From Miniskirt to Hijab

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Named a 2020 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award
Finalist for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award
Finalist for the 2021 Feathered Quill Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Clara Johnson Award

Jacqueline Saper, named after Jacqueline Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. At eighteen she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran–Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in prerevolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes in her life and community, primarily the disparate religions and cultures.

In 1979, under the Ayatollah regime, Iran became increasingly unfamiliar and hostile to Saper. Seemingly overnight she went from a carefree life of wearing miniskirts and attending high school to listening to fanatic diatribes, being forced to wear the hijab, and hiding in the basement as Iraqi bombs fell over the city. After witnessing her six-year-old daughter's indoctrination into radical Islamic politics at school, she fled to the United States in 1987 with her husband and children. At the heart of Saper's story, From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran, is a harrowing and instructive tale of how extremist ideologies seized a Westernized, affluent country and transformed it into a fundamentalist Islamic society.