From Miniskirt to Hijab cover art

From Miniskirt to Hijab

A Girl in Revolutionary Iran

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From Miniskirt to Hijab

By: Jacqueline Saper
Narrated by: Vaneh Assadourian
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About this listen

Jacqueline Saper, named after Jacqueline Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. At 18 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 living a carefree life of wearing miniskirts and attending high school to listening to fanatic diatribes, forced to wear the hijab, and hiding in the basement as Iraqi bombs fell over the city. She eventually fled to the United States in 1987 with her husband and children after, in part, witnessing her six-year-old daughter’s indoctrination into radical Islamic politics at school. At the heart of Saper’s story is a harrowing and instructive tale of how extremist ideologies seized a Westernized, affluent country and transformed it into a fundamentalist Islamic society.

©2018 Jaqueline Saper (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing Middle East Women Iran
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Fantastic telling of a young woman's life during turbulent years of oppression in Iran. Maneuvering through a society that is at odds with her beliefs and ideas of self to eventually overcome the odds and settle in a new country.

An amazing life story.

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A history lesson of Iran through the eyes of a magnificent woman. Thanks for writing this autobiography.

An incredible biography!

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Loved this! Narrator and story were both amazing. I learnt so much about Iran and Jewish people living there.

Amazing!

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One of the best biographies I've read on Audible. Informative and engrossing covering the life of a woman who experienced three significant stages in Iran's history - the good, the bad and the ugly.
Narrator was first class, with no breathy overkill preferred by many narrators.
It contained a lot of explanation, but the author wove it brilliantly into the storyline.

An engrossing read

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