Iran Awakening

Jessica Muhr May 2nd, 2012 Hi yarn of the Middle East Iran arouse One Womilitary personnels Journey to Reclaim Her Life and demesne This book, Iran Awakening, is a novel written by Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. Ebadi weaves the story of her life in a very per boyal and unique way, recounting the account of the oerthrow of the shah and the establishment of a unsanded, religious fundamentalist regimen in which opposition to the g all overnment are impris wholenessd, tortured, and bump offed.By obviously realiseing the Prologue, one jakes leave the neck Ebadi has for Iran and her people. This distinguish that Ebadi has for the suppressed of Iran is a musical theme that appears with prohibited the book and appears to be a large factor shadower her drive to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. In the commencement ceremony chapter, Ebadi recounts her childhood from her birth on June 21st, 1947 in Hamedan, to her childhood in capital of Iran. Something th at may come as a surprise to a commentator was the comparison between male and female in Ebadis home.This equality, however, was not greenness in most Iranian households, Male children enjoyed an exalted status, spoiled and cosseted They lots felt themselves the center of the familys orbit Affection for a son was an investment, says Ebadi. In Iranian culture, it was considered natural for a laminitis to love his son more than his daughter. In Ebadis home, though, she describes her parents affections, attentions, and chink as equ eithery distri onlyed.This equality in the home perk upms to play a large role in creating the strong, determined womanhood Ebadi would come to be, My fathers championing of my independency, from the play yard to my later decision to become a judge, instilled a confidence in me that I never felt consciously, only if came to regard as my most valued inheritance. (Ebadi, 12). One may too find it interesting that as a child, Ebadi did not k at prese nt anything of political sympathies until the coup detat of 1953. On August 19th, 1953, the beloved Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was toppled in a coup detat.Ebadi says that, as children, this untrieds meant nothing. only when the adults could see what Ebadi, at the season, could not. The book makes it clear that, to those of Iran who were not paid to think otherwise, Mossadegh was grand as a nationalist hero and the father of Iranian independence for his bold move of nationalizing Irans oil industry which had been, until thusly, controlled by the West. T herefore, it was overt that this was the beginning of a vast change for Iran. Before the coup, Ebadis father, a grandtime supporter of the prime diplomatic minister, had advanced to become minister of agriculture.In this new regime, Ebadis father was delineated 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 political in the Ebadi home. Entering law school in 1965 was a turning flow for me, says Ebadi. The vast interest in Irans politics was shocking to her later coming from a home in which politics were never intercommunicate of. After toying with the theme of studying political science, Ebadi decided on pursuing a judgeship 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 k directly each other Ebadi get married Javad Tavassoni. Her husband, unlike many Iranian men, coped headspring with her pro ambitions. In the autumn of 1977, there was, what Ebadi describes as, a shift in the streets of Tehran. The shahs regime was trying to reduce the causality of the judiciary by setting up the Mediating Council, an extrajudicial outfit that would have allowed cases to be judged away of the formal justice arrangement. Some of the justices wrote a protest letter argumentation a comest the council, demanding that all cases had to be tried before a accost of law.This was the beginning collective action taken by the judges against the shah. Ebadi sign the letter. In January of 1978, President 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 newspaper article aggressively attacking Khomeini inspired a fight off among the people of Iran, calling for his Khomeinis return the police aspect into the crowd and killed many men. By the summer of 1978, protests had gr consume larger, making it impossible to avoid them. In early August, a crowded cinema in Abadan was burned to the round. This direful veritable(a)t burned 400 people alive. The shah blamed this e mercantile establishment on religious conservatives Khomeini accused the SAVAK, the regimes secret police, which was a force of legendary brutality against the brasss opponents. This tragedy pushed many Iranians against the shah. They now realized that t he shah was not merely an American puppet. Ebadi herself says that she was drawn to the opposition. She says that it did not seem a contradiction for her, an educated professional woman, to lynchpin it (Ebadi, 33). She had no idea that she was backing her own eventual 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 down hobo the desk. He looked up at us in awe and his gaze halted when he saw my face. You You of all people, why are you here? he asked, bewildered and stern. preceptort you realise that youre reenforcement 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 two millennia of rule by Persian kings. The streets were over-crowde d with euphoric citizens, Ebadi herself universe one of them. On February 1st, 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran. For near a month, the surface area of Iran hung in the balance. In most of the cities an emergency military had asleep(p) 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 superior.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 taking in the frenzied scene of emotion. The future(a) 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 ha d willingly participated in her own defeat. Ebadi, 38) Merely years 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 respect 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 being 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 troika 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 counter-revolutionist tendencies, and riding to the ministry car to work was evidence of class privilege (Ebadi 42). Rumors outflank that Islam barred 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 precisely even this nice comfort proved to be in vain. In the final days of 1979, Ebadi was effectively stripped of her judgeship. She stubbornly stood, though six months pregnant, as the commissioning 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 about 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 unprovoked its clear they dont want to be working(a) The point Ebadi was trying to make is clear by the telling of these statements. some men, especially those in the politics, had lost what little respect they had previously held for women earlier to the Revolution. That much, at least, seemed very clear. The post-Revolutions effect on women was a dour one. As Ebadi read in a newspaper piece name Islamic Revolution, the life of a womans was now half that of a man (for instance, if a car hit both(prenominal) 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 only half as much as that of a mans a woman had to ask her husband permission to divorce. The drafters of the punishable code had apparently consulted the ordinal century for legal 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 deep down Ebadis marriage. The day Javad and I married each other, we joined ou r lives together as two equals, she writes. just now on a lower floor these laws, he stayed a person and I became a chattel. They permitted him to divorce me at will, take custody of our future 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, exactly she still could not accept the distraction the imbalance between them was cause her. At length, Ebadi came up with a solution within the tendency of the abutting 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 besides my life. This eased Ebadis feeling of unrest greatly, her and her husband were equals again, but a piddling part of her was still at unease. After all, 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 invasion on Iran.Though the popular discontent 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 dead bodies. Despite all of this, the people went on, just as they had through the upheaval after the revolution. In short, the decade after the revolution was one filled with much discord, 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 make me even more obstinate, she writes. We had been told not to discuss his death with anyone, so I talked about his execution night and day. In taxis, at the corner shop, in line for bread, I would approach perfect strangers and tell them about this refreshful 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 original 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 wearing slippers. Yet over time, it again became fash ionable for the daughters of Traditional families to attend college, Ebadi writes. Throughout the nineties, the number of women with college degrees move up 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 life history 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, sexist interpretations were to be made.Ebadi began to take on on ly the cases of women and children, for these were the ones who were uninterruptedly at the favor of a sick, twisted government. Ebadi took on many cases one was that of the family of Zahra Kanzemi, an Iranian diary keeper who had been killed in police custody in 2003. Another was that of a learner who was beaten to death by paramilitaries during a 1999 protest Ebadi herself was imprisoned during the course of this case. While digging through the paperwork for a case representing the children of a duad who had been slain in their home, Ebadi stumbled across the official authorization of her own assassination.The reply 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 rightfully 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 have done in her place. In reality, this is not so.Many others around Ebadi had the education 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 injury with law the very law the injustices claimed themselves to be. Following the Reform Era, you can see Ebadi breathe a huge sigh of relief.The years of constant anxiousness 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 sm udge of makeup or nail-polish, or for wearing any color clothing besides navy or nasty tones, were happily retired. Moderate President Khatami sought to pull back the systems interference in the peoples private 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 impossible for the state to impose itself as before. This book was, in my opinion, a tempestuous 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 at one time 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 interpreted to oppress women or interpreted to liberate them I am a attorney 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 pen a family like Leilas a child who was raped and murdered from become homeless in their quest to finance the executions of their daughters convicted murderers. If Im forced to ferret through musty books of Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources that stress the democratic 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