Post by sciwriter on Jul 16, 2006 19:28:27 GMT -7
www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16secor.html?pagewanted=print
NY TIMES
July 16, 2006
'Iran Awakening,' by Shirin Ebadi
A Dissenting Voice
Review by LAURA SECOR
IN 1978, as the fever for revolution swelled, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called
from exile in Iraq for Iranians to eject ministers from their offices. Shirin
Ebadi, then 31 years old and Iran's first female judge, joined her colleagues in
storming the office of the minister of justice. He wasn't there. Instead, the
young activists found an old judge sitting behind a desk and staring at them in
amazement.
"You!" he cried, when he saw Ebadi among the conspirators. "You of all people,
why are you here? Don't you know that you're supporting people who will take
your job away if they come to power?"
Ebadi's reply was "self-righteous to the core," she recalls in "Iran Awakening":
"I'd rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved attorney."
The endorsement of a female judge was useful to the revolutionaries, who sought
to reassure Iranian women of their benign intentions. But the following year,
once the clerics succeeded in toppling the shah and consolidating their power,
Ebadi was demoted because she was a woman, first to a clerk and then to a
secretary in the very courtroom over which she had presided as a judge. Later,
her former revolutionary comrades assured her, they would have the luxury of
worrying about the rights of women. But later never came.
One day in 1980, the country's new Islamic penal code - adopted overnight and
without discussion - appeared in the morning newspaper. Ebadi's head pounded
with rage as she read it. A woman's life was to be worth half of a man's in the
eyes of the law. Criminal penalties and relations between the sexes were to be
set back 1,400 years. "The grim statutes that I would spend the rest of my life
fighting stared back at me from the page," she writes.
In collaboration with the gifted journalist Azadeh Moaveni, Ebadi, who in 2003
became the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace
Prize, has written a memoir that is both a deft history of postrevolutionary
Iran and a genuinely intimate recollection. It is fast-paced, suspenseful and
spare, its details memorable and well chosen. And it is a story that
encapsulates the harsh choices that face those who live and fight for change
within the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One thing Ebadi did not expect from the new Islamic penal code was that it would
cast a pall over her marriage. "The day Javad and I married each other, we
joined our lives together as two equal individuals," she writes. "But under
these laws, he stayed a person and I became chattel. They permitted him to
divorce me at whim, take custody of our future children, acquire three wives and
stick them in the house with me."
She knew her husband had no intention of doing any of these things, but the
imbalance of power between them drove her to distraction. At length, she came up
with a solution: she took him to a notary's office, where he signed away the new
rights the Islamic Republic had given him.
"Why are you doing this?" the astonished notary asked.
"My decision is irrevocable," Ebadi's husband replied. "I want to save my life."
The decade after the revolution was a crucible of war and repression. For Ebadi,
it was marked above all by the political imprisonment and murder of a family
member. She recounts that episode with the mixture of outrage and empathy that
would fuel her return to legal practice in the 1990's, by which time Iran's
leaders had realized they needed their female lawyers and law professors.
Ebadi shouldered the country's most intractable human rights cases pro bono. She
pored over religious texts to argue against particular interpretations of
Koranic injunctions by insisting that within Islam, other more just or less
discriminatory interpretations were possible. She did this not because she had
warmed to the Islamic penal code or to the idea of religious interpretation as a
foundation for the law, but because her cases were pressing and her intellectual
vanity was not.
Ebadi represents the family of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who
was killed in police custody in 2003. She herself was imprisoned in the course
of her work on the case of a student who was beaten to death by paramilitaries
during a 1999 protest. When a number of dissident intellectuals were murdered
under mysterious circumstances in the late 1990's, Ebadi took on one of the most
significant of those cases, representing the children of Dariush and Parvaneh
Forouhar, a couple slain in their home. While digging through government
documents in the course of preparing for that trial, Ebadi encountered the
official authorization for her own assassination.
Ebadi is a towering figure, but she writes of her life choices as though they
were natural and obvious. Not that the others in her orbit all chose to risk
their lives and freedom. Many of her friends, she recalls with wistfulness and
no small amount of anger, emigrated during the Iran-Iraq war. Others
collaborated with the regime or went into legal fields that allowed them some
distance from politics. For Ebadi, the only patriotic choice was to stay and the
only moral choice was to fight injustice within a system that enshrined it as
law.
These labors have often been frustrating. Many of Ebadi's cases remain
unresolved, and many of the laws she has sought to change persist today. Still,
through her work she has spotlighted some of the Islamic Republic's most
egregious practices. In doing so she offers no small measure of hope to those
who have run afoul of a judicial system that prefers to operate in the shadows.
One wishes there were more about the cases themselves, the strategies she has
used to represent her clients and the intricacies of the trials. In many
instances we are not even told how the legal proceedings ended, if they ended at
all. Ebadi writes that she reserves these details for a future book, but their
absence here is conspicuous.
What we do get is a complex and moving portrait of a life lived in truth, as
Vaclav Havel would put it, within the stultifying confines of a political system
intended to compel passivity. Ebadi is well aware of the compromises forced on
her as she works to curb the Islamic legal system's worst excesses. It is worth
quoting her at length on this point, because she articulates the dignity of a
reform movement inside Iran that has been derided by Islamists and Westerners
alike as too appeasing of the other side. At a time when Washington speaks
naïvely and grandiosely of regime change in Iran, Ebadi's story offers an
eloquent reminder that working for justice within an unjust system does not
always permit a simple and satisfying moral posture. She writes:
"It so happened that 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. . . . I am a lawyer by training, and know only too well the
permanent limitations of trying to enshrine inalienable rights in sources that
lack fixed terms and definitions. But I am also a citizen of the Islamic
Republic, and I know the futility of approaching the question any other way. My
objective is not to vent my own political sensibilities but to push for a law
that would save a family like Leila's" - a child who was raped and murdered -
"from becoming homeless in their quest to finance the executions of their
daughter's convicted murderers. If I'm forced to ferret through musty books of
Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources that stress the egalitarian ethics of
Islam, then so be it. Is it harder this way? Of course it is. But is there an
alternative battlefield? Desperate wishing aside, I cannot see one."
Laura Secor is a staff editor for The Times's Op-Ed page.
NY TIMES
July 16, 2006
'Iran Awakening,' by Shirin Ebadi
A Dissenting Voice
Review by LAURA SECOR
IN 1978, as the fever for revolution swelled, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called
from exile in Iraq for Iranians to eject ministers from their offices. Shirin
Ebadi, then 31 years old and Iran's first female judge, joined her colleagues in
storming the office of the minister of justice. He wasn't there. Instead, the
young activists found an old judge sitting behind a desk and staring at them in
amazement.
"You!" he cried, when he saw Ebadi among the conspirators. "You of all people,
why are you here? Don't you know that you're supporting people who will take
your job away if they come to power?"
Ebadi's reply was "self-righteous to the core," she recalls in "Iran Awakening":
"I'd rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved attorney."
The endorsement of a female judge was useful to the revolutionaries, who sought
to reassure Iranian women of their benign intentions. But the following year,
once the clerics succeeded in toppling the shah and consolidating their power,
Ebadi was demoted because she was a woman, first to a clerk and then to a
secretary in the very courtroom over which she had presided as a judge. Later,
her former revolutionary comrades assured her, they would have the luxury of
worrying about the rights of women. But later never came.
One day in 1980, the country's new Islamic penal code - adopted overnight and
without discussion - appeared in the morning newspaper. Ebadi's head pounded
with rage as she read it. A woman's life was to be worth half of a man's in the
eyes of the law. Criminal penalties and relations between the sexes were to be
set back 1,400 years. "The grim statutes that I would spend the rest of my life
fighting stared back at me from the page," she writes.
In collaboration with the gifted journalist Azadeh Moaveni, Ebadi, who in 2003
became the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace
Prize, has written a memoir that is both a deft history of postrevolutionary
Iran and a genuinely intimate recollection. It is fast-paced, suspenseful and
spare, its details memorable and well chosen. And it is a story that
encapsulates the harsh choices that face those who live and fight for change
within the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One thing Ebadi did not expect from the new Islamic penal code was that it would
cast a pall over her marriage. "The day Javad and I married each other, we
joined our lives together as two equal individuals," she writes. "But under
these laws, he stayed a person and I became chattel. They permitted him to
divorce me at whim, take custody of our future children, acquire three wives and
stick them in the house with me."
She knew her husband had no intention of doing any of these things, but the
imbalance of power between them drove her to distraction. At length, she came up
with a solution: she took him to a notary's office, where he signed away the new
rights the Islamic Republic had given him.
"Why are you doing this?" the astonished notary asked.
"My decision is irrevocable," Ebadi's husband replied. "I want to save my life."
The decade after the revolution was a crucible of war and repression. For Ebadi,
it was marked above all by the political imprisonment and murder of a family
member. She recounts that episode with the mixture of outrage and empathy that
would fuel her return to legal practice in the 1990's, by which time Iran's
leaders had realized they needed their female lawyers and law professors.
Ebadi shouldered the country's most intractable human rights cases pro bono. She
pored over religious texts to argue against particular interpretations of
Koranic injunctions by insisting that within Islam, other more just or less
discriminatory interpretations were possible. She did this not because she had
warmed to the Islamic penal code or to the idea of religious interpretation as a
foundation for the law, but because her cases were pressing and her intellectual
vanity was not.
Ebadi represents the family of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who
was killed in police custody in 2003. She herself was imprisoned in the course
of her work on the case of a student who was beaten to death by paramilitaries
during a 1999 protest. When a number of dissident intellectuals were murdered
under mysterious circumstances in the late 1990's, Ebadi took on one of the most
significant of those cases, representing the children of Dariush and Parvaneh
Forouhar, a couple slain in their home. While digging through government
documents in the course of preparing for that trial, Ebadi encountered the
official authorization for her own assassination.
Ebadi is a towering figure, but she writes of her life choices as though they
were natural and obvious. Not that the others in her orbit all chose to risk
their lives and freedom. Many of her friends, she recalls with wistfulness and
no small amount of anger, emigrated during the Iran-Iraq war. Others
collaborated with the regime or went into legal fields that allowed them some
distance from politics. For Ebadi, the only patriotic choice was to stay and the
only moral choice was to fight injustice within a system that enshrined it as
law.
These labors have often been frustrating. Many of Ebadi's cases remain
unresolved, and many of the laws she has sought to change persist today. Still,
through her work she has spotlighted some of the Islamic Republic's most
egregious practices. In doing so she offers no small measure of hope to those
who have run afoul of a judicial system that prefers to operate in the shadows.
One wishes there were more about the cases themselves, the strategies she has
used to represent her clients and the intricacies of the trials. In many
instances we are not even told how the legal proceedings ended, if they ended at
all. Ebadi writes that she reserves these details for a future book, but their
absence here is conspicuous.
What we do get is a complex and moving portrait of a life lived in truth, as
Vaclav Havel would put it, within the stultifying confines of a political system
intended to compel passivity. Ebadi is well aware of the compromises forced on
her as she works to curb the Islamic legal system's worst excesses. It is worth
quoting her at length on this point, because she articulates the dignity of a
reform movement inside Iran that has been derided by Islamists and Westerners
alike as too appeasing of the other side. At a time when Washington speaks
naïvely and grandiosely of regime change in Iran, Ebadi's story offers an
eloquent reminder that working for justice within an unjust system does not
always permit a simple and satisfying moral posture. She writes:
"It so happened that 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. . . . I am a lawyer by training, and know only too well the
permanent limitations of trying to enshrine inalienable rights in sources that
lack fixed terms and definitions. But I am also a citizen of the Islamic
Republic, and I know the futility of approaching the question any other way. My
objective is not to vent my own political sensibilities but to push for a law
that would save a family like Leila's" - a child who was raped and murdered -
"from becoming homeless in their quest to finance the executions of their
daughter's convicted murderers. If I'm forced to ferret through musty books of
Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources that stress the egalitarian ethics of
Islam, then so be it. Is it harder this way? Of course it is. But is there an
alternative battlefield? Desperate wishing aside, I cannot see one."
Laura Secor is a staff editor for The Times's Op-Ed page.
