiet and told the world about her death in a tweet. Alongside a photo of Jîna’s grandmother and father wrapped in a tight, tearful embrace outside the closed door of the ICU, Niloofar wrote that “the black dress of mourning has become our national flag.”
The Islamic Republic stood firm in its claim that Jîna had died due to a health issue, denying that the morality police had beaten her to death. But Iranians knew better, and the Friday after Jîna’s death swarms of people, mostly women, congregated in front of Kasra Hospital, overflowing with rage about seeing another one of our young women disposed of by the security state with such casual cruelty. Morality police vans, plainclothes officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and riot police surrounded the hospital to try to prevent people from mourning and demonstrating. Authorities started to violently arrest people, shooting at and beating them.
Elaheh Khosravi was one of the first journalists on the scene. After the commotion made it impossible to stay at the hospital, she walked down Alvand Street to Argentina Square nearby. There, she witnessed and reported on an act of protest and mourning that became a symbol of the 2022 movement that followed Jîna’s death: a young woman, scissors in hand, cutting off her ponytail while shouting, “You [the regime] are forever dishonorable!”
ς
For those of us in Iran who have lived through destruction, war, and turmoil, poetry and literature have always been our shelter. In some cultures, poetry is for the elite. Yet in Iran, it’s for the masses. Nearly every Iranian, regardless of economic status or educational level, knows the great Persian poets. Even those who cannot read can recite, from memory, a favorite verse written by Hafez or Rumi. Poetry has seeped its way into our being; it’s part of our very Iranianness. And it isn’t only delicate or whimsical. It is now and has always been political.
It’s fitting, then, that the legacy of Jîna’s death and the movement it would inspire would unfurl in real time through revolutionary songs and poetic slogans chanted at demonstrations and recorded in protest graffiti that covered the walls and streets that the authorities took from our people. For centuries, narrative expression has shaped how we bring life to the most urgent issues for our people. One of the earliest poetic works that collectively shaped us is the Shahnameh, an epic poem by the Persian poet Ferdowsi. In AD 977, Ferdowsi began writing a story in more than fifty thousand rhyming couplets about the mythical tales of ancient Iran. It took Ferdowsi more than forty-three years to complete this narrative, writing amid the Arab invasion that imposed a new language and religion on our people. Taking care to intentionally use Persian words, Ferdowsi preserved our language and history at a time when it could have been lost forever. Word by word, story by story, we have survived our oppressors by force, with narrative as our lifeline.
A then-twenty-five-year-old singer named Shervin Hajipour began gathering our hopes, stringing them together into a ballad called “Baraye,” meaning “For.” As the guitar comes in to form a sparse music bed, Hajipour’s powerful and graceful voice echoes Iranians’ longings. Transformed into a vessel, he runs down the endless reasons that pushed people out of their homes and into the streets in daily protest:
For dancing in the streets
For our fear when kissing loved ones
For my sister, your sister, our sisters
For the changing of rotted minds.
Perhaps accidentally, or instinctually, Hajipour joined the centuries-long tradition of verse as political commentary that is a foundational pillar of our national identity. When he posted the song to his Instagram in the early days of the movement, it was viewed more than forty million times in less than two days. In writing and sharing this song, Hajipour was not only the dust beneath our feet, standing with us firmly and completely, but also our voice, our eyes, our hearts.
Two days after Hajipour shared “Baraye” online, he was summoned by the police and questioned for “encouragement to protest,” later released on bail in October 2022. He was barred from leaving Iran and lived life in limbo for two years while awaiting sentencing. In a video uploaded to Instagram on July 30, 2024, he finally informed his followers that he was ordered to turn himself in to begin serving a three-year-and-eight-month sentence for the lyrics in “Baraye.” Though his travel ban had by then been lifted, Hajipour said in the video that he would serve his sentence rather than leave Iran.
“For me it’s a question of how else was I supposed to protest? How else could I have critiqued what was going on?” he said, speaking directly to the camera, his voice lightly trembling. “Was there a more peaceful, civil way other than ‘Baraye’?”
Even the most beautiful, nonviolent means of expression are unsafe in Iran. Songs, reporting, and the strengthening of community under unlikely circumstances threaten the regime’s existence. For each Hajipour who is silenced, new words, verses, and slogans will rise, finding their ways into our bodies as we shout them into existence at a protest or write them online to live forever.
(c) Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour
Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.