Iranian lightning rod at UCLA

Anyone who doubts ideas still have power should have seen Iranian human rights attorney Shirin Ebadi struggle to give a speech at UCLA this week.

Barely 5 feet tall, the soft-spoken Ebadi was overshadowed by the lectern in the dark, cavernous Ackerman Ballroom when she stepped up to a resounding standing ovation from the 1,100-strong crowd, which seemed mostly Iranian American. Her criticisms of her country’s Islamic government won her round after round of applause, cheers and standing ovations from hundreds of admirers who chanted her name. Yet midway through her speech, a handful of protesters -- some of them supporters of the shah monarchy that once ruled Iran -- began yelling, calling her a liar, an apologist, an agent of the Islamic regime.

Half a dozen hecklers were escorted out. Equally electrified crowds lined up for Ebadi to sign her new memoir, “Iran Awakening,” the ostensible raison d’etre of the evening.

This was not the kind of literary event where people share white wine and muted pleasantries, but that’s no surprise. Ebadi, 58, won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her “efforts for democracy and human rights.” She is a lightning rod for the broad array of strong viewpoints brought to Los Angeles by the continuous waves of Iranian emigres since the 1979 ouster of the shah. Her many admirers here see her as someone who is risking her life to fight for justice in Iran. The detractors who show up at her speeches say that her dissent doesn’t go far enough and that it provides a window dressing of tolerance for an intolerable regime.

Ebadi’s memoir, which details her journey from a modest Muslim girlhood to her role as the government’s most prominent critic, makes it clear that Ebadi is accustomed to far more than peaceful protest. In 2003, 50 thugs yelling “Death to Ebadi!” rushed to the podium as she was speaking in Tehran. She once spent 23 days in jail. In 2000, when she sat down to read official files detailing the dozens of intellectuals hacked to death, strangled or shot by secret police, something in the fine print caught her eye.

“The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi,” a state death squad leader tells a government minister in a transcript, as casually as if he were ticking off a little chore on his to-do list. OK, the minister said, just wait until the end of Ramadan.

Ebadi went home that night, fixed dinner and saw her two daughters off to bed before turning to her husband and beginning gingerly: “So, something interesting happened to me at work today.” In “Iran Awakening,” she cooks and cleans and tries to shield her husband and daughters from the fallout of her crusading legal work.

Her book tour has given Ebadi an ample platform to criticize Iranian laws that discriminate against women and children, and to air accounts of beatings, rapes and murders of pro-democracy activists such as the people she represents. It has also provided a forum for her calls for democracy in a country where a conservative ayatollah overruled a tepid initiative by hardline elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that would have allowed women to attend soccer games.

“The Iranian government claims it needs nuclear technology for peaceful purposes,” Ebadi told the audience that packed Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley last week, referring to Iran’s refusal to halt its nuclear enrichment program. “The world will not accept this claim.

“What is the solution? The Iranian government has to prove its claim is correct. However, that can only happen when a progressive democracy is established in Iran. When decisions are made behind closed doors without popular participation, dangers can arise.”

Such critiques are not welcome back home, and as she sat down at a table at Dwinelle Hall for an interview, Ebadi idly wondered whether she would be put on trial in Iran for the details of state involvement in the murders in her book -- based on evidence she has carefully stored in several safe places.

Even in the United States, the publication of the memoir was a huge obstacle course. U.S. Treasury Department rules forbid its publication under rules governing countries with U.S. sanctions. As a Nobelist, Ebadi probably could have won an exemption, but “as a lifetime defender of free expression, I could not countenance the thought,” she writes. So she and her publisher filed a lawsuit, and in December 2004, the Treasury Department revised its regulations.

Such rules might explain the scant availability of books that, like Ebadi’s, were written inside Iran, with insights into the feelings and daily routines of ordinary Iranians at a time when the country’s image has often been reduced to a cartoonish caricature of conservative clerics.

Ebadi, as her book makes clear, is not quite ordinary. She describes explaining to her daughters, as she goes off for her 23-day stint as a political prisoner, that it would be much worse if Mommy had had a heart attack.

In “Iran Awakening,” her life begins unremarkably enough, as the daughter of parents whose arranged marriage turned into a passionate lifelong romance. Like many Iranians, political turmoil is an intrusive backdrop to their lives.

Ebadi’s father encouraged her rather unusual ambitions to become a judge. She was young and single, and many men were turned off by the idea of dating a judge. The electrical engineer she eventually married was unfazed, even proud.

Outcry against the shah was growing in those days, and Ebadi and her husband joined many other Iranians, yelling “God is great!” from the roof as a protest.

They also shared the dismay of many Iranians when the shah’s hasty 1979 flight quickly gave way to the 444-day crisis in which 52 Americans were held hostage. The government forced women to veil, took away their right to initiate divorce, gave their husbands unilateral custody of children and lowered the marriage age to 9. One day, Ebadi and other female judges were summarily demoted to something between clerks and secretaries. Ebadi was furious.

When she retired, she took up the case of a family whose futile battle for justice for the gang rape of their little girl had left them homeless. She represented a family whose child had been automatically awarded to an unfit, abusive ex-husband, and beaten to death in his care. She began to argue, in court, that Islam does not condone discrimination against women but allows for equality.

That led to the high-profile cases, such as the murder of a student pushed out of a window during the 1999 student pro-democracy protests, of political prisoners, families of intellectuals -- the kind of cases that led her to the 2000 files that called for her death.

Is she ever afraid? “Fear is an instinct, like hunger,” Ebadi said thoughtfully. “Without meaning to, you get hungry. So honestly, yes, I am afraid. But believing that I am on a righteous path gives me strength. I’m a Muslim and a believer in God, and that gives me strength.”

At UCLA, cheers were nearly constant, from the standing ovation to Ebadi’s complaint that Iranian women must still get written permission from their husbands to travel abroad, at a time when the vice president and 15 parliamentarians are female.

“Imagine if the vice president needs to go to the U.N., she has to beg her husband to let her travel,” Ebadi said, as the crowd laughed. “And if they have a fight that night, what would happen to the U.N. chair?”

The applause swelled when Ebadi promised that “I will continue pressing for the release of all the political prisoners in Iran!” and denounced Iran’s hostage-taking as an “embarrassing mistake” and “wrong.” When Ebadi began to criticize U.S. support for the 1953 coup and U.S. backing of Saddam Hussein during the destructive eight-year Iran-Iraq war, a few people even yelled, “Bravo!”

“It’s time to forget past animosities and think about the future,” she exhorted. “The people of Iran have no disputes with each other. Over 2 million Iranians live in the U.S., and the U.S. has been very hospitable. The people of Iran and the United States have no differences. It’s the governments that are fighting.”

At this, an older man with a cane stood up and yelled, “Down with the Republic of Iran!” Another man yelled, “Talk about the political prisoners!” A young man in a black suit chanted “God bless America!” as he gave Ebadi two thumbs down.

The crowd defended her, chanting: “Ebadi! Ebadi!” Campus security moved toward the most raucous hecklers.

“A lady in the audience called me a liar. What am I lying about?” Ebadi asked. “People in Iran demand an advanced democracy in Iran.

“In my book you will read about many human rights abuses in Iran,” she continued. “But military invasion of Iran or bombing of Iran is not going to solve this. The people in Iran love their country and are not going to permit it to be a second Iraq. It is upon all of us to work for democracy in Iraq. But democracy cannot be brought to a nation with cluster bombs.”

The audience roared, the loudest ovation of the evening.

Then came a difficult question: Knowing what she knows now, someone asked, would Ebadi have joined in supporting the Iranian revolution?

“Yes, she would! She’s an agent!” the protester in the black suit yelled.

Ebadi paused. She does, after all, live in Iran. Iranian media would beam her words back to Tehran. The crowd waited, wondering if she would publicly disavow the 1979 revolution.

“After citing all the discriminatory laws in Iran to you, I do not think I would have,” Ebadi finally answered, choosing her words carefully. “I think you would agree that this is not the right way.”

UCLA administrators moved in to end the event. “Thank you for your super, super behavior,” a man onstage said.

“A hundred percent of the people here oppose the regime in Iran, but there are many differences of opinion in how to deal with the [Islamic] regime,” explained Allen Tajik, 56, an insurance agent, as people pushed toward Ebadi so she could sign their copies of her book.

“Most of the people here supported the revolution too,” Tajik said. “In those days, everyone was in the streets yelling, ‘Death to the shah.’ I supported it ... . We thought after the shah left, it would be like England. But instead it became like George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm.’ ”