The l979 Revolution was a popular movement also composed of many different factions, all opposed to the repressive monarchy, and all determined to create a new order that would give greater rights to women. In the early days of the Revolution, Khomeini desperately needed the popular support of the Iranian women to help him overthrow Reza Shah’s regime. To achieve his goal, Khomeini promised more rights and freedom for all women in a new form of government that would be an Islamist democratic theocracy.18 At that time many secular women, such as Azar Nafisi, who supported a revolution that would provide further rights to all citizens and equality for women, were not supportive of an Islamic or religious state. But these secular women were not prepared to counter the mass support given by religious women for Khomeini and for the Islamists during the Revolution.

Although many secular women protested the idea of the formation of a theocracy, they were outnumbered by the religious women who believed that an Islamic nation would rescue them from oppression. Khomeini established the Islamic State by betraying many of his only moderate supporters and by eliminating his enemies. In fact, once the Revolution occurred, Khomeini and his supporters consolidated their power by eliminating the opposition, destroying the leftist forces, purging the unsupportive religious leaders, and dividing the secular intellectuals by gender. The age-old tactic of “divide and conquer” worked brilliantly in Khomeini’s favor, allowing him to eradicate several facets of opposition at once.

Needless to say that Khomeini’s promises of freedom and equality to women were not completely fulfilled, and he perpetrated what could be called one of the greatest frauds in the history of women’s human rights. After the Revolution, Khomeini’s social and legal policies towards women became stricter and more repressive as he consolidated his political power. For example, soon after his Islamic regime became firmly entrenched, Khomeini declared The Family Protection Law un-Islamic. This law was instituted by the Shah in 1967 to give greater rights to women in the area of marriage, divorce and child custody, un-Islamic. Women judges like Shirin Ebadi were forced to resign their positions, and veiling became mandatory. Khomeini’s pronouncements forced secular women in government and in other high-level positions to resign or to be fired from their positions.

Ironically, the imposition of the veil under Khomeini’s regime has taken on a different meaning and has actually led to greater freedom only for traditional, religious   women who were now able to participate in the public sphere for the first time in many years.  Under Khomeini and in the Islamist Republic, the State guarantees that the public sphere is a safe place for Muslim women to be seen precisely because the State mandated religiously-appropriate behavior by both sexes and strict adherence to the dress covered up so as not to tempt men to behave indecently. In this post-revolutionary, highly regulated society, many traditional Muslim women, who were formerly isolated in the privacy of their home, actually experienced more opportunities and greater freedom to participate in education, politics, health, and many other fields.  Nevertheless, forced veiling had an equal but opposite effect of alienating and isolating secular women, even those who had supported some form of revolution and who opposed the Shah.

Seven months after the Iranian revolution ended, prominent Iranian poet, Ahmad Shamloo, summed up the feeling of the Iranian people when he wrote, In This Dead-end:

They smell your breath. 
You better not have said, “I love you.” 
They smell your heart. 
These are strange times, darling… 
And they flog love 
at the roadblock. 
We had better hide love in the closet… 
In this crooked dead end and twisting chill, 
they feed the fire 
with the kindling of song and poetry. 
Do not risk a thought. 
These are strange times, darling… 
He who knocks on the door at midnight 
has come to kill the light. 
We had better hide light in the closet… 
Those there are butchers 
stationed at the crossroads 
with bloody clubs and cleavers. 
These are strange times, darling… 
And they excise smiles from lips 
and songs from mouths. 
We had better hide joy in the closet… 
Canaries barbecued 
on a fire of lilies and jasmine, 
these are strange times, darling… 
Satan drunk with victory 
sits at our funeral feast. 
We had better hide God in the closet.

Ebadi’s memoir also reveals the significant role that two institutions play in Iranian society --religion and the law. While the two are considered very rigid and almost dogmatically theological, they become haphazard and improvised in the capriciousness of the unstable political environment.

Ebadi understands the significance of the “headscarf” as a polyvalent symbol having many meanings. She admits that “the headscarf ‘invitation’ was the first warning that this revolution might eat its sisters, which was what women called one another while agitating for the shah’s overthrow.” Ebadi admits that she felt betrayed by the revolutionaries who believed that “in their hierarchy of priorities, women’s rights would forever come last. It was simply never the right time to defend women’s rights.”

For example, in a vivid and gripping style she writes that there is “a section of the penal code devoted to blood money, diyeh,  which says that if a man suffers an injury that damages his testicles, he is entitled to compensation equal to a woman’s life. “The drafters of the penal code had apparently consulted the seventh century for legal advice. The laws, in short, turned the clock back fourteen hundred years, to the early days of Islam’s spread, the days when stoning women for adultery and chopping off the hands of thieves were considered appropriate sentences.”  This language in the penal code is a sign of “how the Islamic Republic regards its women” (51).

Ebadi does recognize that the Islamic State has educated women from the provinces for the first time, but this right to education has resulted in major tension within families. Legal rights can not be implemented effectively if the culture of society has not yet caught up with the intent of the legislation. An Iranian father may refuse to send his daughter to school, even though men and women are segregated in the universities, because the father may feel the need to defend her virtue and, thereby, his own honor.

Even though there are currently more women in universities in Iran than men, laws affecting women are discriminatory and inadequate. Marriage laws in Iran allow the man to remain a “person” and the woman becomes “chattel”. The man has a right to divorce the woman at whim, take custody of the children (even if the father abuses the child), and a man has the right to acquire three wives who live together with the first wife. These are illustrations that Ebadi gives of the litany of objectionable laws currently in the books—a woman’s life is worth half as much as a man’s; child custody after infancy goes automatically to the father etc (164, 278).

Women’s role in Iranian society is conditioned by a widespread cultural preference for male children. This preference is one of the main causes of the establishment and continuation of a troublesome patriarchy in Iran, the persistence of women’s low self-esteem, and their social and economic dependence on males for survival. Ebadi understands that in Iran male children are preferred, even though in her own family she was lucky enough to be treated equally with her brother. “In most Iranian households, male children enjoyed an exalted status, spoiled and cosseted by a coterie of aunt and female relatives. They often felt themselves the center of the family’s orbit….As children grew older, the boys’ privileges—from running about the neighborhood to consorting with a range of friends—expanded, while the girls’ contracted, to ensure that they remain najeeb, honorable and well-bred. In Iranian culture, it was considered natural for fathers to love their sons more; the sons are the repository for the family’s future ambitions; affection for a son was an investment”  Ebadi admits that her own upbringing spared her “from the low self-esteem and learned dependence that [she] observed in women reared in more traditional homes.”

Women, Activism and War in  Post-Revolutionary Iran

In order to gain the support of women before and during the Revolution, Khomeini made many pro-feminist promises to guarantee greater support of women’s rights and freedoms.  Once the Revolution ended, these women expected those promises to be fulfilled.   Khomeini did provide rural women with a university education and added more women in Parliament. In the absence of secular feminists within the new government, religious women were soon appointed to positions dealing with women’s affairs, and they actually became influential in the government’s new policies towards women.But the religious women in government helped foster anti-secular policies towards women, which was interpreted by the outside world as anti-feminist behavior.

The division between religious and secular women in post-Revolutionary Iran became more pronounced in the early days of the Khomeini regime, where only Islamic feminists had a real voice in government while secular women such as Azar Nafisi were marginalized.  The policies of the new regime seemed contradictory and lacked cohesion with respect to women. On the one hand, the government required women to wear the veil, eliminated secular women from government and academic posts, and imposed strict Shari’a law on most private matters affecting women and the family. On the other hand, the government claimed to advocate women’s rights, gave all women the right to a public education, maintained women’s suffrage, encouraged political activity in support of the government, and took a relatively moderate stance on family law issues.

In the new Iran, “approaches to women’s issues were divergent, even contradictory.”  For example, soon after the Khomeini regime took power, Iran went to war with Iraq, an event that gave women inordinate power in Iran, while Khomeini continued to create laws and policies that would marginalize women and render them  dependent on men in a patriarchal society.

In Europe, during the first and second world wars, women gained power because they were left alone to run the family while the men fought the wars. The Iran – Iraq war similarly gave more rights to Iranian women than did any other event.  During the war, the strategy of the Iranian government was to outnumber the Iraqi forces. This approach took men out of the home onto the battlefield where Iranian society incurred a great number of male casualties.  Women became indispensable during the war, and they were forced to take over a large percentage of the workforce.  Women had to help maintain the war effort, and for the first time they became the heads of their own households in the absence of a male presence.

In order to retain the political support of these women, the Khomeini government implemented some policies and human rights laws that were favorable to women, such as child custody laws for war orphans and widows, employment benefits for women, education for women, and many other benefits. During the ten-year period of war, women in Iran became accustomed to mobilizing for greater rights and successfully achieving them. This pattern of feminist activism in Iran during the war period established a natural cycle in which Iranian women were able to ask for and actually receive more rights without establishing a formal feminist movement. Thus, the mechanisms for Islamist feminism were firmly established during the Iran-Iraq War.

Arguably, the mobilization of women for greater women’s rights established a kind of underground resistance movement initially led by the Islamist feminists and then continued by secular women in the 1990’s.44 In 2006, Shirin Ebadi actually spoke of a "feminist movement" in Iran, but she hastened to add that it was a movement without a leader and without a home office, purposely designed that way to avoid endangering any one woman.

By late February l979, the real power in Iran was in the hands of the Revolutionary Council, a small and secretive group of clerics hovering around Khomeini who were responsible for summary executions, public whippings for alcohol consumption, and other infractions like malveiling.

In the early months of l979, religious extremists implemented the first “Reign of Terror” imposing hard-line interpretations of Islamic law that resulted in many summary executions of military officers of the previous regime, members of the Shah’s court, and capitalists who were killed because they had waged “war against On March 8, l979 Khomeini gave his “infamous order compelling women to wear the chador.” Hundreds of Iranian feminists, on their way that day to Tehran University for the International Women’s day demonstration, reacted with “bitter derision to this news.”  At the March 8, l979 International Women’s Day demonstration, Iranian women activists and male supporters as well demonstrated in Tehran and Qom against this transformative order for women to re-veil themselves in the traditional chador normally worn only by highly religious women. The demonstration continued for five days and attracted tens of thousands in Tehran.

Some leftist men formed a symbolic and protective circle around the women in order to fight off armed attackers from a newly formed group, the Hezbollah, or “Party of God.” The Hezbollah chanted “You will cover yourselves or be beaten,” and they threw stones, knives and even bullets at the women protestors. The Komiteh, a “shadowy political and police force that was controlled by Khomeini and other mullahs” also harassed and detained women activists.

On March l0, 1979 many thousands marched for women’s rights and fifteen thousand women held a sit-in at the Ministry of Justice.

Religious Despotism, Hypocrisy and Deception

After the 1979 Revolution and “in a violent return swing of the pendulum, religious despotism had ousted both secularism and democracy” in Iran. Between June 1981 and May 1982 a second Reign of Terror took place in Iran, and many people were executed or imprisoned so that the Islamic State and clerical government could be firmly secured.

Iran today calls itself a democratic theocracy, and its constitution attests to its democratic intentions. But upon closer inspection, the structure of government set up in the Iranian Constitution reveals some of the inherent flaws in its democratic intentions or ambitions, flaws that negatively impact the human rights protections theoretically available to women. For example, the Iranian Constitution names the Leader for life, and the Assembly of Experts eventually choose his successor and even supervise his activities. However, in practice the Assembly of Experts and the Guardian Council form a kind of closed system that gives the Leader unlimited power. He alone makes appointments to the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts. In this way, Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors can control both the legislative and executive branches of government…hardly a Western notion of democracy at all!

It is significant that Ebadi’s memoir calls attention to public, rather than private memories. Ebadi addresses the problems inherent in the Islamic Republic’s legal and judicial systems. By providing evidence supporting the claim that both legally and socially women have been treated as less than human in that the protection of their human rights has been denied to them. Second, Ebadi aims to diagnose why this has been the case and what ought to be done, both domestically and internationally, in order to improve women's legal status and social condition.

The task of providing the evidential support for the claim that women's human rights are violated requires a two-pronged approach. Numerous empirical facts concerning harms inflicted upon women and children in Iran would not suffice for supporting this claim. Thus, in addition to citing such facts, Ebadi provides an interpretation of them, specifically as they pertain to interpretations of the Quran. That is, she argues that rape in general and marriage law, custody indeed ought to be regarded as violations of women's human rights, and insofar as these harms are not regarded as such violations, what the law does is use a ''simple double standard'' in its protection of men vs. its (lack of) protection of women. In fact, one of the leitmotifs of Iran Awakening is feminism contrary to this tradition, pays close attention to the social reality (of women) and aims to provide a theory that does justice to this reality.

Ebadi challenges, on several occasions, the religious account of equality. It is this conception of equality that obscures the fact that the structure of social reality is fundamentally hierarchical together with the normative implications of this fact -- the call to move toward a society that is not based on the subordination of any one group to another. 

Ebadi points out that the penal codes are based on male reality and constructed to fit a paradigm based on the experiences of Iranian men.   This phenomenon permeates every aspect of Iranian political and legal life, from the role of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini to the legislative power of the Guardian Council of clerics. More generally, the challenge of setting the legal, political, and social agenda in any society is to provide a correct interpretation of social reality, its features and its problems. The religious clerics have enormous power in Iran, and they have long since regulated Iran’s cultural life, banning discotheques, nightclubs, bars, alcohol, coed sports, satellite gambling, and many kinds of music.

According to Ebadi, reality is a social status, and as long as it is men who have the social status of power (Guardian Council), what is considered to be 'social reality' reflects the male perspective only.  What, on the other hand, gets ignored is the perspective and the status of the powerless in the society:  their conditions and problems are seen as merely private and in no need of being addressed publicly (or politically).  What gets ignored, furthermore, is that society (every society in history) is a society with a rigid hierarchy, in which women are always the lower stratum while men are the higher one.

Women’s social life in Iran is very restricted because they are relegated to the inside private arena of the home and dependent on their male protectors to provide a social life. Social relationships between men and woman are not permitted in public. This segregation forces people to act one way in public and another way in private. As a result of the segregation of the sexes and an atmosphere of pervasive repression, Iran has seen a rise in prostitution (which is illegal in Iran) and the trafficking of women (which is a contemporary form of slavery). This hypocrisy has become the status quo in post-revolutionary Iran, cementing the split between the public and the private, and manufacturing mass deception on an unprecedented scale in society.

Even though women have made some human rights gains, they are still discriminated against, repressed, and oppressed in Iran. “Women do not serve as judges or religious leaders. Adultery is still punishable by stoning to death. Polygamy is legal. In a divorce, fathers control custody of sons over the age of two and daughters over the age of seven. A girl can be tried for a crime as an adult at the age of nine (a boy at fifteen). …Girls are able to get married at nine, and they are oftentimes forced into an arranged marriage against their will. Women inherit only half of what men receive. Blood money (compensation for the victim of a crime) for women is half that of men.” Men can divorce their wives at will, but women need to prove that their spouse is insane, impotent, violent, or unable to support the family. A woman needs her husband’s permission to start a business and sometimes even to get a job. Married women cannot get passports or leave the country without the written permission of their husband… Rape is more often than not blamed on the woman. A woman’s testimony in court has half the weight of a For more in-depth analysis of the gains made in Iran to protect women’s human rights, The standard marriage contract gives women rights on paper that are difficult to enforce in the Iranian family court which is a “hothouse of double standards and male vengeance.”

Wife-beating in Iran is tolerated, quite common, but generally denied. The persistence of this long list of violations of women’s fundamental human rights in post-revolutionary Iran is troubling but slightly balanced by some small and unexpected developments in women’s rights.

Power of Words and Ijtihad

Shirin Ebadi believes in the power of the written word and its ability to free women from tyranny in Iran. ”The written word is the most powerful tool we have to attract people’s attention, to solicit their sympathies and convince them that these laws were not simply unfair but actively pathological, I had to tell stories.” protect ourselves, both from the tyrants of the day and from our own traditions. Whether it is the storyteller of the legend Scheherazde, staving off beheading by spinning a thousand and one tales, feminist poets of the last century who challenged the culture’s perception of women through verse, or lawyers like me who defend the powerless in courts, Iranian women have for centuries relied on words to transform reality.”

Ebadi firmly believes that change for Iranian women is possible, but it must come from within the system and peacefully with no help from foreign countries.  There are signs of a feminist movement now in Iran, whereas “women in the l990’s were “not yet organized” in a feminist movement, even though they were “working to change” women’s rights in the Islamist State of Iran. The conditions for women in Iran are deplorable, and there is no wonder that many women commit suicide or become suicide bombers preferring to die as a martyr rather than live a life of contradiction and paradox in a community that does not treat them fairly or equally. “The suicide rate among women rose after the Islamic Revolution, commonly taking the form of self-immolation.

This tragic exhibitionism…is women’s way of forcing their community to confront the cruelty of their oppression.”  Today Iran has the third highest rate of self-immolation after India.  Suicide and self-immolations are signs of women’s oppression. Protest and revolt are met with harsh responses. Any attempt to protest by the great number of unhappy young people in Iran or by the highly educated women in universities is “crushed” “with typical brutality, especially if America “supports” the protest. Ebadi explained the precarious situation of Western-backing of democratic reform in Iran. Any public American support for any “pro-democracy phenomenon in Iran, whether from an individual or a trend or a demonstration, always provoked the Islamic system’s ire and generally resulted in an even harsher crackdown.”  

Shirin Ebadi abhors Iran’s “patriarchy” and speaks out vocally against the oppression of the conservative rulers who have stripped women of their basic human rights and their political and social freedom. She clearly advocates sovereignty for Iran and a “hands off foreign policy” for America vis-à-vis Iran. She admits her anger at the United States and its CIA for assisting in the removal of Mossadegh, whom she greatly admired. In her moving speech at the Kroc Peace and Justice Center in San Diego on September 7, 2006, she implored the United States to keep out of Iran. “We don’t want Iran to be another Iraq,” she said.

While Ebadi was a firm believer in the ideals of the l979 Revolution, she has grown increasingly disillusioned with the current trajectory of Iranian politics especially under the current regime of the hard-line clerics whose strict interpretation of the Koran is palpable in every aspect of Iranian life. In the post-revolution period and during the Iran-Iraqi war, Ebadi was outraged by the frequency and conduct of the “secret show trials” and pervasiveness of public “executions,” arrests, and torture in Iranian jails. Ebadi and many other Iranian women felt betrayed by both Khomeini and the West, the latter for their support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Yet, Ebadi admits that if Iranians accepted "that the revolution had been betrayed, we would surely lose the war.” It was a period when Iran’s Revolution and the Iran-Iraqi war produced a frightening “cult of martyrdom” that “gloried human sacrifice in the name of Islam.” The “engorged enthusiasm for martyrdom and the aesthetic of death” that Ebadi and all the women around her observed in Iran did not feel alien or excessive to them because “everything—public space, rituals, resumes, newspapers, television—became dominated by death, mourning and grief.”

“Freshly wounded by a violent revolution, we put aside our grievances and betrayal. Those images marching across the television every night inflamed our nationalism. My heart cracked for our young men, setting out for Saddam’s killing fields with their shoddy weapons, no match for a dictator armed with the latest from the West’s arms boutiques” (61).

Ebadi’s hope for the future of Iran lay in the power of interpretation. She recognizes the need to adopt a more dynamic interpretation of the Koran in order to protect and provide equal rights for women. She believes that “a basic right for women could be guaranteed within an Islamic framework of governance, provided those in government were inclined to interpret the faith in the spirit of equality.”

Ebadi reminds us that “In Islam, there exists a tradition of intellectual interpretation and innovation known as ijtihad,  practiced by jurists and clerics over the centuries to debate the meaning of Koranic teachings as well as their application to modern ideas and situations. Sunni Islam effectively closed the door to ijtihad  several centuries back, but in Shia Islam, the process and spirit of  ijtihad  thrive. Ijtihad is central to Islamic law, because Shari’a  is more a set of principles than a codified set of rules.”

Religious-oriented feminists believe that “Ijtihad  imposes flexibility on Islamic law and creates “an exciting space for adapting Islamic values and traditions to [women’s] lives in the modern world” whereas, secular-oriented feminists believe that ijtihad  can be burdensome because it lets clerics and jurists debate and interpret the Koranic teachings for an endless period of time. “An interpretation of Islam” must be “in harmony with equality and democracy.” 

Conclusion

Today’s Iran is very different one from the country which was the site of a major revolution in the late 1970s. Youth now constitute a steep majority of the population with 70%  below the age of 30.  There are 22,000,000 students in Iran, and 70% of university students are women.  With this young constituency demanding more freedom every day, the status quo appears untenable. Educated Iranian women who cannot find expression for their learning and young Iranian people who are frustrated by oppression make a volatile combination poised for transformation, if not revolution. Ebadi’s memoir cannot be understood outside these characteristics as it imagines the path which Iran appears to be taking.

A liberal, a feminist and an internationalist, Shirin Ebadi is, above all, a remarkable humanist, with a capacious intellect and a generous sensibility.  Her lucid and powerful memoir is fiercely intelligent, deeply passionate and intimately attuned to the problems and potential in both democracy and human rights, and reveals possibilities for constructive legal and political reform. Intensely personal, profoundly political and wholly candid, Iran Awakening is at once a recollection of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows us how we carry on, with strength and dignity, in the face of absurdity.  And, finally, it introduces us to an admirable woman, with whom we cannot help but respect and admire. 

Ebadi’s memoir encourages us to ask whether the domestic and international legal standards applied to crimes against women are consistent with our commitment to defending human rights in general.  That is, whether our legal, social, and philosophical theories are adequate to reality as women experience it.  The evidence that Ebadi carefully collects and interprets strongly suggests a negative answer to questions such as these.  Whether we agree or not with her diagnosis of the problem and with her proposed solutions to it, Iran Awakening confronts us with the task of providing a diagnosis and a solution to the problems in the legal and social approach to women's rights in present-day Iran.

Global in scope, sound in marshalling the evidence, eloquent in advancing this memoir offers a comprehensive, compelling source of wisdom not just on why women deserve justice, but why they must be empowered if humanity as a whole is to prevail against the challenges it faces. Committed to a belief in women’s equal rights and human dignity, Ebadi summarily exposes and enlarges the human rights violations and practices and policies that silence and subordinate women and dissidents in Iran.

It is elegantly written and carefully argued.  Ebadi is a voice of good reason and goodwill, and a reminder, for those who need it, that sex is the scene of some of the worst injustices in the world. Ebadi tuly has enlarged our concept of what it means to be human. She writes her memoir with the American-born Iranian Azadeh Moaveni—and Moaveni’s style of writing and some thematic similarities to her own memoir with the American-born Iranian Azadeh Moaveni-- and Moaveni's style of writing and some thematic similarities to her own memoir Lipstick Jihad are recognizable. 

By recounting her childhood memories to address a Western reader, Ebadi is acutely aware of how her narrative and prose will be received. In fact, this book has not been published in Farsi. In a New York Times article, she expresses her purpose in writing her memoir as an attempt to “help correct Western stereotypes of Islam, especially the image of Muslim women as docile, forlorn creatures. She has always wanted to "tell the story of how women in Islamic countries, even one run by a theocratic regime as in Iran, can be active politically and professionally.”

As concrete and necessary today as it was six years ago, this book effectively explains the contradictions, paradoxes and persistent gender inequalities present in Iran. It bears the unmistakable stamp of Ebadi’s genial temperament and willingness to compromise.

The ongoing struggle to achieve the actualization of women’s human rights needs to be given the priority and attention that Ebadi seeks. Her message of hope for women with her undying faith in the power of words and in the liberating effects of interpretation, or what (Thomas Jefferson School of Law) calls “the message of semiotics.”

Further Readings

Amanda Farnham is a gender rights advocate and activist and holds a degree in Philosophy and Ethics from Smith College. She currently serves as the VP for External Affairs for Voices Without Borders International (VWBI). Her email is amanda.farnham@gmail.com