by Shirin Ebadi
For activists and organizers, the situation was growing even more bleak, with state harassment of their families, threats from intelligence agents, and warnings of prosecution stepped up by the day. Worst of all was the narrowing of the space for public debate. Newspapers were becoming more bland in their coverage of politics, afraid of provoking the censors, and formerly outspoken academics and intellectuals were now more quiet. The vibrancy of Iran’s political atmosphere, the very thing that made Iran so distinct in the region, was fading. In its place were arrests of journalists and harassment of dissidents, and this put me in a more fraught relationship with the state. Nevertheless, I had no choice but to raise my voice and criticize the government more publicly.
Finally a gray Peugeot slowed to a stop at the top of our road. I waved to show I was coming and walked up the sidewalk to greet my colleague. I was feeling rather low that day, but I said nothing about that as we merged in with the traffic and headed toward the Tehran revolutionary court.
Everyone who entered the court building had to go through security, and as with all government buildings and public places, there were special lines for men and women. We walked toward the women’s security section and heard, from behind the curtains where the inspections took place, a booming voice chastising a woman for allowing some locks of hair to show beneath her head scarf.
“And what’s this? Wipe it off,” the voice said sharply.
“But it’s just a bit of foundation—is it really a problem?” the other voice said softly.
“If you want to go in, it’s a problem.”
We waited until the woman behind the thick navy curtain had fixed whatever was wrong with her appearance, and then we went in. One of the security women was sitting down looking at a magazine, and the other—I could see instantly that it was she of the booming voice—took up much of the small space. I remembered her from my last visit to the court. She wore a severe black maghnaeh that pinched at the skin around her fleshy face, and her chador seemed to be worn over yet another black chador. Despite her girth, hardly any contour or flash of a figure was visible. She was clearly extremely religious. No deviation, no matter how minor, escaped this woman’s stern gaze. Perfume, light-colored coats, things that scarcely any other security check would fault, that were probably not even technically infractions, made her mouth go tight.
But when bending close to pat me down, she whispered in my ear, “I respect what you do, to protect the rights of women. For the sake of Allah the almighty, please do something for the poor subjugated women. My son-in-law has taken a second wife, and he now wants to divorce my daughter. Everyone says he has used his legal rights. What kind of a right is this? Please, for God’s sake, do something for women.”
My colleague, who had been inspected lightly by the quiet woman with the magazine, had been waiting on the other side of the curtain.
“What took you so long?” she said curiously. “Did she hassle you?”
“No, not at all.”
While the security guard’s words had saddened me, they also bolstered me as I walked toward the court. The woman wanted justice for her daughter. Her words quietly echoed in my mind as we continued down the corridor, a reminder that the quest for justice was one that so many Iranians shared, regardless of their differences.
Because I was a repository for people’s grievances, because they sought me out to tell me their sorrows, I knew the security guard’s concerns were just a glimpse into the vast, simmering dissatisfaction that ruled Iranian society. Government employees often confided their disappointments to me, in ministries and other offices I visited for work. Even judges sometimes complained openly to me, upset with some aspect of the status quo. Where did all that mistrust and resentment reside, I wondered. How could it just lie dormant inside so many people, as they went about their days, their multiple jobs, in this city choked with pollution, waiting and waiting for something to get better?
—
On another freezing cold winter day, a shoeshine man appeared out of nowhere and set himself up directly across the street from our apartment building. Our street is hardly wider than a car’s width, and it dead-ends at a park. It is both entirely residential and not especially long, and the only people who ever venture down it are the very few who live there. It was clearly not a suitable place for a shoeshine man to try to make a living. Dressed in shabby gray trousers and a large overcoat, the man turned up every morning, sat on a wooden stool, and laid out his polish and brushes. The whole business was such a comic and blatant attempt by the security services to monitor me that the colleagues and friends who called at my office began making sarcastic comments to him as they passed.
“Business brisk these days, eh?” they would say. “May you not be tired,” one might add, using the common Persian phrase for greeting those one encounters in the course of work or labor. He would only smile politely, indifferent to these comments. I never saw him making notes, but he did have a mobile phone, which he used to report on the movements of those going into and out of my building. After a few weeks, he disappeared.
About a month later, walking up to the main road to buy cake from our local bakery, I saw that a freshly painted new newspaper kiosk had opened up at the top of our lane. It was carefully situated to give the kiosk owner a wide view of any cars or pedestrians heading down our street. As I walked past, I looked the man tending the kiosk straight in the face.
Less than a hundred yards away, there was another newspaper kiosk that had served the neighborhood for two decades. The owner’s business was thriving, he sold nearly all the papers and magazines published in Tehran, and he was friendly and beloved by the whole area. All the neighbors and local shop owners suspected that the recently arrived newspaper seller was an intelligence agent, installed there by the authorities to, like the shoe shiner, monitor the comings and goings from my office. Although the authorities handled their surveillance so crudely that my neighbors and friends made jokes, it unnerved me to think that vulnerable families of detainees, potential clients, and activists already sentenced and out on furlough would come to meet me imagining that they were going to a private meeting when, in fact, their faces and identities would quickly be recorded and uploaded to the state’s security bodies.
One afternoon, a client who had spent some time in prison for a political crime arrived for a visit. He slowly set his coat and umbrella down on a chair by the door, a grave expression on his face. Then he told me, “When I was just walking past the kiosk, I saw one of the revolutionary court’s interrogators. He was inside, talking to the newsagent. I would remember his face anywhere.”
That was when I knew without a doubt that my suspicions had been correct. I was being watched every time I entered and left my home. An intelligence agent was keeping vigil, with no other purpose than to watch me and report.
As the Tehran winter turned to spring and the snow melted off the tops of the Alborz Mountains, the political situation continued to darken. Around this time, the authorities forced Javad to retire. After thirty years of service he was technically eligible for retirement, but he had had no plans to do so. He was energetic, in perfect health, and enjoyed his work as a senior engineer, and he would likely have kept working another five or ten years before applying for retirement. But one day the human resources officer of the engineering firm he worked for summoned him and said they were granting him retirement, effective immediately. The HR manager told him that the Ministry of Intelligence had indirectly made it known to them that this was because of my activities.
Javad wasn’t devastated, but he was not exactly pleased, either. There was still the possibility of working as a consultant—this didn’t have to be the end of his professional life—but I nevertheless felt a deep sadness and guilt. My work had effectively ruined his. It was another instance of his life being altered because of the path I had chosen, another compromise that he tolerated with grace. Trying to make it up to him, I planned a trip for us to Russia. But Javad’s li
fe changed after that. He pursued a partnership that never panned out, and he ended up putting work aside sooner than he would ever have otherwise. It was an early sign that the state would not permit us to flourish together.
—
I was sitting at my desk with my first morning cup of tea when my buzzer rang. The authorities in Tehran had recently rounded up seven leaders of the Baha’i faith, and the community was shaken to its core. Iran makes life difficult for the religious minorities it does accept—Christians, Jews, and Sunni Muslims. But the Baha’is, considered heretics by the Islamic Republic, are singled out for full-scale persecution. The Baha’i faith emerged in Iran about two hundred years ago, founded by the prophet Baha’u’llah. Today Baha’is number around five million globally, with 350,000, a sizable community, living in Iran as the country’s largest single religious minority. The Islamic Republic not only rejects the Baha’i faith but prevents Baha’is from holding government jobs, denies them licenses for running businesses like restaurants and hair salons, and forbids their young people to study at universities. Since 1979, the state has executed more than two hundred Baha’is simply for their religious beliefs.
When the community leaders were arrested, no lawyer dared take on their case. In the legal realm, the Baha’is are the no-man’s-land of the Islamic Republic. No one, even lawyers who represent feminists and democracy activists, will take on Baha’i cases, because the state’s hatred and extreme sensitivity are so entrenched that the consequences, lawyers fear, will be too dangerous. That is why the families of those arrested came to me, and I agreed to act as their attorney.
Not long after I had accepted their case, a number of hard-line websites began reporting that my daughter Nargess had converted to Bahaism. Under the Islamic Republic’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, converting out of Islam amounts to apostasy, which is punishable by death. It was a prelude to what, I imagined, would be further reports alleging my own conversion. They were trying to scare me into dropping the case, perhaps laying out some sort of trap.
I knew I was treading on dangerous ground and would have to think creatively. I contacted Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a senior cleric who had once been Khomeini’s heir but had been cast aside in the late 1980s when he protested the regime’s mass executions of dissidents. Since then, Montazeri had evolved into one of Iran’s most liberal clerics, though the regime harassed him intensely and kept him under virtual house arrest. I wrote a religious query to Montazeri, asking openly whether Islam would permit a Muslim to defend a Baha’i accused of espionage. In response, the ayatollah issued a fatwa that said it was indeed permissible. The fatwa went so far as to specify that if one was certain that the accused Baha’i was innocent, then not only was it permissible to defend that person but it was vajeb, duty.
The prosecutor had said that the defendants could not meet with their lawyers until the end of the investigations; furthermore, I was not permitted to study the files or have access to the allegations against them. I went repeatedly to see the lead investigator in order to get some news about my clients, but he deflected all my inquiries. During one visit, he grew exasperated.
“You’re a Muslim. How can you be defending a Baha’i?”
“It’s precisely because I’m a Muslim and not a Baha’i that I want to defend them. I believe in freedom of religion, and Islam defends that right.”
He looked at me stonily, so I felt emboldened to continue.
“Has the Koran not said, ‘Oh Muhammad, tell the infidels: I do not worship your God and you do not worship mine. So, keep your religion for yourself, and I will keep my religion for myself too.’ So what is the meaning of this Koranic verse?”
“It’s a pity that the law does not allow it. If the law permitted me, I wouldn’t show mercy even to their children. They are misleading our youths.”
After about a year, my clients were finally permitted to receive visits from their families, but they were still not allowed to meet with me. The relatives who were permitted visits passed me news. They told me that the security officials, including the lead investigator, had promised to show them leniency in court if they agreed to fire me as their lawyer.
My clients did not agree, and after they lingered in prison for another few months, I was finally allowed to study the case files. The prosecutor had accused them of spying for America and Israel and conspiring against national security. But their files did not contain any evidence or even reasoning that might point to their guilt. It was clear that they were being punished for their religious beliefs, but because it would cause such international condemnation to prosecute them on these grounds, the state had leveled espionage charges. Iranian criminal law does not formally consider being a Baha’i an offense, and because the courts had no evidence of spying, these Baha’is should have been released. But the Iranian court sentenced my clients, five men and two women, to twenty years in prison, where they remain to this day.
—
It was high summer, the whirring air conditioners of the neighborhood creating a collective hum that I could hear from my law office. I was reading an email from my daughter, absently sipping a sour cherry juice, and calculating the time difference with the East Coast in my head to see when I could call her. The rasp of my buzzer startled me. I wasn’t expecting any callers, and I waited a moment before I got up to answer.
“Yes?”
“Mahdavi, from the Ministry of Intelligence. Do you have a moment?”
I leaned against the doorframe, wondering what to do. Mahdavi never came by without an appointment, and that afternoon I was alone. I reached for my head scarf and buzzed him in. When he entered, a second man followed behind.
“This is my colleague, Mr. Mahmudi. He will be taking over your file from me.”
Mahmudi was in his mid-thirties, with light brown eyes, fair skin, and the requisite civil servant’s pious stubble. His cologne reached me before he did; I imagined he must have applied it in the car before coming up. His eyes scanned my office with some disappointment, as though he had been expecting something far grander. His shoes were pointy, the style of working-class Iranians trying to appear urban and stylish.
“How are you doing?” Mahmudi asked, after I had made some tea.
“I’m very well, thank you.” I had to remind myself to keep my arms uncrossed, so as not to appear discomfited.
“I’m here to talk about your activities. Maybe you can help us better understand exactly what it is you’re up to. We thought you were mainly involved in human rights. But we see you’re now providing reports to the United Nations. What’s going on here?”
“Well, for one, we send our reports to several places,” I answered. “But as I see it, there’s nothing wrong with cooperating with the U.N., so there’s not much to explain.”
“It makes it political. Why don’t you just do your reports and keep it at that?”
“If cooperating with the U.N. is so wrong, why is the Iranian government a member in the first place? And why does the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs have such extensive dealings with the U.N.? Why do we even have an ambassador there?”
“I’m not here to talk about ambassadors,” he said. “Tell me why you’re also interfering in the election process. This is a political matter; it shouldn’t be meddled with.”
The Defenders of Human Rights Center had set up a committee to promote free and fair elections, based on the principles of an international body to which Iran belonged. The committee had assessed Iran’s votes for two years and found numerous violations, which it had then passed on to the body itself, the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The Iranian government had not been pleased.
I tried to explain to my new monitor that we needed healthy elections to have a healthy democracy. I argued that otherwise people would grow dissatisfied and be compelled to stage another revolution.
Mahmudi listened to this impassively, drumming his fingers on the table. His eyes darkened as I mentioned the possibility of another rev
olution.
“Okay. So this National Peace Council you’ve set up. What’s this? Your work has so many different branches,” he said.
“Human rights are meaningless without peace. During times of conflict, or just a sense of impending conflict, it’s nearly impossible to focus on rights like freedom of expression, or the right to an education. Everyone is just struggling to survive. So peace and rights are actually very connected.”
“We’re at peace now anyway, so it seems like wasted effort to me, at best,” he said.
I didn’t know how much further to go on. Should I really give a short lecture on human rights and their inalienable and existential meaning to an intelligence agent? He was demanding answers, and I had no other language in which to explain myself. He wanted to understand—or at least he was pretending to want to understand—how human rights and democracy and conflict prevention intersected, but such conversation demanded some sliver of a shared worldview, or, at a minimum, a shared understanding of those terms. He was getting antsy, pushing his chair back, as though to create more distance between us. I decided to simplify what I was saying and relate it to his work.
“I’m not interested in political power at all. That’s not the aim of human rights work. I know that holds for my colleagues as well. We don’t work with or for any opposition groups; we don’t even particularly support one over the other. We’re just committed to seeing people live freely and to making sure their legal rights are protected.”
I described the various people who had joined the National Peace Council, how we had included filmmakers and writers, scientists and doctors. We had set up the group during the presidency of George W. Bush, when his government spoke incessantly of war against Iran. All at once, he ran out of patience and interrupted me loudly: