THE STORY OF THE 1979 revolution in Iran has been told in so many ways by women in the last few years. There has been Azar Nafisi, with her story of a unique reading club in Reading Lolita in Tehran. There’s been Marjane Satrapi, with her graphic novel Persepolis. Nafisi used the retreating freedom to analyse the gradual onset of censorship to tell of life under the revolution. Satrapi’s was a child’s eye-view, focused on the curtailing of individual whims. Shirin Ebadi, the Tehran-based human rights lawyer who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, predictably takes a longer and more political view.It is also a view from within. As Ebadi tracks the pre-1979 years, the eight subsequent years lost to the war with Iraq, the brutal crackdowns of the regime and thereafter the slow, and piece-meal, reclamation of civil rights and freedoms, her memoir comes laden with unresolved ques-tions. In that, in refusing to be wiser with hind-sight, she uses her life story to convey the turbu-lent history of her country.It starts with early childhood memories of hearing her gentle grandmother reprimand her harshly for the first time. It was August 19, 1953, and news of the coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh had just been broad-cast, and liberal Iranians were aghast. That early American intervention—with Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit, directing assistance to the Shah—brought intimations of the political into the personal for young Shirin. Later, as she en-rolled in law school, she increasingly got drawn to the coffee-house culture of Tehran where pol-itics was intimately discussed. So even as she became a judge—one of the first women to be so inducted—in March 1970, she did not with-draw assistance to protests against the oppres-sion of the Shah’s regime.Opposition to the Shah had a whole spec-trum, from the liberals to the conservatives. But Ayatollah Khomeini, in exile in Najaf and later in Paris, had emerged as the main rallying point. As she participated in a protest, one of the se-nior judges asked her, “Don’t you know that you are supporting people who will take your job away if they come to power?” Ebadi returned: “I’d rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved at-torney.” So, after the Shah fled, she’d go up to her rooftop at the appointed hour to join the city in synchronised chanting.Through her own removal from judgeship and enforced irrelevance in the years immedi-ately after, Ebadi tells the story of her country.Curiously, by enforcing an orthodox social code—with, for instance, enforced gender seg-regation in education—the Ayatollahs ad-dressed reservations conservative Iranians may have harboured against sending daughters to school and college. As women entered the workforce and public life, the regime was forced into incremental retreat. Ebadi herself gained the right to practice, and found herself leading many prominent cases pleading the rights of ethnic minorities, dissidents, women and chil-dren. Much of it makes for chilling reading.It is interesting to get Ebadi’s take on the cur-rent interest around the world on how to engage with Iran: “The Islamic Republic may hold firm to its right to nuclear power, even if it means suffering sanctions at the hands of the interna-tional community. But its more rational policy makers see a tainted human rights record as a self-inflicted wound that weakens Iran’s bar-gaining power… the Iranian Revolution has produced its own opposition, not least a nation of educated, conscious women who are agitat-ing for their rights. They must be given the chance to fight their own fights, to transform their country uninterrupted.”In Ebadi’s evocative telling, that struggle is still unfolding.
