Review
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“[Shirin] Ebadi recounts the cycle of sinister
assaults she faced after she won the Nobel Prize in 2003. Her new
memoir, written as a novel-like narrative, captures the
precariousness of her situation and her determination to ‘stand
firm.’”—The Washington Post
“Powerful . . . Although [Ebadi’s] memoir underscores that a
slow change will have to come from within Iran, it is also proof
of the stunning effects of her nonviolent struggle on behalf of
those who bravely, and at a very high cost, keep pushing for the
most basic rights.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Shirin Ebadi is quite simply the most vital voice for freedom
and human rights in Iran.”—Reza Aslan, author of No god but God
and Zealot
“Shirin Ebadi writes of exile hauntingly and speaks of Iran, her
homeland, as the poets do. Ebadi is unafraid of addressing the
personal as well as the political and does both fiercely, with
introspection and fire.”—ima Bhutto, author of The Shadow of
the Crescent Moon
“I would encourage all to read Dr. Shirin Ebadi’s memoir and to
understand how her struggle for human rights continued after
winning the Nobel Peace Prize. It is also fascinating to see how
she has been affected positively and negatively by her Nobel
Prize. This is a must read for all.”—Desmond Tutu
“A revealing portrait of the state of political oppression in
Iran . . . [Ebadi] is an inspiring figure, and her suspenseful,
evocative story is unforgettable.”—Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
“Ebadi’s courage and strength of character are evident
throughout this engrossing text, which illuminates the power the
few have had over the many, particularly the women and children
of Iran. The captivating and candid story of a woman who took on
the Iranian government and survived, despite every attempt to
make her fail.”—Kirkus Reviews
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About the Author
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Dr. Shirin Ebadi was one of Iran’s first female
judges and served as the first female chief magistrate of one of
the country’s highest courts until the 1979 Islamic Revolution
stripped her of her judgeship. In the 1990s Ebadi returned to the
law as a defender of women’s and children’s rights, founding a
human rights center that spearheaded legal reform and public
debate around the Islamic Republic’s discriminatory laws. She has
defended many of the country’s most prominent prisoners of
conscience and spent nearly a month in prison in 1999 for her
activities. For many years she was at the center of Iran’s
grassroots women’s movement. In 2003 she was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize for her work. Since the election uprising of June
2009 she has lived in exile.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Chapter 1
Intimidation
The story of Iran is the story of my life. Sometimes I wonder why
I am so attached to my country, why the outline of Tehran’s
Alborz ains is as and precious to me as the curve
of my daughter’s face, and why I feel a duty to my nation that
overwhelms everything else. I remember when so many of my friends
and relatives began leaving the country in the 1980s,
disheartened by the bombs raining down from the war with Iraq and
by the morality checkpoints set up by the still new
Islamic government. While I did not judge anyone for wanting to
leave, I could not hom the impulse. Did one leave the city
where one’s children had been born? Did one walk away from the
trees in the garden one ed each year, even before they bore
pomegranates and walnuts and scented apples?
For me, this was unthinkable. When I walked into the country’s
highest court and the new revolutionary authorities told me that
women could no longer be judges, I stayed. I stayed when the
authorities demoted me to clerk in the same court I had presided
over as a judge. I shut my ears when the revolutionaries who had
taken over the justice system talked in my presence about how
women were fickle and indecisive and unfit to mete out justice,
which would now be the work of men. I stayed as the Iraqi
warplanes bombed houses on our street to rubble. I stayed when
the new authorities said Islam demanded violent justice, that
Islam allowed for young men and women to be executed on rooftops
and hung from cranes for their political beliefs, their bodies
dumped in mass graves.
In the same way that I did not leave Iran, I did not leave Islam,
either. If we all packed our suitcases and boarded planes, what
would be left of our country? If we bowed our heads and stayed
quietly at home, permitting them to say that Islam allowed the
assassination of writers and the execution of teenagers, what
would be left of our faith?
I wrote long letters to friends who had emigrated, on the thin,
diaphanous paper we used for airmail in those days, and told them
that I was still managing to live. In the mid-1980s, I stopped
working altogether and turned inward, disconnected from the
brutal politics of the new regime. Despite the bombs and the
morality checkpoints, my husband and I raised our two girls, who
went to school in pigtails and learned how to read. We had dinner
together every night. My husband, Javad, continued with his work
as an engineer, and I raised the girls, contemplating how I could
reinvent myself, now that the judiciary had become the realm of
men.
In the early 1990s, after the war had ended, the girls were older
and didn’t need me as much. I briefly tried practicing family
law, but I saw quickly that the courts under the Islamic Republic
operated very differently than they had under the shah. The
authorities permitted women to work as lawyers, but the system
and all its new procedures were so dysfunctional that it was
impossible to take a case forward. On several occasions, I had
trouble simply trying to review a file at the courthouse. The
clerk, upon realizing that I wasn’t going to “tip” him for
retrieving the file (corrupt countries have endless euphemisms
for bribery), would say, “Sorry, the file is missing. Come back
tomorrow.” I would go back the next day, and he would say,
“Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to search for your file.” On the
third or fourth day, knowing that I would keep coming back, he
would finally produce the file. But because I wasn’t prepared to
pay a bribe, I had lost two or three days of work.
It was much worse in the courts. There, the person who was
willing to pay more was in the right; justice was bought, not
fought for or deliberated. To protest, I eventually hung a big
sign in front of my law office: “Due to the current inhospitable
circumstance of the courts, I will no longer be accepting clients
and can only offer legal advice.” This did not feel, at the time,
like a particularly risky thing to do. I was simply being honest
about the country’s legal climate, rather than consciously trying
to defy the state. But I see now, and learned with time, how
peaceful disobedience can be a powerful act of defiance. After a
while, people who could not afford to hire a lawyer—often
defendants who had been accused of political crimes—found their
way to me.
The state of criminal law was especially grave after the 1979
revolution. The Islamic Republic had replaced the secular
criminal code Iran had followed under the shah with a system of
Islamic law based on seventh-century readings of sharia, Islamic
law. I still vividly remember the case that revealed to me the
full extent of the system’s dysfunction and cruelty.
My friend Shahla Sherkat, the country’s foremost feminist editor
and publisher, called to ask if I could offer any advice to the
family of an eleven-year-old girl named Leila. One day, as Leila
was picking wildflowers in the hills outside her village, three
men snuck up and attacked her. The men raped her, struck her
repeatedly on the head, and then threw her to her death over a
nearby cliff. The local arrested the men. One mysteriously
hung himself in prison, and the court found the other two guilty
of rape and murder. Because the laws at the time valued the life
of a man convicted of murder more than that of a girl raped and
tossed off a cliff, Leila’s family was held responsible for
paying for their executions. The family was unable to come up
with the money, and the men were released. The Islamic Republic
cled that these laws were based on the principles of blood
money in Islamic sharia, but I believed that not only were they
unjust, they were a distortion of true Islamic legal principles.
In the course of seeking justice through the courts, Leila’s
family became destitute. Her mother had taken to sitting outside
the courthouse each day in a white shroud, silently holding up a
placard that described what had happened to her daughter. As I
recounted more fully in Iran Awakening, I took on their case, and
while I did not manage to secure anything like justice, their
ordeal shaped the sort of legal response that became my second
career. Though the judge in Leila’s case accused me of
contravening Islam in my arguments, I drew on Islamic law and
principles to challenge him. I discovered that many judges in the
Islamic Republic had little or no understanding of Islamic legal
tenets, and also that many Iranian women had no idea of how
egregiously the law discriminated against them. It was only when
life dragged them to some dark crossroads—divorce, the death of a
child, a fight over inheritance—that they realized how little
status they had before the law.
I made a showcase out of Leila’s case, writing articles and
speaking out publicly, and extensive coverage in the Iranian
press soon led to a public outcry. In one article I described how
the criminal code around blood money holds that if a man suffers
an injury that damages his testicles, he receives compensation
equal to a woman’s life. I posed the question this way: If a
woman with a PhD is run over by a car and dies, and an illiterate
thug gets his testicle hurt in a fight, the value of that woman’s
life and that thug’s testicle are equal. Is this, I wrote, how
the Islamic Republic regards its women?
For the first time since the revolution, the question of women’s
equality before the law came into the national spotlight. I saw
then how sympathetic Iranian society was to such injustice and
how powerful public outrage could be; more than anything else, it
made the authorities pay attention. It was then that I started on
the course that I follow to this day, seeking justice in the law
through upholding the rights of those most vulnerable—women,
children, dissidents, and minorities—and pushing for legal change
on the battlefield of public sentiment.
The Islamic Republic has a myriad of shortcomings. It vests
absolute power in an unelected supreme leader, harasses
independent-minded clerics who challenge the religious basis of
its severe Islamic rule, and pursues policies that are
ideologically radical and detached from the national interests of
the Iranian people. But like any regime committed to perpetuating
its own power, it has on some occasions shown sensitivity to the
condemnation of the international community and the brewing
discontent of its own citizens. It is the system we have in
place, and especially in those years, the 1990s and early 2000s,
it made several reluctant adjustments to some of its most
inhumane laws and policies, in response to the activism I and
many colleagues in the field of human rights and the women’s
movement pursued. This course seemed the only path possible to
follow, bar packing up and leaving. Although, in this era,
Iranians began emigrating by the thousands, both those who left
and those who stayed behind remained fiercely proud of Iran the
nation. We had been ruled by autocrats, kings, and now clerics;
our history reached back thousands of years, all the way to Cyrus
the Great, the Persian king who inscribed civilization’s first
human rights charter on a clay cylinder. I viewed myself as an
inheritor of this history, of the great tradition of epic Persian
poetry that I had read to my girls every night before bedtime.
Like most Iranians, I was bitterly disappointed in Iran’s present
precisely because of the love and admiration I had for its past.
I received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2003 for my efforts
for democracy and human rights, and though you would think that
this would have propelled my work in Iran and won me some
grudging respect, it put me under even more pressure and scrutiny
by the government. The Iranian state did everything it could to
suppress the news of my award, forbidding the state radio and TV
stations to so much as mention it and putting me under an even
more severe news embargo. When a reporter asked President
Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who was in power at the time, why
he had not congratulated me, he responded, “This isn’t such an
important prize. It’s only the Nobel in literature that really
matters.”
But as is always the case with Iran, there are ways to get around
official censorship. News that matters finds its way to those who
need to hear about it. I invited a Kurdish music group to perform
at the Nobel awards ceremony. The Iranian regime has
discriminated against its Kurdish minority for years, denying
them the right to study in their own language and to maintain
their Kurdish identity in public life. Iranian Kurds across the
country watched this Kurdish group performing on satellite
television and wept with pride at their inclusion. It was a small
act, but symbolic, and the rumor spread among Iranian Kurds that
I must be of Kurdish background. While the Iranian government
sought to ignore my Nobel Prize—which ultimately recognized the
work of human rights defenders trying to peacefully moderate the
country from within—we had reached an age when satellite
television and digital media meant it was no longer possible to
keep a nation in the dark.
Others took notice of the prize as well, particularly the women
of Iran, who had long been working for equal rights and
re; they saw in the Nobel committee’s decision a global
support and awareness of their struggle. The chancellor of the
all-female Alzahra University, Zahra Rahnavard, invited me to
give a public lecture on women’s legal status. Rahnavard, the
first woman to head a university since the Islamic Revolution,
was a distinguished scholar and activist. The world would come to
know her in 2009, when she appeared on the front pages of
newspapers as the wife of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the Green Movement
sition leader. That day in 2003, Rahnavard greeted me at the
campus lecture theater, a tall building of yellow brick
surrounded by wide lawns dotted with young women reading under
sycamore trees. Hundreds of students were lining up outside for
seats, though the room was already filled to capacity and buzzing
with voices. We were discussing where to put the lectern when the
doors at the back of the auditorium flew open and a mob of about
thirty women, their heads covered by black chadors, poured in,
shouting angrily.
“If Ebadi lectures here today, then tomorrow you’re going to ask
for George Bush!” they yelled, pushing toward the stage, which
Rahnavard and I were standing in front of. They were clearly not
students; they were vigilantes supported by the state. “This
lecture is canceled!” they shouted. The students in the front
rose and moved toward me, forming a protective ring. Rahnavard
walked forward a few paces, her face etched with fury.
“This lecture is being held with the official permission of the
university. You have no right to disrupt it,” she said. “All of
you must leave immediately.”
One of the mob women sprang forward and reached for Rahnavard’s
chador. “You don’t even deserve to have this chador on your
head,” she said, pulling violently at the fabric, which was
pinned to Rahnavard’s manteau beneath.
The rest of her accomplices surged forward. The small band of
students who had formed a circle around me started moving toward
the back of the lecture hall. “Khanoum Ebadi,” they urged, “we
have got to get you out of here—follow us.” They herded the
chancellor and me out a back door and down a long corridor. The
students led us into a small classroom and closed the door and
barricaded it with chairs and tables. Soon we heard shouts and
running, cries of “They’re here, they’re hiding in this room!”
and then fists pounding against the door, trying to push it open.
Rahnavard called the security services on her mobile phone.
“They’ve forced me to do something I never wanted to see happen.
I don’t believe that should set foot on university
grounds, but there’s no other choice,” she said to me.
The arrived and forcibly escorted the mob of women away.
We agreed that canceling the lecture seemed the safest course,
and I thanked the chancellor and her colleagues for the
invitation and their quick wits as we’d faced attack. We shook
hands warmly, and then two officers who had stayed behind walked
me safely off university grounds. Nothing ever came of the
incident, the authorities made no arrests, and we never found out
exactly who had dispatched the women to disrupt my lecture that
day. Rahnavard threatened to resign if the authorities didn’t
find and prosecute those responsible. But they never did, and
after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election, she eventually stepped down
herself or was fired—it was never clear. Though discussing
women’s rights in Iran had always been fraught with difficulty,
what happened there that day seemed the beginning of an
altogether new kind of harassment and intimidation.
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