Iran Awakening, by Shirin Ebadi
Nobel Peace Laureate (2003) Shirin Ebadi has written a riveting account of her life in Iran, from her childhood (when the Shah was installed by the CIA), to the revolution that brought the Ayatollah to power, and onward to current circumstances in her country. As a judge, then a lawyer, Ebadi’s life’s work has been defending human rights, particularly for women in Iran; and striving for peaceful and civil resolutions to violently disputed questions.
When others chose to leave Iran, she chose to stay and fight her non-violent campaign against unjust laws. A judge when the Ayatollah took over, she was quickly demoted to file clerk and eventually persuaded to “take early retirement.” She then began practicing law, taking almost exclusively pro bono cases in which human rights and/or civil rights were at the core. She chose cases that allowed her to argue the regime’s repressive interpretations of points of Islamic law.
Colleagues, friends, even her teenage nephew were arrested, tortured and murdered by the Ayatollah’s forces. Ebadi spent a lot of time thinking about what she would do when (not if, for she knew she was in danger all the time) her turn came, and reports without any sugar coating what her imprisonment was like.
She carefully shields people she needs to protect, but otherwise is astonishingly practical and direct in her account of what women’s lives have been like in Iran for the past 50 years or so. I found myself wondering over and over, “Why didn’t she just get out?” and wavering between thinking her stupid for staying and courageous for pushing onward.
For me, the most galling and bizarrely fascinating chapter is the last one, which details the chain of evens that led to the book finally being published in the USA after dealing with the American government’s censorship.
The book is well written, with none of the usual stiffness of texts written in one language and translated to another. I highly recommend it for teenagers and adults. (The descriptions of torture are straightforward and not sensational, and for that reason are all the more disturbing, so it’s not a good book for readers under about 14 years old.)
