Smashing Silence: An Iranian Woman’s Quest for Justice

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope
Shirin Ebadi and Azadeh Moaveni
256 pp. Random House. $14.95.
By Nadia Farjood
I straddled a historical boundary sitting between my Iranian father and my Iranian grandmother as I pulled back the first page of Iranian activist-lawyer Shirin Ebadi’s autobiography. I bridged mother and son, linking the experiences of a once-17-year old man who fled and of a woman who stayed and endured the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Ebadi, who in 2003 became the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, makes a parallel connection with her memoir “Iran Awakening”—co-written with journalist Azadeh Moaveni—connecting the scattered dots of Iran’s history to sketch the historical trajectory of post-revolutionary Iran. The legendary feminist lawyer-activist draws from the past to outline a hopeful future for her country.
Raised in an untraditional family in Tehran, Ebadi was encouraged to pursue her academic calling. As a young law student in Tehran on the fast-track to a judgeship, she was swept up into university demonstrations, which sparked her interest in protest. As she climbed the legal ladder to become Iran’s first female judge, her twin passions of protest and positive change drew her deeper into activism. While energy around the revolutionary base swelled, in 1978 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—from exile in Iraq—ordered the expulsion of ministers from their offices. The then-31-year-old Ebadi joined forces with fellow judges to storm the Minister of Justice’s office. Coming face-to-face with a judge, who was in the absent minister’s stead, she proclaimed, “I’d rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved attorney.”
In her intimate reflection, Ebadi vividly recalls being stripped of her judgeship because she was a woman, a blatant violation of gender equality marking the beginnings of her feminist activism. After the clerics successfully ejected the shah and crystallized their power, women were sidelined. Despite the support for female judges expressed by revolutionaries who sought to win women’s backing, Ebadi was swiftly demoted twice, down to a secretary position in the same courtroom where she formerly presided as judge.
A newspaper in 1980 pushed Ebadi over the edge. Her eyes rolled agonizingly over foreboding statutes that she would devote her life to overturning, the most egregious of which was that a woman’s life was valued at half that of a man’s. Consumed with rage at the country’s new Islamic penal code, which was codified into law without any public discussion and “turned the clock back fourteen hundred years, to the early days of Islam’s spread,” Ebadi began her foray into what would emerge as a legacy in taking on the most challenging human rights cases in Iran pro bono. Her decision to return to legal practice was fueled further by the murder of her 17-year-old brother-in-law, a political prisoner.
Ebadi observed chaos in the years following the 1979 hostage siege, marked by suffocating repression, censorship, and violence. While unraveling the spool of her story, I corroborated my sources with my grandmother’s. My maman bazorg’s experience matched up against the background of Ebadi’s like perfect camouflage; she confirmed that the events of the revolution produced shockwaves with reverberations that are still felt today. In the revolution’s aftermath, the government did—and still does—block media outlets, she confirmed, especially Persian-language BBC and Voice of America. The country still suffers the effects of a serious case of brain drain—as exemplified by cases like my father’s—of bright students who aced Iran’s rigorous university entrance exam (the Concours) but fled to attend Western universities and stayed due to freedom and better job markets. A thick layer of smog still drapes over the large cities and people still go missing. The country’s execution list is long.
When a string of dissident intellectuals were mysteriously murdered in the late 1990s, Ebadi rose to represent a case that propelled her into national spotlight, that of elderly political activists Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar who were stabbed to death in their Tehran home. While scavenging through government files, Ebadi faced her name in print, terrifyingly embedded in an authorization for her assassination. She writes, “It was the first time in my life that I confronted the possibility of my own death directly, and my abstract worry forever after turned to real fear. When I planned vacations, I would find myself looking at the map and wondering, Hmm, would it be easier for me to be assassinated here or there?”
Despite threats to her life, Ebadi continued to take a large volume of cases in a crusade for justice, one of which landed her in prison. She endured harassment by the Islamic regime and battled the oppressive forces that crippled her friends, colleagues, and fellow citizens, including Siamak Pourzand, a journalist married to human rights activist Mehrangiz Kar (a fellow at the Kennedy School.) In late 2001, at age 71, Pourzand was incarcerated on grounds of vague accusations. Published in 2003, this book did not capture Pourzand’s fate; he took his life while under house arrest last year. In the fall, I saw his daughter speak passionately about the resilience of her mother and the tragic death of her father in Cambridge. Critics of the regime today face grave consequences, including the death sentence.
Weaving through Ebadi’s work is the central theme of promoting gender equality while working under an Islamic framework. She writes, “I believed in the secular separation of religion and government because, fundamentally, Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation. It can be interpreted to oppress women or interpreted to liberate them.” Iran’s theocracy led her to carve out her political and professional role in promoting a positive, peaceful and participatory interpretation of Islam that values women.
In 2003, when a landslide of 14 female liberal female members of parliament made inroads into the legislature, Ebadi was asked to draft policies to advance gender equality. One woman advised her to “‘Write something that broadens women’s rights, but in a way that is compatible with Islam … so that we can defend it on the floor.’” Much of Ebadi’s legal legwork involved poring over Koranic texts to justifying women’s rights through a faith framework.
Women are still harassed for breaches—even minor—of conservative dress (although some in my family say wearing the headscarf further back revealing some loose tufts of hair is becoming more acceptable). My grandmother revealed that while sightseeing in northern Iran a male guard approached her and told her that some skin—between the edge of her sock and the hem of her pants–was indecently exposed. She was dumbfounded. I think Dr. Ebadi would cringe at the priorities of the Islamic Republic, as reflected by a young guard’s concern with a 78-year-old woman whose ankle was catching some air.
Initially, no shackles chained Ebadi to Iran. She could have joined the rest who fled in droves during the Iran-Iraq War, or entered a field that would have supplied her with a safe cushion from evoking the wrath of the Islamic Republic. She begged her friends to stay, to fight for Iran, even when her own life was at risk. She did not bat an eye in taking the most controversial cases of her country. Her conviction that “change in Iran must come peacefully and from within” anchored her to her native land, and her story embodies the tension of her love for Iran and her burning desire to change it.