Ebadi could not publish her work in the Islamic Republic of Iran because of official censorship in that country. Because of arcane rules of the U.S. economic embargo against Iran (these also apply to a few other countries), any U.S. citizen who assisted her in readying her manuscript for publication or in advertising it for sale here would have been committing a crime.
Unwilling to apply for a special exemption to the rule, Ebadi filed a lawsuit in federal court to challenge the provision that limits Americans’ access to information about countries the government seeks to isolate from the international community. The U.S. Treasury Department eased the restriction before the court could declare it unconstitutional.
The effect of embargo on Americans’ access to information from countries such as Iran makes it even harder for us to find voices such as Ebadi’s that differ from the strident arguments put forth by fundamentalist governments and organizations (whether the fundamentalism is political or religious).
Ebadi and other Iranian intellectuals take their responsibility to expose the rest of the world to the complexities of life and thought in Iran seriously. Because diplomats serve the regime which rarely reflects the “true opinions of the people. The responsibility falls, then, on unofficial ambassadors to relate Iranians’ perceptions and hopes to the world (127).”
Ebadi believes the Nobel Peace Prize rewarded her for a life devoted to service based on “the belief in a positive interpretation of Islam, and the power of that belief to aid Iranians who aspire to peacefully transform their country (204).”
Ebadi’s case is particularly important to those who want to understand revolution and its aftermath in Iran. Unlike many Iranian intellectuals and activists who came of age in the 1970s, Ebadi supported Ayatolloh Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary faction and aims during the struggle against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. While most readers will probably not be surprised that a well educated, ethical judge would have opposed Iran’s old regime, it is surprising that a woman who occupied a responsible position in the judiciary would have supported Khomeini rather than another opposition leader.
It only took a month of Khomeini’s rule to show Ebadi just how misguided she had been in thinking, for example, that the restrictions on women wouldn’t apply to women like her who had played an active role in bringing the cleric to power. The chapters of the book devoted to her transformation from true believer to opposition leader are particularly interesting.
Through stories about her personal experiences and the cases she has handled after being removed from her position as judge, Ebadi shows that the absurdities (according to her own judgment) that are embodied in laws on women’s personal status, which have been justified by Islamic law in Iran and other countries, are not based on the only possible interpretation of these codes.
For example, Ebadi drafted new legislation on divorce that, if adopted, would have allowed women to divorce husbands without ther permission and for incompatibility (an option currently available only to men in Iran) as well as insanity or infertility. The law, although based on extensive research in texts that are the basis of the education of Shi’ite clerics, was not enacted, and when Ebadi was called to a meeting with a committee of parliamentarians to discuss the proposal, conservative members threw her out of the meeting.
While most of Ebadi’s examples focus attention on restrictions on women’s dress and behavior, it is important to note that such restrictions also apply to men. For example, the Afghan Taliban required men to wear beards that not all men are physically capable of growing (dramatically illustrated in Kandahar, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s heavy handed film about Taliban rule in Afghanistan). The killing of three Iraqi tennis players clad in shorts this week followed shortly upon the posting of warnings that Islam forbids the wearing of shorts in the Baghdad neighborhood they were passing through.
Ebadi has had an eventful life and she is a generous storyteller. She relates her family and friends’ experiences of repression, war, emigration, reform and opposition including personal details like the difficulty she had remembering to take her headscarf with her when she left the house in the morning, the reason she doesn’t stay in touch with friends who no longer live in Iran and her worries that her daughters would be enamored by the excitement of mass protest.
She also knows, or has defended, most of the opposition activists the world community has heard of. She counted as friends many of the intellectuals who were almost killed in a pre-arranged bus accident while traveling to a conference in Armenia in august 1996. She has represented, for little or no payment, the families of Ezzat Ebrahimnezhad, whose bloodied shirt was immortalized in a photo of Ahmad Batebi that became the iconic image of student protests in 1999, and Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who was killed in prison after refusing to hand over film of people waiting for news of their relatives outside Evin Prison in 2003. When she was awaiting her own arrest during her work on Ebrahimnezhad’s case, she drew strength from Akbar Ganji’s statement that serving some time in prison was necessary, “In Iran, he’d warned, unless you are punished before the public, everyone will assume that you collaborate with the regime (174).”
The fates of those who oppose the present regime in Iran are intimately tied to Western foreign policy, but not in the way most Americans might assume, Ebadi cautions. Rather than helping the opposition, Western statements of solidarity with opposition movements often result in even more brutal destruction of the people involved.
As Ebadi put it, Western insistence that military force could be employed to bring down the current rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran
“endangers nearly all of the efforts democracy-minded Iranians have made in these recent years. The threat of military force gives the system a pretext to crack down on its legitimate opposition and undermines the nascent civil society that is slowly taking shape here. It makes Iranians overlook their resentment of the regime and move behind their unpopular leaders out of defensive nationalism. I can think of no scenario more alarming, no internal shift more dangerous than that engendered by the West imagining that it can bring democracy to Iran through either military might of the fomentation of violent rebellion (214-215).”
Read Shirin Ebadi’s book. Her memoir humanizes Iranians’ social and political dilemmas and in the process, reveals complexities of the situation that should cause readers to question Western leaders’ recent fearmongering, both within their own borders and in the international arena.
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