A voice for Muslim women that will not be silenced

Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights attorney Shirin Ebadi has an unusual reply to those who invoke Islam to support authoritarian societies and the stifling of liberty for women. Islam, Ebadi says, is being wrongly used by male-dominated Muslim states and movements to justify discriminating against women when, in fact, the practice “has its roots in patriarchal and male-dominated culture prevailing in these societies, not in Islam.”

What is needed, Ebadi says, is a “gender-neutral” reading of Islamic texts. “You cannot trample the rights of women under the pretext of Islam,” Ebadi said in an interview Thursday morning.

Ebadi, a devoted Muslim with large dark eyes and short hair, who favors tailored dark suits and presents her arguments with soft-spoken deliberation, is hardly the first to point out the discrepancies between the Koran and modern fundamentalist governments.

But Ebadi is making this case in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and it has caused religious conservatives to threaten and even attack her. Ebadi has grown so resigned to the hazards of her profession that she once turned herself in during one contentious case to avoid being arrested at home. She spent 23 days in solitary confinement, reading the Koran.

In December, as she gave a speech at the Al Zahra women’s university in Tehran, 50 thugs rushed the podium, yelling, “Death to Ebadi.” Her gentle persistence in the face of such threats has earned her the nickname “woman of steel.”

In her first visit, since winning the prize, to California -- home of a powerful community of Iranian immigrants and exiles -- Ebadi presents her case for a modern, reformist view of Islam in a two-hour lecture on “Islam, Democracy and Human Rights” this afternoon at UCLA. In her earlier swing through Canada and the East Coast, Ebadi, 56, has been vehement on one point: “Islam is not a religion of terror and violence.”

“There is a spirit flowing through all Islamic teachings that guarantees human equality in the eyes of God,” she said. “We can interpret Islam to sanction equality between men and women.” Religious leaders deny women equality in the name of Islam, she said, “because of the patriarchal culture governing all Islamic societies.”

Because Islamic leaders cast themselves as messengers of God, Ebadi has said, they accuse their critics of being enemies of Islam. Ebadi’s life illustrates the difficulties this poses for her and others who are pressing for reforms from within countries in which women’s issues are cast by conservatives as the heretical corrupting influence of Westernization.

Ebadi became one of Iran’s first female judges in 1975. She was among those who initially embraced the 1978 Iranian revolution, which ousted the shah in early 1979. Then came the rise of fundamentalism and a wave of repression.

There were summary executions. Women were forced to cover themselves with veils. Morality police roamed the streets, hauling off women deemed immodest for forced “virginity tests” or worse. The age of marital consent for girls was lowered to 9 (it has since been raised to 13), and adulteresses were condemned to stoning.

Ebadi was demoted from judge to legal assistant -- something she has compared to going from a university president to becoming a janitor. She reemerged as a prominent defender of dissidents, women and children, taking on controversial cases after other human rights attorneys were silenced or driven into exile.

She has represented the families of artists and intellectuals killed by government thugs and found evidence to link hard-line politicians with Islamic vigilantes who beat several students to death during the 1999 student protests. She has written 11 books on human rights and on family law setting out the rights of children.

By giving her the Peace Prize, Ebadi says, the Nobel committee “was expressing its appreciation of freedom-seeking Muslim women all over the world.”

Ebadi is riding the wave of a paradoxical moment in the 66 million-strong nation. The shah’s monarchy gave women the vote, professional opportunities and more egalitarian laws on such civil matters as divorce. But social services were scant and poverty rampant, with female illiteracy as high as 90% in some rural areas. Today, literacy for girls between 15 and 24 is near universal, and family planning has reduced the national fertility rate to about two children per couple. Female university students now outnumber males.

Many young Iranians chafe at religious restrictions and gravitate toward youth culture from “the Great Satan,” watching “Baywatch” on satellite and listening to Madonna. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was recently featured on the cover of an Iranian women’s magazine.

The result has been mounting pressure for broad reforms. A majority of women helped vote a more moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, into office in 1997, though Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, retained final say in all matters of state. Khatami did request a moratorium on the stoning of adulteresses, but many women complain that he and other politicians pander to women’s issues without taking real steps to reduce women’s legal disadvantage.

Still, interpretations of what is permissible under Islam have changed since the early days of the revolution, demonstrating, Ebadi said, that religious doctrine, much of it passed down through oral tradition, is open to interpretation. For example, women have been reinstated as judges in Iran. “The judiciary of Iran accepted that they had made a mistake,” she said. “This was not Islam but an interpretation of Islam.”

The day Ebadi became the first Iranian to win the Nobel Prize, Iran’s state television ignored the news for much of the day, then aired it last, after an emergency airliner landing in New Zealand and a sports segment. President Khatami did not immediately congratulate her, and he told a group of journalists that the peace prize was “not that important,” adding, “The ones that count are the scientific and literary prizes.”

But thousands of Iranians, most of them women, turned out to meet Ebadi at the airport when she flew in from Paris, greeting her with carnations, songs and tears and defiantly wearing white head scarves, instead of the state-approved black. The next morning, an Iranian newspaper published a cartoon of her Nobel medal rising as a golden flower out of a sea of thorns.

Yet since she won her award, a member of parliament has compared her to Salman Rushdie, the author of “The Satanic Verses,” who lived for years under a deadly fatwa. In the holy Iranian city of Qom, a group of conservative clerics said Ebadi would never have received the Nobel if the government had complied with a conservative leader’s advice to “cut the unclean tongues of the infidels.”

In some ways, her life hasn’t changed much. She still works with a female staff in an office in her basement, emerging to cook the family meals and run the household she shares with her husband, Jawad, an electrical engineer, and one of her two daughters -- the other is now studying in Montreal.

She still takes on controversial cases: Currently, she is representing the family of an Iranian-born Montreal photojournalist allegedly beaten to death in an Iranian jail last year. In February, she refused to vote in parliamentary elections in which the disqualification of more than 2,000 candidates prompted reformist parliamentarians to pen an open letter telling the Ayatollah Khamenei, “You lead a system in which legitimate freedoms ... are being trampled on in the name of Islam.”

But one thing has changed irrevocably: She now has a world platform for her views. In recent weeks she has lunched with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and urged the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq. “Look at the photographs taken in Iraq and the shameful treatment these prisoners have gotten,” she said. “This is very far from the peaceful civilization that the United States stands for. Isn’t it time to end the killing? Democracy would be better implemented if the United States withdrew and the United Nations took over.”

She would like to establish a nongovernmental organization to help battered wives and to clear land mines left behind from the Iran-Iraq war.

Los Angeles’ Iranian community mirrors the deep divisions in Iran, though here the fault lines are traced by monarchists who fled the ouster of the shah and by more recent arrivals who, like Ebadi, initially welcomed the revolution.

A week before Ebadi’s arrival, a monarchist group hosted a cocktail fundraiser with keynote speaker Richard Perle, a prominent advisor to President Bush who resigned from his official Defense Policy Board position in February after coauthoring a hawkish new book advocating “bold action” against Iran and fellow “sponsors of terrorism.”

“I believe Richard Perle has an ideology similar to ours, so we can be of mutual benefit,” said Foad Pashai, the secretary general of the Constitutionalist Party of Iran, an exile group that favors constitutional monarchy in Iran.

And Ebadi? “We don’t share her views,” said Shayan Arya, the president of the party’s Seattle chapter.

But many others do -- or are, at least, eager to listen to them. Ebadi’s event this afternoon quickly sold out, and many people angled for an invitation for a private reception at the home of Ron Burkle, whose Center for International Relations at UCLA sponsored the event.

“I’ll continue the work that I have been doing even more forcefully,” Ebadi said. “As you can see, I am using the microphone to give the message of peace to the people of the world.”

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Shirin Ebadi

Where: UCLA’s Royce Hall

When: Today, 4 to 6 p.m.

Price: Free, but no tickets left. Unclaimed seats will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Contact: (310) 825-2101

Also

Where: UC Santa Barbara, Campbell Hall

When: Monday, 8 p.m.

Price: $15; $10 for UCSB students.

Contact: (805) 893-3535