For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran's Women-Led Uprising by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

This is a book I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out, and it’s become more timely than ever with the ongoing protests (I’m typing this in January 2026) in Iran. It was the beginning of the shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran’s bazaar and the escalation of military force in Iran that inspired me to pick up this book right at the end of 2025.

Little did I know then how brutal and violent the crackdown against the protestors would become in Iran. I have family still in the country, and it was horrifying to know that we could not reach them when the government’s police and military going door to door in search of those who are defiant against the state-imposed laws.

It was much worse in some ways than the Mahsa Amini protests, especially considering the silence from Western advocates and the world as a whole. Suddenly the Iranian people were pawns again and considered as pawns of external powers. Regardless, though, this was a read that grounded me.

Let’s get into the review.

The story of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests through two Iranian journalists who covered it—one in Iran, one in the United States.

The core of this nonfiction book, which brought Jamalpour and Tabrizy back together after some time of silence between the two due to Jamalpour’s run-ins with the Iranian government and potential imprisonment, are the protests that sparked after the killing of the Kurdish woman Mahsa Jina Amini.

For those who don’t know, she was only 22 when she was killed by the morality police in Iran for an improper hijab. Iranians took to the streets en masse to burn hijabs and protest the strict morality laws imposed by the Islamic Republic, which are not largely outdated. Many Iranians are increasingly secular and the religious government has been met with resistance almost since the beginning, especially from women’s rights groups.

Jamalpour, who was under threat from the Iranian government because of her work as a journalist, was inspired to go to the streets and resume her work despite the threat of what could happen to her. She reached out to Tabrizy, who works as a journalist in the United States and was at The New York Times reporting on the protests and fact checking what was happening on the ground.

Thus began a communication between the two that served as a funnel of information and journalism. This book structures their experiences on the ground and in the US through every other chapter. When one chapter focuses on Tabrizy’s work, the next is on Jamalpour’s experiences and witnessing what was happening to people as the Iranian government began to quickly crack down on dissent.

Not only do they document the history of the movement and how it evolved throughout the course of this book, but they also cast a broader net on Iranian dissent in recent history. Tabrizy’s family left Iran behind after the revolution, but not Tabrizy, working as a journalist, is unable to go back. Even when her grandmother was ailing, she was unable to see her because going back to Iran meant she would most likely be jailed.

For Jamalpour, who was also a minority in Iran, she’d already faced the crackdowns. She had the chance to come to the United States and worked in London, but she came back to Iran. Her work with the Women, Life, Freedom protests are what pushed her over the edge professionally. She ended up fleeing to Istanbul after this because it was too unsafe to continue living in Iran.

There’s also a web they’re creating about women in Iranian society and how they’re seen by a deeply patriarchal system. Women have been the forefront of social movements in Iran for centuries, but they’re often seen as people who should stay inside of the home, and legally they’re seen as inferior to men. As an Iranian-American, I see how women are treat in an unequal manner every day—I resonated with these chapters as the women described other women in their lives and families, especially considering how they struggled.

Overall Thoughts

I’ll admit it: there were certain passages where I ended up crying over while reading this. I was so invested that I ended up reading all of this book in one sitting. I’ll probably end up buying a copy when I have some more pocket change because of how much I liked reading this book. The writing is also really accessible when it comes to covering Iran, its issues, and the personal experiences of these women.

When I was in college, I did my honors thesis on women’s resistance in Iran, with an emphasis on how women in the Iranian Revolution were a major part in protesting. They were promised by what would become the Islamic Republic that they would have freedom, but they were betrayed.

I think we need more books like this in Western and American bookstore. Then maybe people will understand our people more and the stakes of even covering this from the US, let alone in Iran. A lot of Americans tend to not know much about Iran and operate on a need-to-know basis, yet seem to think a lot about our people. That’s been my experience, at least.

All of this is to say: read this book if you get the chance.

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