[lit-ideas] 'Woman Warrior' from The Nation

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Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 07:22:43 -0400
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Thought you would be interested in this article from The Nation.

   Woman Warrior 
   by Reza Aslan


Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi is
one of the most eloquent advocates for liberalism and reform in the
Muslim world. Her tireless work on behalf of those left unprotected by
Iran's draconian laws--the orphaned, the widowed, the dispossessed--has
made her an almost saintly figure in Iran. Her recently published memoir, Iran 
Awakening,
is an inspiring account of her herculean struggle to hold Iran's
clerical regime accountable for its gross human rights violations. As a
testament to how a single, inspired voice can rise above the cacophony
of bigotry and fanaticism, the book should be required reading for any
American trying to see through the fog of misinformation about how to
bring freedom to Iran.

But had the US government had its way, no American ever would have read
it.

Until recently an outmoded and discriminatory Treasury Department
regulation, enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC),
prohibited the translation, editing, promotion or marketing of any work
from an embargoed state (e.g., Iran, Cuba, Sudan) unless the work had
been previously published in the writer's home country. Ebadi's memoir,
of course, never would have passed Iran's unyielding censors and thus
had no chance of being published first in her home country. It was
precisely for that reason that Ebadi turned to the United States,
assuming that a country that has sanctified freedom of speech would
provide her the opportunity denied by Iran's hard-line government to
publish the story of her life and work.

To her astonishment, OFAC banned the publication of her memoir here, in
effect censoring a liberal Muslim reformer who has spent her life
battling the very Islamic extremists that the United States is so keen
to defeat. OFAC eventually suggested that she apply for a license
that would allow her to publish her memoir here without facing any
penalties. But rather than accept the compromise, Ebadi and her American
agent initiated a lawsuit against the Treasury Department in federal
court, claiming that the OFAC law was unconstitutional. Embarrassed by
the media attention, the department backed down. On December 15, 2004,
OFAC revised its laws regulating so-called "embargoed literature,"
clearing the way for the publication of Iran Awakening.

If you find it remarkable that a female human rights lawyer from Iran
should have the audacity to remind the US government of its
constitutional responsibilities, then you don't know Shirin Ebadi.

Born in 1947, Ebadi grew up in an era of profound social and political
change. The country's young monarch, Muhammad Reza Shah, only recently
placed on the throne by the victors of World War II, had launched a
forced modernization/Westernization program that dramatically reformed
Iran's archaic family law. For the first time, women were allowed an
active role in shaping domestic policy. The universities were flooded
with bright, ambitious girls studying law, engineering and medicine. But
equal access to education did not translate into equal status in
society. Despite the Shah's reforms, the patriarchal codes that underlay
Iran's social order were still firmly in place. A woman could go to
college. She could even serve in the government. But she could not
expect to transcend the traditional limitations placed on her by Iran's
rigid, male-dominated society.

It was Ebadi's great fortune to have grown up somewhat sheltered from
the experience of most women of her time. Reared in a wealthy and
unconventional family, Ebadi never suffered the "low self-esteem and
learned dependence" she observed in women from more traditional homes.
Her father, a former agricultural minister in the Shah's government,
always encouraged her to be a strong and independent woman. After
college she married a kind and almost comically unpatriarchal husband
who, by her account, deferred to her wisdom and strength in nearly every
situation. At the age of 23 she became a judge whose authority over the
men who entered her courtroom was accepted as a matter of course. All of
this may explain why, even as she enthusiastically took part in the
movement to topple the Shah's government, it never occurred to her what
effect the revolution would have on the status of women in Iran.

As one of the country's most distinguished female judges, Ebadi and her
pro-revolutionary sentiments were especially welcomed by the opposition
forces helmed by the charismatic cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. Like many
middle-class intellectuals, Ebadi had no problem reconciling her
secularist outlook with Khomeini's religious rhetoric. After all, she
writes, "Who did I have more in common with, in the end: an opposition
led by mullahs who spoke in the 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?"

Before long, however, Ebadi realized she had "willingly and
enthusiastically participated in [her] own demise." Almost immediately
there were signs that the revolution, whose primary purpose was to free
Iranians from the bonds of autocracy, was veering off course. First,
there was the "headscarf 'invitation'" announcing that women should
reflect their fidelity to the revolution by covering their hair (Ebadi,
who had never worn the veil before, took to tacking one in the hallway
so as to remember to put it on before leaving the house). Men in her
office no longer came to work in suits and ties but in stained,
collarless shirts and badly wrinkled slacks meant to identify them with
the humble masses. Rumors swirled around the courtroom that Islam barred
women from serving as judges. Issues once central to the revolution,
such as the redistribution of wealth and the opening up of Iranian
society, were replaced by the most inane and purely theatrical
concerns--the length of a woman's hem or the fullness of a man's beard.

Iran's judiciary quickly became the chief obstacle to the imposition of
Islamic law. The clerics were themselves jurists, and the new Iran they
envisioned was founded on the belief that only they could properly judge
what was lawful and what was not. One day Ebadi arrived at work to find
that she no longer had a job: The judiciary had been purged and brought
under the dominion of the mosque. Less than two years after helping to
tear to down the monarchy, Ebadi had been demoted to little more than a
clerk in the court she once presided over. In protest, she continued to
show up at her office every morning but refused to do any work. She
simply sat at her desk and stared at the wall.

By the time she and most of her colleagues realized that the revolution
had been hijacked, Saddam Hussein had launched a surprise attack on
Iran. Suddenly, the debate over the meaning and purpose of the
revolution came to a halt. The provisional government was sacked and
unconditional power handed over to Khomeini and his personal militia,
the Revolutionary Guards. Ebadi could do nothing but watch her dreams of
democracy transform into the nightmare of religious authoritarianism.
"If we admitted to ourselves that the revolution had been betrayed," she
writes of the dilemma facing many Iranians, "we would surely lose the
war."

Ebadi's words are a timely reminder, particularly as the United States
contemplates another pre-emptive military attack in the region, that the
history of revolution and war in Iran is intertwined. It was the war
with Iraq that ultimately created the Islamic Republic as we know
it, not the revolution itself. It was the war that brought all of Iran,
including the military, under the yoke of clerical rule, allowing
Khomeini to make sweeping changes in the Constitution in the name of
national security (a tactic with which Americans have become familiar
under the Bush Administration). More than anything else, it was the war
that convinced even the most pro-American Iranians that the United
States could never be trusted. As Ebadi writes:

Imagine if you were an Iranian and watched the boys in your neighborhood
board the bus for the front, never to return. Imagine staring in mute
horror at the television screen as Saddam rained chemical weapons down
on your boys, his death planes guided by U.S. satellite photos. Fast
forward about fifteen years. Now you are watching faded video footage of
Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand, smiling at the
butcher who made our capital's cemetery a city. Now you are listening to
President George W. Bush promise he wants to bring democracy to the
Middle East. You are hearing him address the Iranian people in his State
of the Union address, telling them that if they stand for their own
liberty, America will stand with them. Do you believe him?

When the Iran-Iraq war stuttered to a truce eight years later, more than
a million people on both sides had died. An entire generation of Iranian
men had been obliterated, creating a vacuum in the workforce that could
only be filled by the country's highly educated and capable women. Those
who had lost their jobs in the postrevolutionary purges were invited
back to work. Ebadi returned to her courtroom, this time as a lawyer
(she remained barred from serving as a judge), where she has spent the
past decade challenging the Iranian government as much in the court of
public opinion as in the court of law.

Iran Awakening chronicles many of the cases that Ebadi has fought in
Iran's inequitable courts, including, most dramatically, the
infamous serial murders of a group of Iranian dissidents and writers in
the winter of 1998, a case that ultimately resulted in the unprecedented
arrest and conviction of members of the government's own Information
Ministry (while working on the case, Ebadi learned that she was the next
person the ministry had marked for death). Of course, Ebadi lost nearly
every one of these cases, but in a rigged legal system like Iran's,
winning or losing is beside the point. What matters is the light she has
shone on a system that can function only if it remains in the shadows.

Ebadi's genius as a human rights lawyer comes from her ability to
exploit the founding mythology of the Iranian revolution, namely that it
was fought on behalf of the dispossessed. Her objective is to show
Iranians that "the dispossessed [have] now become the dispossessors." By
publicly unveiling the injustices suffered by the weakest members of
society at the hands of a regime that likes to present itself as the
champion of the weak, Ebadi seeks to shame the Iranian government into
changing (much as she shamed the Treasury Department). In this way, she
uses the same Islamic ideals that supposedly underpin the
Islamic Republic as a weapon against the barbarisms of the clerical
regime. It is a risky strategy that has repeatedly put her life in
peril. But in a country like Iran, it is not enough to whisper that the
emperor has no clothes; it must be shouted so that all the world becomes
aware of his nakedness.

While such fearlessness has made Ebadi a hero to many Iranians, not
everyone agrees with her approach. Indeed, Ebadi has her fair share of
critics, particularly among influential Iranian-Americans who favor a
more aggressive policy toward Iran. In the wake of the recent
presidential election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the consolidation of
the conservatives' control over every level of government, some Iranians
believe that the days when the clerical system could be reformed from
within have come and gone. For them, the only option left is to destroy
the regime by any means necessary and build a new Iran on its ashes.

Meanwhile, recent reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere that the
United States is preparing a sustained bombing campaign in Iran in hopes
of halting the country's nuclear program, coupled with revelations that
the Pentagon has been using an Iranian terrorist organization called the
Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) to conduct stealth operations in Iran
from bases in Iraq and Pakistan, have pushed the already paranoid
clerical regime into a panic. As happened during the Iran-Iraq war, the
regime has begun clamping down even harder on dissent so that activists
like Ebadi who seek a compromise on the nuclear impasse and
d&eacute;tente with the West are increasingly being denounced as US
stooges.

Still, Ebadi remains convinced that change in Iran can only come from
within. "The Iranian Revolution," she writes, "has produced its own
opposition, not least a nation of educated, conscious women who are
agitating for their rights. They must be given the chance to fight their
own fights, to transform their country uninterrupted." Whether Iranians
like Ebadi get that chance depends in large part on US policy.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060529/aslan



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[lit-ideas] 'Woman Warrior' from The Nation

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