Iran Awakening

Jessica Muhr May 2nd, 2012 History of the Middle due east Iran Awakening One Womans Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country This book, Iran Awakening, is a novel written by Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. Ebadi weaves the story of her life in a very own(prenominal) and unique way, telling the account of the overthrow of the shah and the establishwork forcet of a new, religious fundamentalist regime in which opposition to the government are impri word of honored, tortured, and murdered.By simply reading the Prologue, one can see the applaud Ebadi has for Iran and her populate. This love that Ebadi has for the oppressed of Iran is a theme that appears through with(predicate)out the book and seems to be a large factor slow her drive to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. In the foremost chapter, Ebadi recounts her childhood from her birth on June 21st, 1947 in Hamedan, to her childhood in Tehran. Something that whitethorn come as a surprise to a lecturer was the equality between potent and female in Ebadis home.This equality, however, was not common in most(prenominal) Iranian households, Male children enjoyed an exalted status, sp crudeed and cosseted They often felt themselves the center of the familys orbit affectionateness for a son was an investment, says Ebadi. In Iranian culture, it was considered natural for a get down to love his son more than his daughter. In Ebadis home, though, she describes her parents affections, attentions, and discipline as equally distri scarceed.This equality in the home seems to play a large role in creating the strong, determined charr Ebadi would come to be, My fathers championing of my independence, from the play yard to my subsequent last to become a judge, instilled a confidence in me that I never felt consciously, but came to regard as my most valued inheritance. (Ebadi, 12). One may also find it enkindleing that as a child, Ebadi did not get by anything of administration until the coup d etat of 1953. On August 19th, 1953, the beloved Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was toppled in a coup detat.Ebadi says that, as children, this news professionalgram meant nothing. But the adults could see what Ebadi, at the time, could not. The book makes it clear that, to those of Iran who were not paid to think otherwise, Mossadegh was revered as a nationalist hero and the father of Iranian independence for his bold move of nationalizing Irans oil industry which had been, until then, controlled by the West. Therefore, it was obvious that this was the beginning of a vast change for Iran. Before the coup, Ebadis father, a colossaltime supporter of the prime government government minister, had advanced to become minister of agriculture.In this new regime, Ebadis father was coerce out of his job, fated to languish in lower posts for the rest of his career. This was what caused a silence of all things semipolitical in the Ebadi home. Entering constabulary school in 1965 was a turning point for me, says Ebadi. The vast interest in Irans politics was shocking to her after coming from a home in which politics were never spoken of. After toying with the idea of studying political science, Ebadi decided on act a judgehip which is exactly what she did. In March of 1970, at the age of twenty-three, Ebadi became a judge.In 1975, after 6 months of getting to have it off each other Ebadi married Javad Tavassoni. Her conserve, unlike galore(postnominal) Iranian men, coped well with her master key ambitions. In the autumn of 1977, there was, what Ebadi describes as, a shift in the streets of Tehran. The shahs regime was attempt to reduce the power of the judiciary by setting up the Mediating Council, an extrajudicial outfit that would have allowed cases to be judged outside of the processal justice system. Some of the justices wrote a protest letter arguing against the council, demanding that all cases had to be tried before a court of law.This was the firs t collective action taken by the judges against the shah. Ebadi signed the letter. In January of 1978, chair Jimmy Carter arrived in Tehran, Iran and described it as an island of stability, something he later came to regret. Not long after President Carters statement, a news makeup article aggressively contend Khomeini inspired a revolt among the people of Iran, calling for his Khomeinis return the police shot into the crowd and killed many men. By the summer of 1978, protests had grown larger, making it impossible to avoid them. In early August, a move cinema in Abadan was burned to the round. This horrific slip burned 400 people alive. The shah blamed this notwithstandingt on religious conservatives Khomeini accused the SAVAK, the regimes secret police, which was a force of legendary heinousness against the governments opponents. This t religious cultdy upholded many Iranians against the shah. They now realized that the shah was not merely an American puppet. Ebadi herself says that she was draw to the opposition. She says that it did not seem a contradiction for her, an educated professional woman, to back it (Ebadi, 33). She had no idea that she was financial support her own fifty-fiftytual defeat.Ebadi uses something close to irony as she describes a morning when she and several judges and officials stormed into the minister of justices office. The minister was not there, instead a startled elder judge sit behind the desk. He looked up at us in amazement and his gaze halted when he maxim my face. You You of all people, why are you here? he asked, bewildered and stern. Dont you know that youre supporting people who will take away your job if they come to power? Id rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved attorney, I retorted boldly, self-righteous to the core. (Ebadi, 34) On January 16th, 1979, the shah fled Iran, ending both millennia of rule by Persian kings. The streets were over-crowded with euphoric citizens, Ebadi herself existence on e of them. On February 1st, 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran. For to the highest degree a month, the domain of Iran hung in the balance. In most of the cities an emergency military had gone into immediate effect and Khomeini had ordered people to go back into their homes by nightfall with the instruction to go onto their roof at 9pm and scream, Allaho akbar, God is great.On February 11th, Khomeini exhorted people to defy the 4pm curfew the military had imposed by coming out into the streets. Ebadi remembers going into the streets, hearing sounds of the gunshots echoing, and winning in the frenzied scene of emotion. The next day, the 22nd of Bahman on the Iranian calendar, the military surrendered and the prime minister fled the country. The country rejoiced, including Ebadi herself. She says, looking back, she has to laugh at the feeling of pride that washed over her for it took scarcely a month for her to realize that she had willingly participated in her own defeat. Ebadi, 38) Merely days after the revolutions victory, a man named Fathollah Bani-Sadr was appointed provisional overseer of the Ministry of Justice. Expecting praise from this man, Ebadi was shocked when he said, Dont you think that out of obeisance for our beloved Imam Khomeini, who has graced Iran with his return, it would be better if you covered your hair? This headscarf invitation was the first in a long string of restraints on the women of Iran. After organism away for less than a month, Ebadi could already see the changes that had taken place in Tehran. The streets were renamed after Shia imams, martyred clerics, and Third World heroics of an anti-imperial struggle. (Ebadi, 41) Her fellow co-workers, male and female, were dirty and smelled. The bow tie had been banned, being deemed a symbol of the Wests evils, smelling of cologne signaled counterrevolutionary tendencies, and riding to the ministry car to work was evidence of class privilege (Ebadi 42). Rumors spread that Islam barr ed women from being judges. Ebadi was the most distinguished female judge in all of Tehran.So, upon hearing these rumors, she tried to counter her worries with her connections but fifty-fifty this small comfort proved to be in vain. In the final days of 1979, Ebadi was in effect stripped of her judgeship. She stubbornly stood, though six months pregnant, as the committee flippantly tossed a sheet of paper at her and said, Show up to the research office when youre done with your vacation, her vacation being her maternity leave. The men then began to talk more or less her as though she was not there, saying things like, Without even starting at the research office, she wants a vacation another said, Theyre disorganized and another, Theyre so unmotivated its clear they dont want to be working The point Ebadi was exhausting to make is clear by the telling of these statements. Most men, especially those in the government, had lost what little respect they had previously held for wo men prior to the Revolution. That much, at least, seemed very clear. The post-Revolutions effect on women was a grim one. As Ebadi read in a newspaper piece titled Islamic Revolution, the life of a womans was now half(prenominal) that of a man (for instance, if a car hit both on the street, the cash compensation due to the womans family was half of that due the mans), a omans testimony in court as a witness now counted sole(prenominal) half as much as that of a mans a woman had to ask her husband permission to divorce. The drafters of the penal code had apparently consulted the s emergenceh century for level-headed advice. (Ebadi, 51). Ebadis head pounded with rage as she read this news. The grim statues that I would spend the rest of my life fighting stared back at me from the page, she writes. One effect of the new Islamic penal code was the imbalance it caused within Ebadis marriage. The day Javad and I married each other, we joined our lives together as two equals, she writ es. But downstairs these laws, he stayed a person and I became a chattel. They permitted him to divorce me at will, take custody of our time to come children, and acquire three wives and stick them in the house with me. (Ebadi, 53). Ebadi knew her husband had no intentions of putting this new law to use, but she still could not accept the distraction the imbalance between them was causing her. At length, Ebadi came up with a solution within the be given of the next morning, her and her husband drove to the local notary where her husband readily signed a postnuptual agreement.This granted Ebadi the right to divorce her husband without permission, as well as primary custody of their children in the event of a separation. Why are you doing this? the astonished notary asked Javad. My decision is irrevocable, Javad replied. I want to save my life. This eased Ebadis feeling of unrest greatly, her and her husband were equals again, but a small part of her was still at unease. After a ll, I couldnt drag all the men of Iran down to the notary, could I? (Ebadi, 54). September 22nd, 1980 marked the day that Saddam Hussein launched a full-blown attack on Iran.Though the popular dis nub with the revolution had by no means abated as Ebadi mentions, during the war, the newspapers still had long lists of the executed, all the former regimes officials and counterrevolutionaries who had been shot or hung, and sometimes pages filled with macabre photos of gallows and nonviable bodies. Despite all of this, the people went on, just as they had through the upheaval after the revolution. In short, the hug drug after the revolution was one filled with much strife, war, and repression.This strife first became personal to Ebadi in the form of the political imprisonment and murder of her brother-in-law Fuad at the young age of 24. Fuads death made me even more obstinate, she writes. We had been told not to discuss his death with anyone, so I talked about his execution night an d day. In taxis, at the corner shop, in line for bread, I would approach perfect strangers and tell them about this sweet boy who was sentenced to twenty years in prison for selling newspapers, and then executed. (Ebadi, 89)This tragic event in Ebadis life, the hot outrage that it made her feel, is remembered as the spark which would lead to her return to legal practice in the 1990s. Things had, of course, continued to happen since Fuads death in the fall of 1988. In 1989, Khomeini had died, the komitehs harsh, unnecessary punishments grew more serious and frequent Ebadi writes of one instance in which her friends fiance is whipped 80 times with no legal grounds whatsoever. The extreme laws against women grew more and more severe.When Ebadi was arrested for the first time (for a crime of wardrobe), she mentions an elderly woman who was arrested for the crime of corrosion slippers. Yet over time, it again became fashionable for the daughters of traditionalistic families to attend college, Ebadi writes. Throughout the nineties, the number of women with college degrees rose steadily, and eventually the women began to outnumber the men in universities by a small margin. This new wave of educated women emerging from Iran created a people that was no longer content to slip back into their old, traditional roles in the home.This new attitude was often met by extreme clashes within the family. Ebadi writes of one such woman who, upon requesting a divorce from her husband, was refused by her father. Facing a lifetime of unhappiness, the woman doused herself in gasoline and set herself ablaze. In 1992, Ebadi again began practicing law, this time exclusively taking on pro bono cases. She pored over religious texts, attempting to gain sufficient knowledge to argue against particular interpretations that would claim that, within Islam, homophobic interpretations were to be made.Ebadi began to take on only the cases of women and children, for these were the ones who w ere constantly at the mercy of a sick, twisted government. Ebadi took on many cases one was that of the family of Zahra Kanzemi, an Iranian journalist who had been killed in police custody in 2003. Another was that of a student who was beaten to death by paramilitaries during a 1999 protest Ebadi herself was imprisoned during the course of this case. While jibe through the paperwork for a case representing the children of a couple who had been slain in their home, Ebadi stumbled across the official warrant of her own assassination.The response Ebadi has to this shocking information was one of the major instances that. I believe, greatly endears her to the reader as an extremely brace and powerful woman. I wasnt scared, really, nor was I angry, she writes. Instead, Ebadi simply wanted to know why. One thing that is truly unique about Ebadi is the way in which she writes about her life choices. She writes about them as if they were natural, obvious, and just the thing anyone would h ave done in her place. In reality, this is not so.Many others around Ebadi had the schooling and ability to make the same choices that Ebadi had made, but they did not, some even emigrating during the Iran-Iraq war. For Ebadi, patriotic to the core, the only choice was to stay. She has a love for her country that defies the instability and repression the government tries to place upon her. Ebadi knows, deep within herself, that the government is not the country. The only moral choice she could live with was to fight injustice with law the very law the injustices claimed themselves to be. Following the domesticize Era, you can see Ebadi breathe a huge sigh of relief.The years of constant disquiet over everything, even her girls birthday parties, were behind her. The days when young people would be whipped for venturing into the mountains together, women would be detained or lashed for simply wearing a smudge of makeup or nail-polish, or for wearing any color clothing besides navy or black tones, were happily retired. Moderate President Khatami sought to pull back the systems interference in the peoples secret lives, but as Ebadi states, President Khatami deserves only a measure of credit for this shift.Really it was because my daughters uncowed generation started fighting back, and, through the force of their sheer numbers and boldness, made it unfeasible for the state to impose itself as before. This book was, in my opinion, a fantastic portrait of a life lived in truth. It was a delight to see how Ebadis simple courage and outright stubbornness made a vast difference in the lives of many, even in the face of extreme adversity, like her own possible assassination. In conclusion, I will erstwhile again quote Ebadi, as she articulates the dignity of the reform movement within Iran. 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 co nstrue 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 amend terms and definitions. But I am also a citizen of the Islamic Republic, and I know the futility of go up 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 Leilas a child who was raped and murdered from neat homeless in their quest to finance the executions of their daughters convicted murderers. If Im forced to ferret through musty books of Islamic polity 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. Shirin Ebadi