Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  —

  In August 2014 a young Iranian mathematician, Maryam Mirzakhani, won the world’s top math prize, the Fields Medal, often called “the Nobel Prize of math.” Iranians were thrilled and could talk about nothing else on social media, congratulating Maryam and sharing in the pride of her accomplishment. Iranian women pursuing higher education inside the country had suffered acutely under Ahmadinejad, who had instituted gender quotas across numerous disciplines, effectively making it impossible for women to study physics, chemistry, and tens of other subjects at numerous universities. For those struggling to find institutions that permitted them to train in the subjects they loved, their horizons had never looked so limited. Student visas were increasingly difficult to secure, a number of programs teaching English as a second language no longer offered exams in Iran because of sanctions, and the fall in the Iranian rial’s value made studying abroad even in less expensive countries like Malaysia impossible.

  I sent Maryam a public message of congratulations, to recognize her incredible accomplishment and to remind all those Iranian women inside the country that striving for an education was still worth it. Maryam, after all, had earned her bachelor’s degree at Sharif University of Technology before moving to the United States for graduate work. I made a request of Maryam in my message: “When you go back to Tehran, ask why a young physicist is sitting in prison.”

  This resonated widely in the Iranian media, and it captured neatly why Iran has such a massive brain drain of educated, talented young people. Omid Kokabee, a young Iranian experimental laser physicist, had been arrested and imprisoned in 2011. Before his arrest, Kokabee had been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas; he had returned to Iran to visit his family, whereupon the authorities had sentenced him to ten years in prison for allegedly “cooperating with enemy states.” In a 2013 letter written from Evin Prison, however, Kokabee said that his arrest had followed his refusal to cooperate with the authorities on a military research project. Since then, thirty-one Nobel laureates in physics have signed a letter to the Iranian government demanding his release.

  Kokabee’s experience, together with Maryam’s, illustrated why so many of Iran’s brightest young students left the country. Abroad they could pursue research work at the world’s most prestigious and academically advanced institutions, without fear of butting up against a security state that viewed researchers and scientists with either suspicion or designs of recruitment. As Maryam’s extraordinary achievement showed, abroad they could ascend to the greatest heights in their field.

  Inside Iran, the climate for women, especially, was deteriorating by the day, despite Rouhani’s election. In September 2014, Tehran’s chief of police for public places announced that women would no longer be permitted to work in the city’s cafés and restaurants, pushing thousands of women, especially university students, out of work. Female musicians reported that cities were increasingly refusing to permit them to perform onstage. Tehran’s mayor, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, decreed around the same time that women civil servants should not work alongside men, adding that women working long hours outside the home in the company of male colleagues undermined family life. And particularly disappointing for young people, the authorities in the capital even forbade women to watch that year’s soccer World Cup, as had long been the custom, in public cinemas and cafés. The moves were all part of a stealthy segregation plan, deployed piecemeal over time in and across different spheres, that threatened to remake public life in Iran and push women, who participated vibrantly despite the state’s myriad restrictions, to the margins.

  Rouhani’s government did seek to intervene. His officials argued that gender restrictions in the workplace, for example, contravened Iran’s obligations as a signatory to the International Labour Organization. But the fact was that conservatives had retained enormous clout throughout the system, and their collective influence and determination to reshape Iran to fit their deeply patriarchal, Islamist vision easily outweighed Rouhani’s limited will to resist.

  The destructive legacy of Ahmadinejad’s tenure could be felt in all of these developments. For eight years, he had systematically persecuted the country’s civic activists. He had also singlehandedly snuffed out its women’s movement and, most dangerously, had renormalized the idea that women should be open targets for the state and ordinary Iranians alike. In the fall of 2014, a spate of serial attacks against women rocked the city of Isfahan. Men on motorbikes threw buckets of sulfuric acid in the faces of women stopped at traffic lights in their cars or walking down the street. Despite the panic spreading among the women of Isfahan as the number of assaults rose to at least fifteen, the police failed to find and arrest the attackers. On Facebook, women in Isfahan discussed the attacks openly and said they were being targeted for what the vigilantes deemed “immodest” dress. Whether the assailants were acting independently or on orders, I cannot say. But what was clear was that the political climate was hospitable to such violence against women. Hard-liners in parliament were trying to push through a bill that would have protected vigilantes seeking to “enforce” Islamic law.

  When it comes to the most extreme forms of violence against women that we see in the Middle East or in countries with Muslim majorities, Iran—broadly speaking, and looking at the level of society itself—has among the fewest problems. In countries like Pakistan, for example, acid attacks are an almost daily occurrence. In many societies, honor killings, forced marriage, and domestic violence are mainstream realities. Iran suffers from all of these ills, but with far less severity than many of its neighbors. Iran is not Afghanistan, and it is not Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Literacy among Iranian girls and young women is nearly 99 percent, women make up over 60 percent of all university students, and if you walk the streets of any Iranian city at rush hour, you will see women streaming out of workplaces, boarding buses and subways alongside men. They are an active, engaged part of public life, and they increasingly often serve as primary breadwinners in their households.

  I describe all of this to show how much Iranian society itself has evolved. The regime’s hard-liners are a social minority today, and though society itself has bounded ahead, those representing the extremist minority are, tragically, in control. And like all dictators, they are clinging to power with vicious violence. The Iranian government’s ambitions in the region, especially, are kindling fierce resentment among Arabs from Egypt to Iraq, and I am nervous about what dangers this will pose for Iran. What I hope and pray for most of all is that the Islamic Republic’s present leaders will not change Iran inalterably. I know that one day I will go back to Iran. But I am not sure that the Iran I return to will be the same as the one I left behind.

  —

  The same night I sent my congratulations to Maryam Mirzakhani, the brilliant mathematician, I received a text message from an unknown number:

  Do you want us to do to her what we did to you? If you don’t shut up, we’ll shut you up.

  In December 2014, my colleague Narges Mohammadi (who had served several terms in prison for clashes with the state) flew to the eastern border city of Zahedan to bestow a prize from the Defenders of Human Rights Center on Molavi Abdul-Hamid, the Sunni Friday prayer leader of the region. Abdul-Hamid has something approaching rock-star status among Iran’s Sunnis, who are often ethnically Baluch and hail from that border province. Iran is a Shiite majority country, and its Sunni citizens, who make up about 10 percent of the population, face serious discrimination. They are made to feel like second-class Iranians and are never able to secure senior positions in government, the military, or any state-affiliated institution. In Tehran, a city of nearly eight million people, the authorities have not permitted the building of any new Sunni mosques.

  With the sectarian tensions in the region rising every day, it is more imperative than ever for the Iranian state to embrace its Sunnis, so that Iran remains invulnerable to the kind of sect-based violence and insecurity that is ravaging Iraq and Syria and threatens other
parts of the Persian Gulf. Molavi Abdul-Hamid is a wonderful potential ally in this effort, if only the state would appreciate him.

  Earlier that year, when the Sunni extremist group Jaish al-Adl attacked an eastern border post on the Iran-Pakistan boundary line and took five Iranian border guards hostage, it was only Abdul-Hamid’s intervention that secured their release. He sent emissaries to the hostage takers and beseeched them, “Please, for my sake, release these Iranians.” And they did.

  He is constantly telling the Baluch to calm down, soothing their anger, trying to keep them peaceful and in the fold. He is an asset and an upstanding Iranian citizen. But the Islamic Republic despises him. The authorities have imprisoned his sons, killed some of his relatives, and banned him from traveling. Yet he continues to work to calm sectarian and ethnic tensions. He does so despite what some MPs stood up and said about him in parliament, after he secured the release of the border hostages: they claimed that the hostage taking was his fault, on the logic that if the separatists listened to him, then clearly he had instigated the attack in the first place.

  The prize the center gave to Abdul-Hamid made a great deal of noise, and I’m glad for this. We are going through such troubled times in the region, and my aim is to bring Iranians of different groups and sects closer together. I want to tell them, “We’re with you; you’re a part of us. We’re all Iranians, together.” This kind of sentiment hasn’t really emerged properly in Iranian society. While many public intellectuals, writers, and pundits feel this way, and are progressive in their thinking about sect and ethnicity, it hasn’t become popular yet to express such ideas openly. If the human rights community can take the lead in this, I think we will help preserve a sense of broad, inclusive Iranian identity that will serve us well, as the Middle East stumbles through a period of heightened sectarianism.

  The day after Narges traveled to Zahedan to give Abdul-Hamid the prize, she was summoned for interrogation by the intelligence authorities. Instead of calling him by his name, they referred to the cleric as “Molavi Abdel-Khabees,” using a rhyming pun that substituted “malicious” for his last name. They demanded to know why we had given the prize to him.

  “Is it illegal to give someone a prize?” Narges asked them. “And at a time of such tensions, is it such a bad thing to bring people closer together?”

  It was astonishing that with so much sectarian instability in the region, the Iranian state was not doing more to include its Sunni citizens and project itself in the region as an Islamic power that had the loyalty of both Shia and Sunni Iranians. But as with so many other matters, the Islamic Republic looked only one step ahead, instead of ten.

  When the portly Iranian man opened the door of the office next to mine and called out in Persian, “Hello, Mrs. Ebadi!,” my first thought was that I would need to move. The office I had rented in London as the base for my human rights NGO, the Centre for Supporters of Human Rights, could not have been in a more inaccessible building. It was a towering modern glass structure in Hammersmith that housed the executive offices of Harrods, and it took security very seriously. The reception desk required ID of anyone entering the building, and the café lounge downstairs was run by the building management itself and admitted only residents and their guests. The place was so expensive that instead of springing for a proper office, I had rented only a tiny room, about the size of a small Persian rug. It fit just two small desks, arranged so close together that when two people used the office at the same time, they bumped elbows constantly.

  Various E.U. security officials had suggested that I consider hiring a bodyguard, but I was reluctant to do so. During those years in Iran when the state had assigned me “bodyguards,” out of ostensible fear for my safety, it had been a form of intense surveillance. Everywhere I went, the two security agents were my shadow, listening to my conversations, observing my interactions. If Javad and I had dinner with friends in a Tehran restaurant, they sat at the table beside us. Although I knew that in Europe a bodyguard would genuinely be looking after my safety, the thought of someone trailing me at all times made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t stand the idea of another person spending the whole day on their feet, standing about looking after me.

  Still, I knew I had to be very careful on my own. Iranian intelligence agents were energetically active in Europe; a number of exiled Iranian dissidents and journalists had had their laptops stolen in mysterious thefts in which the burglar took nothing else of value, and London’s universities were a favorite finishing school for young Islamic Republic spies. So rather than a bodyguard, I preferred to live and work in highly secure buildings. Because I traveled so much, a small office posed no problems, and I had imagined that this glass building in Hammersmith, where nearly everyone was British and went about in formal business attire, would be suitable.

  Until the day a mysterious Iranian man turned up in the office directly next to mine and introduced himself as my new neighbor. My assistant, Leila, and I were astonished, and we greeted him cautiously.

  “I know we’ve met before in Tehran. Was it at Mrs. Kar’s office?” He was in his mid-forties, with red cheeks, thick black hair, and arched eyebrows.

  “Were you one of her clients?”

  “No, no—I was just there to talk to her about a writer we both knew.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t recall meeting you at all.”

  He explained that he was in the petrochemicals business, had rented the office three months ago, and had finally gotten around to moving in today. He offered me his card. I asked how he managed to do petrochemical trading out of Europe, given the international banking sanctions against Iran.

  “We know how to get around those,” he said, laughing. “We work with the Russians.”

  I politely told him I had a phone call to make, and Leila and I went into our office. His card bore a company logo, and one side was written entirely in Cyrillic and included a Russian address. I scrawled “suspicious neighbor” on it and pulled out my notebook to work.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door.

  “Do you mind if I take up a few minutes of your time?” he asked.

  We made space for him in the awkward little room, and those few minutes turned into an hour and a half. He started with “What are you doing here in London?” and continued with endless questions: about what my dealings with Iran currently were, where I received my funding, who I worked with. It reminded me of a Tehran interrogation session, the kind I had endured so many times in my life. How intrepid they were, I thought, to have reenacted history here in the heart of London, renting an office next door to mine, just as they had done in Tehran.

  We talked about a number of things, but I made the point again that although the Iranian government viewed me with great suspicion as some kind of political alternative to the current regime, I hadn’t the slightest desire for political power. I knew the authorities didn’t believe it, and that the man sitting beside me probably did not, either.

  But, I still wonder, do they think I am so stupid as to really wish to become the president of Iran? At such a tumultuous moment in history, with the Middle East festering with open conflict, and Iran a country teeming with prisoners and political opposition of seventy stripes? I sometimes wonder what kind of person they take me for. Perhaps they themselves are so addicted to power and privilege that they imagine others must be seeking the same. They ask me so repeatedly where I receive my funding, while they know—their files document—that I have never been corrupt, and the way I live my life has shown that. If it were any different, my office might have been larger than a rug, and I wouldn’t be living in a modest apartment, riding the red double-decker buses of London.

  I could have easily brushed this man off, but I deliberately answered everything he asked me. I wanted to prove yet another time to the intelligence officials of the Islamic Republic—if indeed he was one, which seemed likely—that I had nothing to hide. That I worked in human rights, that my work was legal, and that I
did not contravene Iranian law in the process and had never done so. I told him about the activities the Centre for Supporters of Human Rights was now actively pursuing, promoting research and understanding around the compatibility of Islam and an egalitarian legal framework for women, particularly in the realm of family law.

  The conversation jumped about, soon moving to Iran’s economy. He mentioned the billionaire Babak Zanjani, who went to prison for corruption.

  “Zanjani hasn’t done anything wrong. It was suggested to me that I go and sell some oil, but I said no,” he told me. “But I could have become as wealthy as him.”

  I remained silent, and didn’t say that Babak Zanjani was an outrageous thief.

  “I’m afraid we won’t be neighbors for long,” I said. “We’re moving out in January.”

  “Oh, where are you going?”

  “We’re moving to the United Nations in New York. They sometimes have space for NGOs and have promised us an office.” This wasn’t exactly true, but I wanted to convey the sense that we had protectors in the world.

  Let him chase me there, I thought. When he was finished, he thanked me and left, and I imagined I would see him again, or at least an assistant; someone would surely be using the expensive office he had rented. When I told my colleagues and friends about the suspicious neighbor, they all agreed that he was certainly an intelligence agent.