Until We Are Free

Dr. Shirin Ebadi was one of Iran's first female judges and served as the first female chief magistrate of one of the country's highest courts until the 1979 Islamic Revolution stripped her of her judgeship. In the 1990s Ebadi returned to the law as a defender of women's and children's rights, founding a human rights center that spearheaded legal reform and public debate around the Islamic Republic's discriminatory laws. She has defended many of the country's most prominent prisoners of conscience and spent nearly a month in prison in 1999 for her activities. For many years she was at the center of Iran's grassroots women's movement. In 2003 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Since the election uprising of June 2009 she has lived in exile.

Chapter 1 Intimidation The story of Iran is the story of my life. Sometimes I wonder why I am so attached to my country, why the outline of Tehran's Alborz Mountains is as intimate and precious to me as the curve of my daughter's face, and why I feel a duty to my nation that overwhelms everything else. I remember when so many of my friends and relatives began leaving the country in the 1980s, disheartened by the bombs raining down from the war with Iraq and by the morality police checkpoints set up by the still new Islamic government. While I did not judge anyone for wanting to leave, I could not fathom the impulse. Did one leave the city where one's children had been born? Did one walk away from the trees in the garden one planted each year, even before they bore pomegranates and walnuts and scented apples? For me, this was unthinkable. When I walked into the country's highest court and the new revolutionary authorities told me that women could no longer be judges, I stayed. I stayed when the authorities demoted me to clerk in the same court I had presided over as a judge. I shut my ears when the revolutionaries who had taken over the justice system talked in my presence about how women were fickle and indecisive and unfit to mete out justice, which would now be the work of men. I stayed as the Iraqi warplanes bombed houses on our street to rubble. I stayed when the new authorities said Islam demanded violent justice, that Islam allowed for young men and women to be executed on rooftops and hung from cranes for their political beliefs, their bodies dumped in mass graves. In the same way that I did not leave Iran, I did not leave Islam, either. If we all packed our suitcases and boarded planes, what would be left of our country? If we bowed our heads and stayed quietly at home, permitting them to say that Islam allowed the assassination of writers and the execution of teenagers, what would be left of our faith? I wrote long letters to friends who had emigrated, on the thin, diaphanous paper we used for airmail in those days, and told them that I was still managing to live. In the mid-1980s, I stopped working altogether and turned inward, disconnected from the brutal politics of the new regime. Despite the bombs and the morality checkpoints, my husband and I raised our two girls, who went to school in pigtails and learned how to read. We had dinner together every night. My husband, Javad, continued with his work as an engineer, and I raised the girls, contemplating how I could reinvent myself, now that the judiciary had become the realm of men. In the early 1990s, after the war had ended, the girls were older and didn't need me as much. I briefly tried practicing family law, but I saw quickly that the courts under the Islamic Republic operated very differently than they had under the shah. The authorities permitted women to work as lawyers, but the system and all its new procedures were so dysfunctional that it was impossible to take a case forward. On several occasions, I had trouble simply trying to review a file at the courthouse. The clerk, upon realizing that I wasn't going to "tip" him for retrieving the file (corrupt countries have endless euphemisms for bribery), would say, "Sorry, the file is missing. Come back tomorrow." I would go back the next day, and he would say, "Sorry, I haven't had a chance to search for your file." On the third or fourth day, knowing that I would keep coming back, he would finally produce the file. But because I wasn't prepared to pay a bribe, I had lost two or three days of work. It was much worse in the courts. There, the person who was willing to pay more was in the right; justice was bought, not fought for or deliberated. To protest, I eventually hung a big sign in front of my law office: "Due to the current inhospitable circumstance of the courts, I will no longer be accepting clients and can only offer legal advice." This did not feel, a