09/07/2026
My long-awaited autobiography is now PUBLISHED.(Download 4 free from Bio link)
“Resistance Is Life Resistance” is my story—but it is also the story of a society seen from within. It is a memoir shaped by an ethnographic gaze: uncompromisingly honest, deeply personal, and, at times, quietly ironic. I begin with a childhood overshadowed by the , civil conflict, and the dislocation of exile.
I write about an adolescence marked by sexual, social, and political vulnerability; about leaving home, building a life in London/Europe, pursuing higher education, and working and travelling across continents in search of understanding—not only of the world around me, but also of my own place within it. For decades, my anthropological fieldwork studies took me across the four parts of in and eventually back to . The very research and studies to which I had devoted my life became the reason for my arrest. My accounts were hacked and soon after when I was returning from a conference in Africa, I was detained by Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence (IRGC), imprisoned and interrogated in solitary confinement for over 110 days at the Tehran’s notorious evin_prison, and later sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment by the Revolutionary Court for nothing more than conducting independent academic research.
I also recount my own experience of the controversies surrounding the Iranian MeToo movement and the consequences of insisting on telling my story in full in my own words. In the end, I escaped across the mountains and returned back to Britain. Throughout this memoir, I weave the threads of my personal and professional life into the wider political and social history of Kurdistan, Iran, and beyond. My hope is not simply to tell the story of one life, but to illuminate the often-unseen connections between lived experience and the forces of history, power, culture, and resistance that shape us all.
A free digital edition of Resistance Is Life is available on my personal website as well as on google books & google play also printed copies and an eBook versions are available on Amazon and through Avaye Buf Publishing.