by Shirin Ebadi
Late one day we went out for a walk together, up and down the streets of Negar’s Boston neighborhood, with the trees still bare and the afternoon light waning. Near a park, Javad stopped.
“Didn’t you always say that human rights start from one’s own family?” he asked me. “When you noticed that one of your colleagues wasn’t paying enough attention to their partner or their kids, didn’t you always tell them that family always comes first? I just want to know why you were not prepared to practice what you preach.”
There were some benches in the park, and though it was cold, we sat down.
“More than twenty-five years have passed since you started your human rights work,” he said. “Has anything positive happened in all this time? Have you achieved anything? If you helped get ten prisoners released, twenty more immediately took their place. Have you brought freedom to Iran?”
My whole body froze up as he spoke. I didn’t interrupt, just perched on the bench, listening to him.
“If you’re fair,” he went on, “you’ll admit that all your efforts have been in vain. And that all you’ve succeeded in doing is bringing misery upon yourself and your family.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. I could see clearly how tired and fed up he was, how Mahmudi’s persecution and the hounding of the intelligence agents had blackened his life. He was yearning for peace and calm, and I did not blame him for that for a second. But I was almost sixty-five years old, and I couldn’t just change my ideas and my values, or the way I lived. I couldn’t abandon everything I had worked for throughout most of my life, or abandon my colleagues who were sitting in prison. I couldn’t sit in some remote corner of the world and stop being who I was. I felt dizzy and disconnected, having this conversation with my husband of almost four decades in a Boston park. I rubbed my hands together to warm them up, and watched a garbage truck rumble to a stop in front of a row of houses.
“I don’t want to say that I don’t have any answers,” I slowly told him. “But for me, all I can say is that nothing is going to change.”
He looked at me for a long time. I will never in all my years forget that spring day that was still cold and frozen with winter. That day a well of guilt sprang up inside me that I immediately understood I would carry forever. Until that day I had never done anything that had made me feel guilt. Everything until that point had been shared between us; my work and its impact on our life had been something that evolved slowly, and even during the worst of times, Javad had stood by me. When the mob came to attack our building, he was the one who went downstairs and stood up to the rioters and challenged the police to protect us. He had never espoused all my ideals, but he had remained steadfast. It had always been clear that the guilt and blame lay with the government, and that I wasn’t the one hurting us.
All of that understanding seemed dated now; all that mattered was the hurt in my husband’s broken face. To all my other pains and sorrows, I now added this, the end of my marriage. I was deeply wounded, but I knew that if we stayed together the authorities would persecute Javad forever. Though I could have put up a fight, I understood that ending our marriage was the only way I could truly protect him.
—
Javad stayed in Boston with us for three weeks, then went on to Canada to visit his sister. He returned to Iran before the end of the appointed month, so that he could retain the only property he now had left in the world and get his ownership deed back.
I returned to Europe and decided to expand my activities. I wanted to establish and register a nonprofit organization that could serve as a hub and center for all of my various human rights work. After consulting with a few lawyers, I chose London as my base, and around the end of 2013 I registered the Centre for Supporters of Human Rights. When I helped found this center, I wanted to focus its work tightly on Iran and the right to legally defend those accused of crimes of conscience. The Iranian lawyers who worked so tirelessly to represent political prisoners were extraordinarily vulnerable. The authorities monitored them closely, imprisoned scores of them, and intimidated their relatives. The Iranian Bar Association, under pressure from the Ministry of Intelligence, did not bother to defend its members harassed in this way. So at the outset of founding this new network, I dedicated our attention to defending these lawyers and to reporting the troubles they faced to the United Nations and to the International Bar Association.
In time, working with a number of lawyers who had left Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 protests, we created a vibrant network connecting lawyers inside and outside the country; we collaborated when possible on human rights cases, training workshops, and publishing legal articles. This sort of connectivity was uplifting and motivating for both the lawyers forced into exile and the lawyers working away inside Iran.
Throughout all of this, my business didn’t prevent me from staying in touch with Javad. But each time we spoke, I found him colder and more distant than the time before. Most of our conversations revolved around our daughters: their work, Negar’s new family, and Nargess’s studies. We had nothing else to talk about anymore.
Then one day Javad told me that he wanted to separate. If we were divorced he might finally rid himself of Mahmudi, and he might also want to marry again. Had I expected this? If I am honest, I would say I don’t really know. I knew that he had every right to enjoy a normal life, rather than the kind that had been inflicted on him the past four years. I told him that I, too, agreed, and we decided that I should give him power of attorney to go to court and pursue the legal formalities for a divorce. Of course, under Iranian law he didn’t need my agreement to divorce me, but my formal authorization would make things much easier.
—
Part of being an exile, a nomad, is that the most significant moments in your life pass by in places where you have no memories and no past. On a warm, summery day, I was in Madrid to speak at the Fifth World Congress Against the Death Penalty. But my thoughts were trained on what I was about to do as I entered the Iranian embassy, which was housed in a hacienda-style building of white stucco and brick. I passed through the lacy black lattice gates, carrying the certified power-of-attorney letter I had written, authorizing divorce proceedings. The embassy staff stamped it with the official seal, and I went directly to the post office to send it to Javad. Then I gave a talk about the death penalty, during which I explained how in authoritarian countries the practice is exploited by the state to execute activists and, often, minors.
The following day, June 12, 2013, Iranians would vote in their next presidential election, the second vote I would be missing. Strikingly, I had also been in Spain, in Majorca, four years earlier, on the eve of the last presidential election. Four years earlier, just as today, my destiny had taken a sharp turn. Last time, events had unfolded in a way that would keep me permanently outside of my homeland. This time, it was the ending of my thirty-seven-year marriage.
Even when both parties agree to a divorce, it is still a distressing and dark time. I didn’t regret what I had done, especially since Javad had initiated the divorce himself. But for a long while, I felt myself walking through a great, stretching emptiness. When I passed the men’s cologne section of duty-free shops, I felt a stab of sadness, remembering how I was always the one to buy Javad his colognes from the airport. At random points I would be accosted by memories: of the day we planted the first tree in the orchard, or of how lovingly Javad dealt with one of the girls’ scraped knees. Now there was no one to ask whether I was eating properly. There was no one who understood me so intimately, who knew the kinds of jokes that made me laugh most or the blend I liked in loose tea. In Madrid, I kept myself busy with meetings and told myself I had to overcome my grief. I know I shouldn’t let depression get the better of me.
This is why I intensified my work in the newly formed CSHR, to make sure that every single day I remembered that I had been born in a country where a mere intelligence agent had the power to crush a person’s life. I needed to remember that it was no good to
keep looking behind myself and that I should instead look only ahead, at the future.
What helped me overcome some of that sorrow at the time was the news Nargess, my younger daughter, gave me. She told me she had found the man she wanted to spend her life with and that she had agreed to marry him. One evening we had dinner together, and she introduced her fiancé, Ali, to me. He belonged to a cultured Iranian middle-class family and had a master’s degree in computer science from a prominent British university. He was working in London for a governmental organization and was three years older than Nargess. I felt that he would make a suitable partner, and I gave them my blessing. They began planning their wedding, to be held in London that August.
They had decided to get married at city hall, but I also wanted them to have an Islamic ceremony, because of our faith. I went to see an Iranian cleric in London—most of the Shia clerics in London are Iranian—and explained the situation.
“I want to have the Koranic marriage sura read for my daughter,” I said.
“Will both you and her father be present?” he asked.
I told him that her father was in Iran and wouldn’t be able to attend, but that it wouldn’t be an issue, because we were not looking to take the marriage certificate to the Iranian embassy. “We just want an Islamic ceremony,” I said.
“Well, then I can’t do it. Iranian law doesn’t allow that,” he said imperiously, drawing his robes together. “I don’t want a certificate like that going to the embassy.”
“But we don’t want it to go to the embassy!” I protested, exasperated. “We’re Muslims, and we want an Islamic ceremony. This is just for us.”
After the revolution, Iranian family law became based on sharia, and the judiciary decreed that when a woman is getting married for the first time, she requires the permission of her father. Even if she is fifty years old and happens to be a minister in the government. If the father is not present or does not agree, the woman is obliged to go to court and request special permission to marry. This medieval law applies only to women, of course, and it creates ridiculous amounts of trouble in Iran. Iranian men can marry whomever they want from the age of fifteen on, but a fifty-year-old woman needs permission.
“Where in Islam is it written that this is required?” I asked the cleric. “It’s not in the Koran. The source is a very weak passage, and there are many other sources that carry more weight, theologically.”
“The Islamic Republic doesn’t allow it, and I don’t want any trouble.”
“To hell with you, if you don’t know Islam. I know Islam better than you do, and you know very well that we don’t need you, as a cleric, to perform it.”
I was more saddened than angry. I was more of a Muslim than he was, and I knew the tenets of Islam far better than this man who wore clerical robes and claimed the title of emissary of our faith. And so I performed Nargess’s marriage ceremony myself, reading the Koranic verses for them at home without any fanfare.
—
I was glad to see Nargess leaving to live at her husband’s home, and I felt grateful that she was starting a life she wanted, and that I would be around to watch it grow and flourish. One of my great sorrows was that my life had changed Nargess’s destiny. Her plan in life had been to become a lawyer, and through great effort she had studied the law in Iran, passed her initial exam, and completed her internship. All she had needed to secure her license was to pass the final bar exam. She should have sat for the exam in 2009, but because she had been sorting out her PhD applications, she’d submitted a letter asking to postpone her exam by a year. The Iranian Bar Association had refused to accept her letter, on the grounds that her mother had been disbarred.
I felt that my work, and the harassment it prompted from the intelligence ministry, had destroyed Nargess’s chances of practicing law in Iran. But she felt differently and often said so. She said she could make more of a difference working outside Iran, raising awareness of all the rights violations inside the country. She often reminded me of what she’d been like as a child, chafing at the restrictions and desperate to leave Iran. One post on her blog was about how living outside Iran had made her appreciate Ramazan again. Unlike me, she didn’t blame Mahmudi for her fate.
But as pleased as I was about Nargess starting her new life with her husband, I was also weighed down by a heavy sorrow. It had now been over four years since I’d left my homeland, a place I loved passionately, a place that inspired and motivated me and formed much of my very identity. I was away from all my closest friends, as well as all the colleagues and associates I had worked with so intimately over the years. Fate had cast me, alone, into a land whose culture I didn’t understand adequately, and whose language I could not speak especially well, either. My daughters now had their own lives, and I had separated from my husband. Javad and I still spoke on the phone occasionally, and he was still the one I turned to when I needed something from Iran. He sent me books and, each Norouz, a calendar to help me chart my year. But these small kindnesses did not fill the long hours that stretched around me. After each long day at work, I spent most of my evenings alone at home. I wasn’t in the mood to accept the invitations of the large group of acquaintances I’d made. I wanted my old friends, but they weren’t here. I had become deeply lonely.
In all divine religions, there is an unalterable constant, and that is the loneliness of God Almighty. In other words, there is only one single God, who has no partner or colleague. Whenever I felt sad, a philosophical question always came to my mind: “Is God happy to be alone?”
One autumn day during his second term, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled to the village of Bint Jbeil, in southern Lebanon, and waved an Iranian flag just a few miles away from the border with Israel. He addressed a thronging crowd in the same stadium where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave his victory speech to mark Israel’s withdrawal from occupied southern Lebanon in 2000. The region is still one of the most tense stretches of border anywhere in the world, with Israeli snipers watching through the crosshairs of high-powered rifles and Hezbollah fighters scouring for opportunities to kidnap a soldier.
In this distant fight, Iran is a key player. As a backer and funder of Hezbollah, it shares in the militia’s victories and funds its losses. The Israeli-Lebanon war of 2006, often called the Hezbollah war, resulted in the leveling of nearly 90 percent of the buildings in Bint Jbeil. The sleepy village lined with cedar trees was turned to rubble, and it was Iranian money that paid for its resurrection. Tehran paid for new apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools, and now Ahmadinejad was enjoying the adulation and gratitude of the Lebanese who’d benefited. Photos of the Ayatollah Khomeini covered the stadium walls, alongside images of Hezbollah heroes, and the flags of the Islamic Republic, Hezbollah, and the Lebanese state fluttered together.
For Iran, Lebanon, Hezbollah, and the gateway through which it funnels all its money, arms, and military support—the neighboring state of Syria—are no small investment. These alliances are central to Iran’s projection of influence in the region, and they also provide a convenient theater through which Iran can teach its own citizens a lesson about what happens when a people rise up. By now, we are used to images of the Syrian civil war, one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies of our young century. We have come to know that it is a bloody internal conflict, pitting Sunni Syrians against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite; the Alawite sect is a branch of Shia Islam. But before Syria’s conflict became a civil war, it was a broad-based uprising against the tyranny of Assad. It was Assad, with the support of his Iranian backers, who turned an essentially democratic revolt into a sectarian war. The Iranian leadership backed him in this effort, with a close eye trained on the Iranian homeland, a thousand miles away.
Through the bloodbath that unfolded in Syria, the Islamic Republic conveyed a clear warning to Iranians, both those inside the country and the opposition movement abroad. The message was: If you rise up, we will crush you. We will not retreat a single
step. We will not be Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who stepped down. We will be Assad, who would rather torch his country to the ground than relinquish power. The fate of Iran will be the fate of Syria.
Iranians had not been harboring dreams of violently overthrowing their government. But the Syrian case unfolded during a specific and uncertain time for Iran, directly between the 2009 uprising and the 2013 presidential election, a time when Iranians were weighing the prospect of change, observing the hopeful changes in other parts of the region, and considering how their own regime might be transformed. The lessons of 2009 were painful, and the destruction of Syria playing out every night on Iranians’ televisions was an intimate reminder of how the Islamic Republic would respond, should Iranians seek change through the streets. This, I believe, is what prodded people to start thinking about internal reforms once again, despite their abject failure in recent years. There seemed to be no choice but to seek gradual improvements through the current system. This is why so many Iranians were prepared to vote again in 2013, putting aside the bitter memories of the 2009 election.
In the run-up to the 2013 vote, the Iranian regime was careful to avoid the mistake of 2009, and the state vetting body approved only candidates who would be unconditionally and unquestionably obedient to the supreme leader. No more Mousavis and Karroubis, leaders who might go maverick and challenge the system. Each and every candidate had to have a proven track record of unwavering political loyalty; they had to be the sort of men who didn’t mind dissimulation and were comfortable speaking out against their true positions when required. The vetting was tough enough that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the old stalwart of Islamic Republic politics, who had led Iran through two terms as president after the end of the war with Iraq, was disqualified as a candidate. It was a vote that more than anything underscored the now explicit and all-encompassing power of the supreme leader.