Book Review: Iran Awakening

[da]

I'm up because my sweetie has to teach too early in the morning, but since I'm up (and conscious): here's a book review I've been sitting on for a while.

I've been interested in the history of Iran since melted_snowball brought home Persepolis in 2004 or so. (Another plug for Persepolis and its sequel. It's a historical graphic novel, owing some debt to Maus, but mostly just a memoir of one girl's experience as she grew up through the Islamic Revolution.)

I've found another book with the general theme of "liberal feminist woman supports the overthrow of the Shah in '79, only to discover the new regeme much worse." It's an engrossing read, certainly exciting. And a quick read- 250 pages.

Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope is by Shirin Ebadi and Azadeh Moaveni.

Shirin Ebadi is something of a superwoman. She was a judge under the Shah, was quickly fired by the Ayatollah, fought her way back into the courts as a clerk, and meanwhile speaking out for women's rights under the Koran.

In 2003, a Canadian reporter, Zahra Kazemi died in police custody. Shirin Ebadi was her family's lawyer, and was responsible for publicly saying that Kazemi was killed by police, which was a tremendously brave thing to do while living in Iran.

That sort of sets the tone for her life. The Kazemi story doesn't come in until about two thirds of the way through the book. Before, she spends quite a while talking about her family history, daily life before and after the Shah was overthrown, and what a bizarre country Iran became due to the interpretation of the Koran the theocracy chose to follow. At the same time, she speaks loudly and plainly for Iranian citizens' legal rights as they exist under the current law. Excellent stuff.

Salon has a good article about the book, and I'm going to crib the first page of it here:

Shirin Ebadi's new book, "Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope," opens with a chilling scene that underlines just how hazardous her human rights activism has been. In the fall of 2000, Ebadi, one of Iran's leading reformist lawyers, represented Parastou Forouhar, whose parents, dissident intellectuals, were butchered by government assassins. Their killings, part of a string of murders of regime critics carried out by the Ministry of Intelligence in the late 90s, were perpetrated with particular sadism -- the aging couple were stabbed repeatedly and then hacked to pieces.

In 2000, some of those involved in the murders were finally brought to trial. "The stakes could not be higher," writes Ebadi. "It was the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic that the state had acknowledged that it had murdered its critics, and the first time a trial would be convened to hold the perpetrators accountable."

The victims' lawyers were given ten days to review massive stacks of government files on the case. Recalling an afternoon bent over the dossier, Ebadi writes, "I had reached a page more detailed, and more narrative, than any previous section, and I slowed down to focus. It was the transcript of a conversation between a government minister and a member of the death squad. When my eyes fell on the sentence that would haunt me for years to come, I thought I had misread. I blinked once, but it stared back at me from the page: 'The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi.' Me." As she recounts, she didn't have time to process the shock, because she needed to keep working. "Only after dinner, after my daughters went to bed, did I tell my husband. 'So, something interesting happened to me at work today'."

Comments

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

I recently purchased the Persepolis books, after hearing glowing reviews of them from several people, including you two. It's nice to feel like I have some basic background on 20th century Iran now. I wish more people would read these sorts of books, and realize that invasions are likely to kill off democratic movements...

Anyways, thanks for the link to the review, it was interesting.