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| Volume XIII, Winter 2006, Number 4 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, by Shirin Ebadi, with Azadeh Moaveni. Random House, 2006. 232 pages. $24.95, hardcover.
David Nalle
Former editor, Central Asia Monitor
Americans are challenged today by the need to understand and deal with the country of Iran. We recognize readily that it is a big, complex country of some 70 million people, occupying a strategically critical portion of the Eurasian continent. We have assimilated the fact that Iranians are not Arabs and that the great majority of Iranians adhere to the minority Shia version of Islam — and that the Islamic Republic of Iran is the only major country where Shiism is, in effect, the state religion.
We have also become aware that Iran has a very long and distinctive history. The signal events of its two-and-a-half-millenium history for the most part took place within the boundaries of the homeland as defined today. The notable exception is the founding trauma of Shiism, when Imam Ali and his son Imam Hossein were murdered by the dominant, later ‘Sunni,’ establishment on the plains of southern Iraq.
Unique and self-conscious in terms of its land, history and religion, Iran needs articulate interpreters. Azar Nafisi, in her provocatively titled best-seller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, performed the role for a particular sub-set of young Iranian women seeking education and perhaps social liberation. Another Iranian-born author, Afshin Molavi, took a different approach in his Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran. He chronicled his travels throughout Iran and the conversations he had along the way, interpolating his observations on the history, politics, religion and, inevitably, the treasured classical poetry.
Both of these are good books and reward a reader with insight and understanding. More effectively than either of them, however, Shirin Ebadi’s Iran Awakening gives a compelling picture of life in Iran during the last two or three tumultuous decades. Her book has the structural merit of looking at life in Iran, before and then under the Islamic Republic, through the prism of her personal life as a housewife and mother and her dramatic career in the Iranian legal profession. Ebadi became a judge in 1970 at age 23, but, because she was a woman, was demoted in 1980 to the level of clerk by the post-shah Islamic government of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Ebadi stayed on at the Ministry of Justice until she could take retirement, in 1985. By that time, Saddam Hussein had attacked Iran, and the two countries were mired in a ghastly war that lasted eight years. She testifies to common Iranian knowledge that the United States lent various kinds of support to Saddam, notoriously with satellite images of Iran’s defenses at a time when it was known that he was using sarin and mustard gas against the Iranians. Beyond the horrors of the war, it was a terrible decade for average Iranians, with fanatical clerics dealing out summary justice to anyone they regarded as “anti-Islamic.” Mass emigration of elites to the West accelerated.
As a mother of two young daughters, Ebadi began to pursue an increasingly demanding and dangerous career as a defender of human rights. The cases she describes often involve women or children, the underprivileged, whose rights have been grossly violated by men empowered and defended by the retrograde clerical establishment.
The most egregious offenses of the clerics against the people occurred in the fall of 1998, when the Ministry of the Interior carried out a series of extra-judicial executions of intellectuals deemed to be disloyal. It was when Ebadi was preparing to represent the bereaved family of Darius and Parvaneh Forouhar, a couple viciously murdered in their home, that she came across a Ministry file designating her as the next candidate for execution.
It was the dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, recently on a speaking tour in the United States, who broke the story in a Tehran newspaper of the Interior ministry’s death squads. Ebadi reports that several years later she came across Ganji in the notorious Evin Prison, where she had gone to visit a client. Ganji was serving a six-year sentence for criticizing the government and enlisted Ebadi to replace his non-performing government-appointed lawyer. The coming together of these two individuals highlights one paradox at the heart of the Islamic Republic: both are self-avowed devout Muslims, citizens of an Islamic Republic; both had been jailed and faced death sentences leveled by their own government; and now one is a journalist internationally admired for acting on his convictions, and the other is a winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.
There is a subtext to Ebadi’s Iran Awakening. Addressing the fact that the book was originally banned by Treasury Department regulations from publication in the United States, Ebadi writes:
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To my mind, the regulations also reflected how tangled and dysfunctional the relationship between the United States and Iran remains to this day. The lack of honest exchange remains a dangerous habit for both countries and has led both to sustain traumas singular in their modern history: the 1953 overthrow of a democratic government in Iran and its delayed response, the 1979 hostage siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. It worries me that despite this fraught record, the two countries persist in behaving as though their fates are not intertwined, as though they can muffle each other out and feel no ramifications.
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Current events in the Middle East suggest that the fates of the United States and Iran are even more closely — and dangerously — intertwined than they were before. Both in rhetoric and action, the current Iranian government has courted confrontation with the United States over its support of Israel. The editor of Kayhan, the establishment newspaper in Tehran, is quoted by David Remnick in the July 31, 2006, issue of The New Yorker as saying that the annihilation of Israel “is not only a religious and national duty, but also a universal human duty, from which no Muslim or free human being can be exempt.”
The message one gets from Shirin Ebadi’s book is that, while there are people with such views in power in Iran today — the kind of people she has confronted in her legal career — there is also a religious, reasonable and mainstream component to Iranian society that may be expected one day to prevail.
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