From Miniskirt to Hijab

Jacqueline Saper, named after Jackie Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. As a teenager, she witnesses the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times as well as the Iran-Iraq War. A deeply intimate and personal story, Jacqueline recounts her privileged childhood growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran and how she gradually becomes aware of the paradoxes in her life and community-primarily the disparate religions and cultures. In 1979, under the Ayatollah regime, hijab is imposed in the workplace and Iran becomes increasingly unfamiliar and hostile. Jacqueline eventually flees to America with her husband and children in 1987 after witnessing her six-year-old daughter’s indoctrination into radical Islamic politics at school. At the heart of Jacqueline’s story is a harrowing and lesson-bearing tale of how extremist ideological politics and religion gripped an increasingly Westernized, affluent country, and transformed it, unbelievably, into a fundamentalist Islamic society.