Yet Ebadi, like many of her middle-class compatriots, supported, indeed was initially inspired by, the Revolution.
It seemed in no way a contradiction for me - an educated, professional woman - to back an opposition that cloaked its fight against real-life grievances under the mantle of religion. Faith occupied a central role in our middle class lives ... Who did I have more in common with, in the end: an opposition led by mullahs who spoke in their tones familiar to ordinary Iranians or the gilded court of the shah, whose officials cavorted with American starlets at parties soaked in expensive French champagne? ... [On the day the Shah was overthrown] I felt that I too had won, alongside this victorious revolution. It took scarcely a month for me to realize that, in fact, I had willingly and enthusiastically participated in my own demise. I was a woman, and this revolution's victory demanded my defeat.Demoted to clerk, Ebadi kept turning up at the ministry each day, although refusing to do any of the menial work expected of her. She was anyway, she admits, distracted by her personal situation - seeking fertility treatment overseas (she eventually had two daughters). Yet she didn't withdraw into herself. She writes of learning that Islamic law was to be implemented, turning the clock "back fourteen hundred years, to the early days of Islam's spread when stoning women for adultery and chopping off the hands of thieves were considered appropriate sentences. I felt my body become hot and prickly with a boundless rage. A dull pain began to twitch in one of my temples..."
She hung on grimly in the judicial department for a statutory 15 years, dealing internally with that anger, but then retiring, and when in 1992 an official decision allowed women to practice law, she began to work in the commercial and trade fields, hoping that, as under the Shah, these would remain relatively uncorrupted. This wasn't to be, so she decided to take only pro bono cases:
I had to choose cases, I realized, that illustrated the tragic repercussions of the theocracy's legal discrimination against women. I could recite a litany of objectionable laws - a woman's life is worth half as much as a man's, child custody after infancy goes automatically to the father - until I was out of breath. But a personal story is more powerful than any dry summary of why a given law should be changed. To attract people's attention, to solicit their sympathies and convince them that these laws were not simply unfair but actively pathological. Iranian culture, for all its preoccupation with shame and honor, with all its resulting patriarchal codes, retains an acute sensitivity to injustice.This battle, with its many horrifying tales - that of 11-year-old Leila Fathi, raped and murdered, and her poverty-stricken parents made homeless and distraight by the struggle to punish her killers, and of nine-year-old Arian Golshani, left to be killed by an abusive, drug-addicted father, her mother helpless to rescue her - occupies perhaps a smaller part of the book than might have been expected. Yet you almost feel Ebadi is tempering the tale, feeling that her Western readership might wallow in its horrors and use them against Iran - perhaps rightly.
Article comments
1 - Mayank Austen Soofi
I have been noticing this book since a long time in the bookshops. But I'm always unsure of biographies/autobiographies of Nobel peace laureates. Most of the times they are extremely full of themselves and the impression is that these 'heroes' started working for their causes right from the time of their birth. But this review carries a different and interesting take on this memoir of Shirin Ebadi. Besides, it is written with the assistance of the talented author of Lipstick Jihad. I think I'll have to buy this book. Thanks for the review.