Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  —

  The Western media labeled the uprisings taking place across the region the “Arab Spring.” I do not know who coined this phrase, but it was a complete mistake. There was no spring. People’s memories are very short, for anyone who knew the Middle East even a little would understand that a dictator’s departure does not necessarily mean the end of dictatorship. Had everyone forgotten Iran in 1979 and the uprising that historians called the last great revolution of the twentieth century? How easily that dictator had been replaced by another, wearing different ideological robes. In my encounters with Arab friends, who were so overwhelmingly hopeful about the prospects for change, I did not wish to be the cynical Iranian. But I found the rise of the Islamists, who so promptly emerged from the shadows to seek power, deeply disturbing.

  In both Egypt and Tunisia, the Islamists managed to take control through elections. The first thing they did after victory was to dampen their nations’ feminist movements, through the approval of new laws justified in the name of sharia. These laws intensified the gender discrimination that already existed, and they also limited freedom of expression, so that the citizens would not dare express their dissatisfaction with them. The new rulers equated every single political criticism as criticism of Islam, and they labeled their critics “infidels.”

  The climate grew so extreme that in Tunis in October 2011, mobs attacked and threw firebombs at the home of a television station owner whose channel had aired Persepolis, an animated film based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi documenting her coming-of-age during Iran’s Islamic Revolution. While the film had nothing to do with Tunisia, it did powerfully convey the discontent of Iranian young people who’d lost their cultural and social freedoms with the rise of the country’s new Islamist leaders. The Salafists, as the extreme Islamists in the Arab world are known, took issue with a scene in the novel where Satrapi portrays God as appearing in human form. On the surface, the Islamists were most incensed by this perceived violation—strict, puritan Islam holds that images cannot be made of God, the Prophet, or, indeed, any human or animal. But perhaps more important, the film carried a powerful message about the vulnerabilities of a secularist in the midst of an increasingly conservative revolution, and how quickly Islamists in power were able to close up the space in which more liberal or secular Middle Easterners used to exist. After the imam in a downtown Tunis mosque railed against the film in his sermon, thousands of Tunisians protested in the streets and torched the television network’s offices. The authorities prosecuted the television station’s owner.

  In Egypt, too, the presidential elections brought into office an Islamist whose strict, power-grabbing agenda soon caused great alarm. Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, sought to refashion Egyptian laws at home, limiting the democratic process, while keeping the United States—a key donor of foreign aid to Egypt—placated. When the people of Syria rose up against their own dictator, Bashar al-Assad, Morsi came out strongly in support of the opposition and snubbed Iran, which was keen to rebuild the political ties with Egypt that had been severed after the 1979 revolution. But for Egyptians, Morsi’s brief, one-year rule proved disastrous. Though he had promised a government “for all Egyptians,” Morsi moved to strengthen his own Muslim Brotherhood party, granting himself far-ranging legal powers and trying to rush through a new draft constitution that liberals, many moderates, and Egypt’s Coptic Christians opposed. When it came to women’s rights, Morsi and the Muslim Brothers showed their intentions very quickly. They rejected a U.N. declaration condemning violence against women and explicitly said that wives should not be permitted to file complaints against their husbands for rape, adding that a husband should have “guardianship” over his wife.

  These moves, especially the draft constitution, so infuriated Egyptians that they once again poured into Tahrir Square in protest, leading to days of unrest and mass demonstrations that culminated in clashes and, ultimately, the Egyptian military’s removal of Morsi from power. There was a moment when the Egyptian president before the revolution, Hosni Mubarak, and the president after the revolution, Mohamed Morsi, both sat in prison watching the satire of the history of their country. The U.N. secretary-general and the head of the European Union asked the Egyptian military to release Morsi, and many observers in the West denounced his removal as a military coup.

  But as an Iranian who had lived through a similar history, I intimately understood and sympathized with the impulse that had led to the anti-Morsi demonstrations. What should a society do when a leader that is elected through a democratic process then seeks to subvert the very legal foundation on which the state, constitution, and electorate that voted him into power is based on? Can you allow a democratically elected leader to essentially destroy and subvert the principles that put him in power in the first place? Many Egyptians viewed Morsi’s removal not as a subversion of democracy but an unfortunately necessary act that was required to safeguard it.

  For me, it was almost a blow-by-blow reenactment of Iran’s revolution, and I was relieved to see Egypt spared, to some extent, Iran’s fate. In those early days of Egypt’s uprising, in the first days of Morsi’s presidency, I always felt anxious when I spoke to Arab friends, who were adamant that no one could snatch away the ideals of their revolution and that Morsi would not dare roll back the rights of Egyptian women. I wanted to say to them, “Look at me! I supported a revolution that ended up stripping me of my judgeship. I walked in the streets and chanted for freedom and helped a revolt that was seized by Islamists, leading to the collapse of my career, the collapse of the rights of women entirely.” What a bitter, startling time it was for me, to watch all this unfolding in the region, and to hear the indignation of Western liberals, who felt it was “undemocratic” for Egyptians to stop Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from taking over Egypt.

  So the tumult of 2011, despite all the hope and promise of those dramatic moments, did not bring about a spring of any sort for the Arab world. And in Iran, not only was there no sign of spring at all; the citizens lived in a permanent winter. With the imprisonment of the key opposition leaders Mousavi and Karroubi, the majority of Iranians who had held out hope that eventually, with time, the system would reform itself from within lost hope. And, disturbingly, around the same time, the most regressive forces calling for regime change in Iran gained ground in the West. The Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization, which had emerged before the 1979 Iranian revolution but had transformed itself over time into a cultish, violent group, began drawing the attention and support of members of the U.S. Congress and some prominent former officials. Washington had long designated the MKO as a terrorist group, but in September 2012 the group won; the State Department took it off its list of designated terrorist organizations. Iranians across the world viewed the group with disdain—if there was anything that Iranians of various political stripes agreed on, it was this, for the members of the MKO had joined Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq War, fighting against their own countrymen. So it was particularly jarring and worrisome to see mainstream U.S. politicians cozying up to the MKO, even if only to needle the Islamic Republic.

  Around the same time, a palpable swell of affection was growing around Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the last shah, whom monarchists considered the rightful king of Iran. For years, Pahlavi had been politically active from his base in Washington, D.C., though it neither seemed that he was a natural leader for an opposition movement nor that Iranians were particularly interested in reestablishing the monarchy. But at a time when the political situation in Iran looked terribly bleak and Iranians increasingly felt that the supreme leader was not willing to retreat at all, Reza Pahlavi seemed to be a figure that a measure of hope and support could coalesce around.

  —

  In April 2011, the husband of one of my closest friends, Mehrangiz Kar, jumped off his Tehran apartment building. Like me, Mehrangiz was a lawyer, and she had dedicated the years after the Iranian revolution to writing about the
law, about legal discrimination. We were family friends—I had watched her daughters grow up alongside my own—and, like me, Mehrangiz had spent time in Evin Prison. Her crime had been attending a conference in Berlin during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, and for this she served fifty days.

  Sometime after her release, Mehrangiz was diagnosed with breast cancer. She traveled abroad for treatment, and while she was outside Iran, the authorities arrested her husband, Siamak Pourzand; they had previously arrested him on various occasions and forced him to confess on television to things he did not believe and crimes he had not committed. And as with Javad, the confession did not ultimately secure him freedom from torment.

  Because Siamak fell ill in prison, the authorities eventually agreed that he could serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. Months passed, and Siamak languished in the confines of his prison-house, unable to see his wife, who could not travel back to Iran without fear for his safety, and his daughters. He grew increasingly depressed, until one night he threw himself off his apartment building; he died instantly. The night after his death, I watched his daughter Leily, whom I had known when she was a little girl in ponytails, speak about her father on television. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and her voice was raw. “My father courageously chose death, a kind of death that would expose the injustice that was inflicted on him,” she said.

  Leily’s maturity and her pain, the sadness in her face, made me cry. I sat on my sofa thinking of the families, my own and others, torn apart and brutalized by the Islamic Republic. Since childhood, Leily had watched her parents go in and out of prison, her adolescence cast in a halo of anxiety caused by security officials. I thought of my own daughters, and how the paths we had chosen as parents had rushed them too soon into adulthood, imposed on them the sort of worry and anxiety that should only be the burden of adults. In the shadows of my living room, I watched the lights of the city flicker in the distance, and I imagined how bright the night sky would look if every one of the Islamic Republic’s victims shone as a separate star.

  —

  It was a cloudy February day—Valentine’s Day, I realized, seeing all the chocolates and flowers in the shop windows as I walked through Cambridge. I was moving slowly, taking in the cobblestones and the rusty-red bricks of the university buildings, watching the joggers muffled in gloves and hats speed past, the students walking and laughing in small packs. I was thinking about Javad. Though I was still feeling raw over what had happened, the girls and I missed him, especially when we were together. My daughter Negar and her husband, Behnud, had moved to Boston some months earlier, to take up postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and Harvard, respectively. I had come to visit because Negar was having a baby, and one of the very few wishes I’ve had all of my adult life, to hold my grandchild in my arms, was finally coming true.

  For weeks Javad had been chasing his passport, so that he could be there for the baby’s birth. But at every turn, Mahmudi had been waiting and finding ways to block him. His application for a new passport, to replace the doctored and ruined one he had received back after getting out of prison, had been rejected.

  At the passport office, Javad had received a reference number with which to follow up his case, and the trail led to the court that was imposing a ban on his freedom of movement. There, he learned that his name was included in the case that had been brought against me for “conspiring against national security.”

  “I’m listed as your ‘collaborator,’ ” he told me on the phone one night. “The judge read to me from the document he had; it said that allowing me to leave the country ‘would not be in the interest of security.’ ”

  The judge who’d issued the order told Javad frankly that as long as Mahmudi did not withdraw the restriction, nothing could be done to secure him the right to travel. With Negar’s due date approaching, Javad had become desperate. He still saw Mahmudi regularly for his monthly or twice-monthly interrogation sessions, and recently Mahmudi had taken to standing him up. Javad would wait for hours in a corridor or reception room, only to be told at the end of the day that he would need to return the next day, that Mahmudi had been too busy to see him.

  “They do this—it’s their game,” I told Javad. “They’re trying to hurt you and frustrate you psychologically.” I wanted to soothe him, but privately I did not understand what it was that they wanted from him. He had confessed on film, and they knew very well that he was completely at their mercy. So what was the game now?

  One afternoon, Javad asked Mahmudi directly to lift his travel ban.

  “My eldest daughter is giving birth to her first child, and I’d like to be there,” he said. “She has no other family in America, and she asks me every time we speak whether I can make it.”

  Mahmudi rubbed his stubble, his brown eyes glinting.

  “Why doesn’t your wife shut up?”

  “She doesn’t listen to me. As you well know.”

  “Man, why do you want a wife who doesn’t listen to you? If she loved you, she’d pipe down for your sake, at least. She knows full well that she’s not going to overthrow this regime and that nothing is going to change around here. But she insists on carrying on, even though she knows her silence would fix all your problems.”

  Javad didn’t reply. And in the end, he was unable to leave the country.

  So I was alone with Negar in Boston, and the evening we got Javad’s news that he would not be allowed to travel, I helped her as she wrapped her baby boy, Radean, in a flannel blanket, placed a small patchwork bear next to him in his bassinet, and made a short film to send to her father. I stayed with Negar for about two months. Often during the day I would hold Radean and sway back and forth in the living room, so Negar could catch up on her sleep. The apartment was frequently silent during the day, as Negar napped and Radean breathed softly in my arms. His breath smelled sweet, like milk.

  —

  Mahmudi slammed the door of the interrogation room so hard the tea on his desk sloshed in its cup. The room was the same as ever: stark white walls that looked gray in the fluorescent light, two wooden chairs, the stained brown schoolroom carpet. But on the table, Javad noticed, were more folders than usual. This made him hopeful.

  Norouz, the first day of spring and the start of the Persian New Year, was approaching, and Javad was back again with Mahmudi, seeking permission to travel so he could join the rest of us in Boston. My daughter Nargess and I were flying from London to visit Negar, and though we had not asked Javad to come—it seemed cruel to continually invite him, knowing he was unable to travel—when he’d heard about our plans, he’d decided to try one more time to get his travel ban lifted. This time, he’d changed his tack. A friend’s brother had a position in the Ministry of Intelligence and had made a direct appeal to Mahmudi on Javad’s behalf.

  “So here we are,” Mahmudi said, tapping a pen against the files. “Back to the same question.”

  Javad waited, folding his hands in his lap. Being quiet seemed the best way to avoid antagonizing the interrogator. Mahmudi held the pen up to the light, examining it.

  “I’m going to allow you to go, just this once. But you have to return quickly, in less than a month. When you get back, you come here and sign an affidavit vowing that you said nothing against the Islamic Republic while abroad.”

  “Of course, and can I just say—”

  “I’m not finished,” Mahmudi interrupted. “You leave your apartment as collateral, and if we see anything we don’t like, it becomes ours. And you also have to carry this pen with you at all times. It’s a fountain pen with a built-in GPS, so we’ll be able to monitor you at all times and know where you’re going.”

  He again held up the pen, the same one he had been playing with since he’d walked into the room, and twirled it in his fingers. The apartment we owned in Yusef Abad, our home, was the only property that had not been confiscated and sold off to pay the tax penalties. Mahmudi knew it was the only security, both financial and emotional, we had left.<
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  Javad thanked him and left quickly, before Mahmudi could change his mind or think of something else to complicate matters. But once Javad got home, he rang his friend and asked if his brother in the intelligence ministry could mediate with Mahmudi to have the tracking pen demand withdrawn. In the end Mahmudi agreed, but he still took the property deed to Javad’s apartment as collateral, to be forfeited if he did not return to Iran within one month.

  —

  Your children do not stop being your children when they become adults. When Javad and I were finally reunited in Boston that March, after nearly three years, I was deeply aware of our daughters watching us, anxious. It was Norouz, the most important holiday for us as Iranians, and Negar had a new baby. But the first day I saw Javad, I kept darting into the kitchen, to make tea, or into the bathroom, to compose myself. I held my grandson for hours that day, cuddling him and pretending to be calm.

  That wasn’t my husband out there in the living room; it was just a shell of him, a broken man. He looked about a decade older, with more lines etched on his face, and there was a bitter cast to his features that never lifted. He had once been a charming man; he used to smile broadly and often, his eyes brightening with the witty jokes and asides that came naturally to him. I had always appreciated that quality of his—the way he energized a room and drew people to him. But now he would sit in a corner for hours, without saying a word. Even around the dinner table when we were all laughing or reminiscing about something, he had a distracted, faraway look, as though part of him was somewhere else. He was polite to me but colder, and I could feel the girls watching and noticing. I also felt a gaping distance between us. Before he’d arrived, our phone conversations had been growing shorter and chillier. It was as though we had nothing in common anymore, nothing to talk about.