Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  About a month later, two of the country’s most prominent women’s rights activists came to my office. The trees outside the building were thick with green leaves, and the sun was shining so brightly that I flicked off the office lights. As Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani and Parvin Ardalan took off their manteaus and head scarves, I poured tea, waiting for the bubbles to settle across the amber liquid. Parvin had a commanding presence, with her mop of curly black hair, huge dark eyes, and winged eyebrows. Noushin was slighter and more unassuming. They were both in their early thirties and had worked for years as journalists and community activists. They seemed more energized than usual that day, and when we sat down around the dark oak table to talk, they explained that they were about to launch an important new campaign.

  “It will be called the One Million Signatures campaign,” said Noushin. “It will, of course, protest against legal discriminations against women, but it will get us out door-to-door across the country, moving forward the conversation about women’s rights.”

  Both of them looked at me expectantly.

  “So, Khanoum Ebadi, do you agree with our idea?” Noushin finally asked. “Can you help us?”

  I had been silent because I was so moved. It felt like all the efforts that women like me had made in the early years of the revolution, pushing back against all that discrimination and state bullying, were finally—nearly three decades later—bearing some fruit. Iran’s feminist movement was one of the country’s most striking features. Despite the state’s fierce repressiveness—everything from laws that permitted stoning and polygamy to morality police sweeps that harassed women on the street for not dressing conservatively enough—Iran had a burgeoning, vibrant women’s movement. Most important, it had grassroots support among women of all backgrounds. This wasn’t a clique of upper-class women who had studied in Europe and were supported by their husbands but a real movement, with centers and seminars and training sessions with titles like “How to Cope with Interrogation.” Though it was not something that I particularly wished to take credit for, it did seem that my receipt of the Nobel in 2003 had propelled the women’s activists. To have a woman just like them, a woman they knew, whom they had seen going in and out of court for years under the Islamic Republic, be recognized in this way showed them that the world watched and appreciated their efforts. Most of the time they were struggling alone, but history was also watching them.

  Because my position allowed me to travel around the region, I saw how special this was. No other Middle Eastern country had anything quite like it. Much of the region was still enamored with political Islam, and in countries like Saudi Arabia, many women were simply not interested in mounting an open challenge to the state’s patriarchy. So in this, Iran was very special and ahead of its neighbors, and the movement had managed to flourish, despite Ahmadinejad’s emergence.

  “Your idea is tremendous,” I said. “It is impressive and bold, and well conceived. I just think you have to be careful to direct it in a way so that it has maximum appeal. It needs to be an initiative that traditional and religious people also find themselves drawn to, not just the secularists.”

  The two nodded in agreement, but they said they had to discuss this aspect of their outreach with the committee charged with launching the campaign. Everyone had to support the group’s key ideas before they could be adapted. I was pleased to see how naturally democratic the activists were in organizing and planning their initiatives, and that they were not prepared to accept something without consulting with their colleagues. I wished them the best of luck, and I said I looked forward to their launch.

  The following week, Parvin and Noushin returned and showed me a draft of their One Million Signatures campaign handbook and introduction, which the group’s legal committee had drafted. I made a few minor changes to ensure that all the content was consistently defensible in any court of law. After that, a date was set for the launch of the campaign: August 27.

  What discriminatory laws, Parvin asked, should they start with? Divorce law and polygamy? Inheritance and child custody? I said their campaign should have only one objective—namely, the reform of all discriminatory laws. They asked if such an objective could be achieved under the Islamic Republic system.

  I told them, “This must be the aspiration, the ideal. An ideal is like the sun in the sky. Perhaps no one can ever reach the sun, but you shouldn’t forget that it’s there. As to which set of laws you should start with, I think this is something you’d best ask the signatories.”

  —

  When it came to launching the campaign, the authorities refused the women a legal permit to hold their meeting in a public place or assembly hall. So they had no choice but to start the campaign from the office of one of the group’s supporters. The plan was to hold a brief ceremony and announce the campaign’s objectives. But two hours before the start of the meeting, security officials warned the owner of the office building that such a meeting should not go ahead.

  There was no time to inform all the participants. Everyone gradually began to arrive, and they faced a locked door. Noushin and Parvin were standing there, arms crossed over their chests, absolutely furious. Others looked anxiously at the security forces, who were now standing at the entrance to the street. Gradually those who had been invited to the meeting began to arrive, forming a large crowd in the street. I spotted a few journalists, as well, in the crowd.

  Suddenly, a young girl shouted from among the crowd: “You can’t stop us! The campaign will begin here…right in the middle of this street!” The crowd broke into applause at her suggestion, and the organizers began distributing sheets of paper for everyone to sign. An hour later, the crowd dispersed, and the security forces left as well, probably thinking that they had successfully prevented the meeting.

  The following month, while on a visit to the United States to attend a seminar along with Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and all the women winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, I passed out the campaign’s petition paper and asked everyone to sign it. Soon the media announced that all these prominent figures had come out in support of this action by Iranian women.

  Though the organizers called their effort the One Million Signatures campaign, the key goal was never to simply collect signatures. The main objective was to raise awareness across Iran about discriminatory laws and to propel a wider debate around how those laws could be updated or changed. The campaign, which had both men and women in its ranks, used the meeting point of a signature collection as an occasion to speak to people and to emphasize the peacefulness of their work. Campaigners visited government offices and organizations, and they asked people for signatures at metro and bus stations. They organized street-theater events, visited women in their homes, and fanned out across the country. They found support and expanded quickly from Tehran to a number of other cities. There, activists from Tehran held “train the trainer” sessions, and these local activists began doing in all these cities what the key founders had started in Tehran.

  What this proved was something deeply distressing to the authorities: that the demand for legal reform extended to women across the country, across class, geography, and social background. The campaign’s great success was to develop and build women’s awareness around key legal issues like equitable inheritance rights and inflation adjustment for dowries—these were areas that had the support of traditional and more secular-minded women alike, and the mounting pressure, plus the many thousands of accumulating signatures, made the state deeply nervous.

  It was at around that time that the arrests began. Across the country, the authorities began going after activists, from senior leaders to even occasional participants. The chief prosecutor accused them of “conspiracy against national security” and the “dissemination of lies” in society. This was because after the officials had carefully scrutinized the handbook, the introduction, and all the material published and distributed by the campaign, they could not find even a single sentence that contravened an accepted tenet
of Islam. This meant it would be impossible for the state to level charges of antagonism against Islam; there was not even enough to get a cleric who was on the state’s payroll to declare that the activists were apostates. I had been watching out for this from the beginning. From that day at my office when Noushin and Parvin had brought over the campaign’s draft documents, I had read them with an eye to what I suspected would someday happen.

  When the activists went to court, I represented a number of them as their defense lawyer. In one of the trials, I openly challenged the state’s claim that the women’s work had somehow undermined national security.

  “So a woman says she does not want her husband to have a second wife, and she refused to share her marital bed with another woman. Can you please explain to me how this will lead to Israel attacking Iran?” I asked the judge. He was not a cleric, but he had the required stubble and continuously played with a string of amber prayer beads.

  The accusations were completely irrelevant and laughable. But with a justice system that had long ago lost its independence, that now walked in step with the whims of a higher, repressive authority, the fact that there was a court process meant very little. The judiciary sentenced both Noushin and Parvin to three years in prison, and a number of others also received convictions. Many who avoided prison found themselves later so harassed and vulnerable that they ended up leaving the country.

  Despite this, I consider their work a success. New organizers continued to carry on their work, and kept on collecting signatures. The campaign transformed legal discrimination into a national social debate. The social aspect is key here, because the feminist activists managed to disentangle the women’s question from the high politics of East versus West, Iran versus the world, and the Islamic Republic versus democracy. Topics like equal access to education for women, blood money, and polygamy became issues that ordinary women were engaged with, and as a result, in the elections to come they figured as a central part of candidates’ campaign pledges.

  There were some small legal victories as well. In 2008, the campaign pressured the parliament into amending the country’s inheritance laws, ensuring that women could inherit their deceased husband’s properties. That same year, the parliament also granted women the right to equal blood money in accidents covered by insurance companies. Members of parliament managed to block Articles 23 and 25 of the “Family Protection” bill the Ahmadinejad government had proposed in 2007, which would have enabled men to take additional wives without their first wife’s consent and would have mandated that women pay a tax on their fiancé’s mehrieh (dowry gift). None of this meant that Iran’s lawmakers were suddenly liberal and concerned with women standing equally before the law, but they were sensitive enough to public opinion to see that society itself was growing more progressive. And, as is often the case in Iran, Iranians managed to either nudge the regime ahead or pull it along with them—I’m not sure which.

  On an inky Tehran night in 2007, just before one in the morning, my old friend Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American Middle East scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., was riding in a taxi along the Tehran-Qom highway, en route to Imam Khomeini airport. Haleh visited Iran two or three times each year to see her mother, an Austrian woman who had lived in the country for decades and was devoted enough to Iran that she stayed on there even after her Iranian husband, Haleh’s father, passed away. As Haleh’s taxi sped through the night, a car in the next lane started driving precariously close. It veered near, drifted away, then veered close again. Haleh clutched the door handle and shouted to the driver. He nervously slowed down, waving a hand at the other driver as if to say, Are you trying to kill us all? The car kept pushing closer and closer, until it edged the taxi onto the shoulder, forcing it to stop. Under the sickly orange glow of the streetlamps, two men jumped out and forced the doors of the taxi open. They grabbed Haleh’s handbag and luggage, hopped back into their car, and sped off into the night.

  A shaken Haleh, who couldn’t fly because her Iranian passport had been in that stolen bag, returned to her mother’s house and went to the police station in the morning to report the incident. The police referred her to some security officials, who, in turn, asked a few questions about her work, then let her go. She agreed to return a few days later and answer the rest of their questions. The next time she returned for more questioning, the agents arrested her. It now became clear that the motorway theft had been staged, an elaborate way to stop Haleh from traveling home to Washington.

  Haleh’s husband, Shaul Bakhash, a distinguished professor who taught at George Mason University and who, like Haleh, had been a noted journalist before the revolution, contacted me. Haleh was a grandmother and close to retirement, a delicate, petite woman whom no one could imagine in an Islamic Republic prison cell. He was distraught but composed, and he assured me that if I would agree to represent Haleh he would pay my fees, no matter how high. I explained to him that I had made a pledge to myself never to receive any payment from any political prisoner. Fulfilling that pledge was like performing a divine duty for me. Should one receive money for fulfilling a divine obligation? He thanked me, and I started my work. But, as usual, the authorities did not permit me to visit Haleh; nor did they provide me with the case file to study. It was impossible to determine what the authorities believed to be the cause of her guilt. What had she been accused of doing? And why the staged highway robbery? Why had they not simply obtained an arrest warrant from the prosecutor and picked her up at home?

  Defending such a client, under these circumstances, was a bit like being dropped into a spy film without any advance knowledge of the plot or even a sense of location. Often I felt as though I were rushing about in the darkness, banging on doors, searching for the elusive person who mattered, the individual who could reveal what was actually going on. In Haleh’s case, the authorities blocked me from speaking to the interrogators who were seeing her regularly, and of course there was little question of my tracking down the intelligence officers handling her case, the ones who made all the decisions. Where would I even look for them? The precise location of the Ministry of Intelligence’s headquarters in Tehran is still unknown to any but those who work there and those in the very highest level of the government. In all my interactions with agents, they had visited my office, keeping the place they returned to a secret.

  There wasn’t much I could do, but as I certainly needed to do something, I gave interviews about the case to the press, often hourly. I wrote a letter detailing the case to the U.N. High Commission on Human Rights—Iran was on the committee that year and I hoped it would release Haleh to save itself the embarrassment of having the issue raised during one of the committee’s upcoming meetings. Not long after, the authorities released Haleh. Her friends and family in Washington had mounted an aggressive campaign in the Western media, pressuring the government for her release, and it had succeeded. She left Tehran and flew to Washington, D.C., never to return.

  In the months and years that would follow Haleh’s arrest, the Iranian state went on to arrest and detain other Iranian-American dual citizens. The policy was, first and foremost, designed by the state to create a bargaining chip with the United States. People like Haleh, and those who came after her, were effectively hostages, cases that American officials brought up through intermediaries and then directly with Iranian officials, in hopes of securing the release of American citizens. That it sought to create bargaining power through such means only highlighted Iran’s desperation, as well as its willingness to use the most compromised means possible to achieve its political aims.

  —

  On a frigid winter morning, I was standing outside our apartment building, bundled in a warm woolen coat, waiting for a young colleague to pick me up. There was a light dusting of snow along all the spindly limbs of the trees, and the coffee-colored slush along the curb was still frozen in patches. A few minutes earlier, my colleague had texted to say she was nearby, and s
o I had locked up and gone outside, concerned that the ice and snow on our street might give her trouble. Our street is a tiny residential lane off the main thoroughfare in Yusef Abad and, because of its slight angle, can be difficult to maneuver during wintertime. I might have simply walked up to the main road and taken a taxi, but by that time, the winter of 2007, I no longer went anywhere on my own. I had dispensed with my state-appointed bodyguards, and during one of my recent trips abroad I had bought a vial of pepper spray, which I kept in my handbag. There was no particular threat that compelled me to do this, just a general sense of mounting tensions. I knew that the authorities were increasingly displeased with me, and that sooner or later they would choose some way of conveying that more intensely. Sometimes, as when I was returning home late in the evening or walking through a part of Tehran I didn’t know especially well, I clutched the spray in my palm. I wasn’t afraid of thieves; I was afraid of spies.

  I had recently received a legal summons to appear before a judge and explain why I had shaken hands with Jacques Chirac, the French president, the previous year. Apparently some Iranian man had seen the handshake on television or a photo of it in a newspaper and had filed a legal complaint against me, arguing that by shaking a man’s hand publicly, I had brought shame on him, this random individual, “before the entire world.” I had ignored the summons. I knew the state was desperate to put me on trial for something, but a complaint like this I simply refused to engage with.

  It was becoming clear that Ahmadinejad’s rise to power was inalterably changing everything. The political establishment was growing angrier and more intolerant, and the middlemen and loyalists Ahmadinejad had installed across the regime’s many institutions were busy clanging shut any of the small, progressive openings Iran had experienced under President Khatami. The censorship authorities were aggressively stepping up their controls on what novelists, screenwriters, and academics could publish, and even books that had been vetted and published found themselves back on the censor’s desk. Girl with a Pearl Earring, in its seventh print run, lost its publishing clearance, as did Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which had been published in Persian under the already soaped title Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts.