Wednesday, August 10, 2011 8:31:09 AM
Excerpt: "Ever utopian, Shariati promised Iranians that Islam would solve their modern-day problems, that if they reacquainted themselves with with their "real" tradition rather than it's passive legacy), if, in his words, they "re-became themselves," the way out of their modern problems would reveal itself. The Islamist utopian made Iranian society fertile ground for the rice of the MKO, and it is difficult to illustrate the group's social following without mentioning Shariati, a name that was on everyone's lips for years, when few knew or thought of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was Shariati who inspired masses of Iranians to support militant Islam over secular leftism, and the MKO flag always flew along w ith those of other groups at the head of the great marches. Though much of the history of the revolution remains contested, some believe it was the MKO that propelled its victory."
According to, Shirin Ebadi, Ali Shariati .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Shariati .. was the chief figure in the "slow radicalization of Iranian youth" in the late 60s and early 70s, lead the MKO's early appeal .. the above excerpt is from page 65 of Ebadi's book, which I just happen to be enjoying, again, now.
===========
'Iran Awakening,' by Shirin Ebadi ..
A Dissenting Voice
Review by LAURA SECOR
Published: July 16, 2006
IN 1978, as the fever for revolution swelled, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called from exile in Iraq for Iranians to eject ministers from their offices. Shirin Ebadi, then 31 years old and Iran's first female judge, joined her colleagues in storming the office of the minister of justice. He wasn't there. Instead, the young activists found an old judge sitting behind a desk and staring at them in amazement.
Reuters
Shirin Ebadi
IRAN AWAKENING .. A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. .. By Shirin Ebadi with Azadeh Moaveni. .. Illustrated. 232 pp. Random House. $24.95.
"You!" he cried, when he saw Ebadi among the conspirators. "You of all people, why are you here? Don't you know that you're supporting people who will take your job away if they come to power?"
Ebadi's reply was "self-righteous to the core," she recalls in "Iran Awakening": "I'd rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved attorney."
The endorsement of a female judge was useful to the revolutionaries, who sought to reassure Iranian women of their benign intentions. But the following year, once the clerics succeeded in toppling the shah and consolidating their power, Ebadi was demoted because she was a woman, first to a clerk and then to a secretary in the very courtroom over which she had presided as a judge. Later, her former revolutionary comrades assured her, they would have the luxury of worrying about the rights of women. But later never came.
One day in 1980, the country's new Islamic penal code — adopted overnight and without discussion — appeared in the morning newspaper. Ebadi's head pounded with rage as she read it. A woman's life was to be worth half of a man's in the eyes of the law. Criminal penalties and relations between the sexes were to be set back 1,400 years. "The grim statutes that I would spend the rest of my life fighting stared back at me from the page," she writes.
In collaboration with the gifted journalist Azadeh Moaveni, Ebadi, who in 2003 became the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, has written a memoir that is both a deft history of postrevolutionary Iran and a genuinely intimate recollection. It is fast-paced, suspenseful and spare, its details memorable and well chosen. And it is a story that encapsulates the harsh choices that face those who live and fight for change within the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One thing Ebadi did not expect from the new Islamic penal code was that it would cast a pall over her marriage. "The day Javad and I married each other, we joined our lives together as two equal individuals," she writes. "But under these laws, he stayed a person and I became chattel. They permitted him to divorce me at whim, take custody of our future children, acquire three wives and stick them in the house with me."
She knew her husband had no intention of doing any of these things, but the imbalance of power between them drove her to distraction. At length, she came up with a solution: she took him to a notary's office, where he signed away the new rights the Islamic Republic had given him.
"Why are you doing this?" the astonished notary asked.
"My decision is irrevocable," Ebadi's husband replied. "I want to save my life."
The decade after the revolution was a crucible of war and repression. For Ebadi, it was marked above all by the political imprisonment and murder of a family member. She recounts that episode with the mixture of outrage and empathy that would fuel her return to legal practice in the 1990's, by which time Iran's leaders had realized they needed their female lawyers and law professors.
Ebadi shouldered the country's most intractable human rights cases pro bono. She pored over religious texts to argue against particular interpretations of Koranic injunctions by insisting that within Islam, other more just or less discriminatory interpretations were possible. She did this not because she had warmed to the Islamic penal code or to the idea of religious interpretation as a foundation for the law, but because her cases were pressing and her intellectual vanity was not.
Ebadi represents the family of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was killed in police custody in 2003. She herself was imprisoned in the course of her work on the case of a student who was beaten to death by paramilitaries during a 1999 protest. When a number of dissident intellectuals were murdered under mysterious circumstances in the late 1990's, Ebadi took on one of the most significant of those cases, representing the children of Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, a couple slain in their home. While digging through government documents in the course of preparing for that trial, Ebadi encountered the official authorization for her own assassination.
(Page 2 of 2)
Ebadi is a towering figure, but she writes of her life choices as though they were natural and obvious. Not that the others in her orbit all chose to risk their lives and freedom. Many of her friends, she recalls with wistfulness and no small amount of anger, emigrated during the Iran-Iraq war. Others collaborated with the regime or went into legal fields that allowed them some distance from politics. For Ebadi, the only patriotic choice was to stay and the only moral choice was to fight injustice within a system that enshrined it as law.
These labors have often been frustrating. Many of Ebadi's cases remain unresolved, and many of the laws she has sought to change persist today. Still, through her work she has spotlighted some of the Islamic Republic's most egregious practices. In doing so she offers no small measure of hope to those who have run afoul of a judicial system that prefers to operate in the shadows.
One wishes there were more about the cases themselves, the strategies she has used to represent her clients and the intricacies of the trials. In many instances we are not even told how the legal proceedings ended, if they ended at all. Ebadi writes that she reserves these details for a future book, but their absence here is conspicuous.
What we do get is a complex and moving portrait of a life lived in truth, as Vaclav Havel would put it, within the stultifying confines of a political system intended to compel passivity. Ebadi is well aware of the compromises forced on her as she works to curb the Islamic legal system's worst excesses. It is worth quoting her at length on this point, because she articulates the dignity of a reform movement inside Iran that has been derided by Islamists and Westerners alike as too appeasing of the other side. At a time when Washington speaks naïvely and grandiosely of regime change in Iran, Ebadi's story offers an eloquent reminder that working for justice within an unjust system does not always permit a simple and satisfying moral posture. She writes:
"It so happened that I believed in the secular separation of religion and government because, fundamentally, Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation. It can be interpreted to oppress women or interpreted to liberate them. . . . I am a lawyer by training, and know only too well the permanent limitations of trying to enshrine inalienable rights in sources that lack fixed terms and definitions. But I am also a citizen of the Islamic Republic, and I know the futility of approaching the question any other way. My objective is not to vent my own political sensibilities but to push for a law that would save a family like Leila's" — a child who was raped and murdered — "from becoming homeless in their quest to finance the executions of their daughter's convicted murderers. If I'm forced to ferret through musty books of Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources that stress the egalitarian ethics of Islam, then so be it. Is it harder this way? Of course it is. But is there an alternative battlefield? Desperate wishing aside, I cannot see one."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16secor.html
Shirin Ebadi
born 21 June 1947) is an Iranian lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. On 10 October 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was the first ever Iranian, and the first Muslim woman to have received the prize.
In 2009, Ebadi's award was allegedly confiscated by Iranian authorities, though this was later denied by the Iranian government.[1] If true, she would be the first person in the history of the Nobel Prize whose award has been forcibly seized by state authorities.
Ebadi lives in Tehran, but she has been in exile in Canada since June 2009 due to the increase in persecution of Iranian
citizens who are critical of the current regime. ..more .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_Ebadi
Shortly after The Iraq-Iran war came to an end when an Iranian airliner was shot down by the Americans ..
Iran Air Flight 655 (IR655) was a civilian jet airliner shot down by U.S. missiles on 3 July 1988, over the Strait of Hormuz, toward the end of the Iran–Iraq War. The aircraft, an Airbus A300B2-203 operated by Iran Air, was flying from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, when it was destroyed by the U.S. Navy's guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard, including 66 children,[1] ranking it ninth among the deadliest disasters in aviation history. .. more .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
some 7000 MKO attacked Iran thinking the population would support them, but Iranians had had enough of war. Just an other severe silly miscalculation, no doubt imo that the MKO were encouraged in that folly by guess who.
For me, it is virtually impossible to believe that Mukasey was telling the truth when he said ..
"In July, Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, testified at a House Foreign Relations Committee hearing that, "[While] the MEK emphasizes its commitment to democracy and free expression, in neither deed nor word has it forsworn its violent pedigree." Former Bush Attorney General and frequent MEK conference panelist Michael Mukasey disagreed, telling lawmakers that the MEK's terrorist designation is "based on acts that are alleged to have occurred at the time the Shah was in power in Iran," and "the State Department has no evidence of any violent act even attributed to the group since then."
Mukasey’s claim is disputed by a number of sources, .. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/02/the-mujahedeen-e-khalq-controversy.html .. but the question of whether the MEK has renounced its militant origins lies at the core of the State Department's review. A spokesman for the State Department declined to comment on the ongoing examination." ..
that from page 3 .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/08/mek-lobbying_n_913233.html?page=3 .. of your link .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/08/mek-lobbying_n_913233.html?page=1
According to, Shirin Ebadi, Ali Shariati .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Shariati .. was the chief figure in the "slow radicalization of Iranian youth" in the late 60s and early 70s, lead the MKO's early appeal .. the above excerpt is from page 65 of Ebadi's book, which I just happen to be enjoying, again, now.
===========
'Iran Awakening,' by Shirin Ebadi ..
A Dissenting Voice
Review by LAURA SECOR
Published: July 16, 2006
IN 1978, as the fever for revolution swelled, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called from exile in Iraq for Iranians to eject ministers from their offices. Shirin Ebadi, then 31 years old and Iran's first female judge, joined her colleagues in storming the office of the minister of justice. He wasn't there. Instead, the young activists found an old judge sitting behind a desk and staring at them in amazement.
Reuters
Shirin Ebadi
IRAN AWAKENING .. A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. .. By Shirin Ebadi with Azadeh Moaveni. .. Illustrated. 232 pp. Random House. $24.95.
"You!" he cried, when he saw Ebadi among the conspirators. "You of all people, why are you here? Don't you know that you're supporting people who will take your job away if they come to power?"
Ebadi's reply was "self-righteous to the core," she recalls in "Iran Awakening": "I'd rather be a free Iranian than an enslaved attorney."
The endorsement of a female judge was useful to the revolutionaries, who sought to reassure Iranian women of their benign intentions. But the following year, once the clerics succeeded in toppling the shah and consolidating their power, Ebadi was demoted because she was a woman, first to a clerk and then to a secretary in the very courtroom over which she had presided as a judge. Later, her former revolutionary comrades assured her, they would have the luxury of worrying about the rights of women. But later never came.
One day in 1980, the country's new Islamic penal code — adopted overnight and without discussion — appeared in the morning newspaper. Ebadi's head pounded with rage as she read it. A woman's life was to be worth half of a man's in the eyes of the law. Criminal penalties and relations between the sexes were to be set back 1,400 years. "The grim statutes that I would spend the rest of my life fighting stared back at me from the page," she writes.
In collaboration with the gifted journalist Azadeh Moaveni, Ebadi, who in 2003 became the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, has written a memoir that is both a deft history of postrevolutionary Iran and a genuinely intimate recollection. It is fast-paced, suspenseful and spare, its details memorable and well chosen. And it is a story that encapsulates the harsh choices that face those who live and fight for change within the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One thing Ebadi did not expect from the new Islamic penal code was that it would cast a pall over her marriage. "The day Javad and I married each other, we joined our lives together as two equal individuals," she writes. "But under these laws, he stayed a person and I became chattel. They permitted him to divorce me at whim, take custody of our future children, acquire three wives and stick them in the house with me."
She knew her husband had no intention of doing any of these things, but the imbalance of power between them drove her to distraction. At length, she came up with a solution: she took him to a notary's office, where he signed away the new rights the Islamic Republic had given him.
"Why are you doing this?" the astonished notary asked.
"My decision is irrevocable," Ebadi's husband replied. "I want to save my life."
The decade after the revolution was a crucible of war and repression. For Ebadi, it was marked above all by the political imprisonment and murder of a family member. She recounts that episode with the mixture of outrage and empathy that would fuel her return to legal practice in the 1990's, by which time Iran's leaders had realized they needed their female lawyers and law professors.
Ebadi shouldered the country's most intractable human rights cases pro bono. She pored over religious texts to argue against particular interpretations of Koranic injunctions by insisting that within Islam, other more just or less discriminatory interpretations were possible. She did this not because she had warmed to the Islamic penal code or to the idea of religious interpretation as a foundation for the law, but because her cases were pressing and her intellectual vanity was not.
Ebadi represents the family of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was killed in police custody in 2003. She herself was imprisoned in the course of her work on the case of a student who was beaten to death by paramilitaries during a 1999 protest. When a number of dissident intellectuals were murdered under mysterious circumstances in the late 1990's, Ebadi took on one of the most significant of those cases, representing the children of Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, a couple slain in their home. While digging through government documents in the course of preparing for that trial, Ebadi encountered the official authorization for her own assassination.
(Page 2 of 2)
Ebadi is a towering figure, but she writes of her life choices as though they were natural and obvious. Not that the others in her orbit all chose to risk their lives and freedom. Many of her friends, she recalls with wistfulness and no small amount of anger, emigrated during the Iran-Iraq war. Others collaborated with the regime or went into legal fields that allowed them some distance from politics. For Ebadi, the only patriotic choice was to stay and the only moral choice was to fight injustice within a system that enshrined it as law.
These labors have often been frustrating. Many of Ebadi's cases remain unresolved, and many of the laws she has sought to change persist today. Still, through her work she has spotlighted some of the Islamic Republic's most egregious practices. In doing so she offers no small measure of hope to those who have run afoul of a judicial system that prefers to operate in the shadows.
One wishes there were more about the cases themselves, the strategies she has used to represent her clients and the intricacies of the trials. In many instances we are not even told how the legal proceedings ended, if they ended at all. Ebadi writes that she reserves these details for a future book, but their absence here is conspicuous.
What we do get is a complex and moving portrait of a life lived in truth, as Vaclav Havel would put it, within the stultifying confines of a political system intended to compel passivity. Ebadi is well aware of the compromises forced on her as she works to curb the Islamic legal system's worst excesses. It is worth quoting her at length on this point, because she articulates the dignity of a reform movement inside Iran that has been derided by Islamists and Westerners alike as too appeasing of the other side. At a time when Washington speaks naïvely and grandiosely of regime change in Iran, Ebadi's story offers an eloquent reminder that working for justice within an unjust system does not always permit a simple and satisfying moral posture. She writes:
"It so happened that I believed in the secular separation of religion and government because, fundamentally, Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation. It can be interpreted to oppress women or interpreted to liberate them. . . . I am a lawyer by training, and know only too well the permanent limitations of trying to enshrine inalienable rights in sources that lack fixed terms and definitions. But I am also a citizen of the Islamic Republic, and I know the futility of approaching the question any other way. My objective is not to vent my own political sensibilities but to push for a law that would save a family like Leila's" — a child who was raped and murdered — "from becoming homeless in their quest to finance the executions of their daughter's convicted murderers. If I'm forced to ferret through musty books of Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources that stress the egalitarian ethics of Islam, then so be it. Is it harder this way? Of course it is. But is there an alternative battlefield? Desperate wishing aside, I cannot see one."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16secor.html
Shirin Ebadi
born 21 June 1947) is an Iranian lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. On 10 October 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was the first ever Iranian, and the first Muslim woman to have received the prize.
In 2009, Ebadi's award was allegedly confiscated by Iranian authorities, though this was later denied by the Iranian government.[1] If true, she would be the first person in the history of the Nobel Prize whose award has been forcibly seized by state authorities.
Ebadi lives in Tehran, but she has been in exile in Canada since June 2009 due to the increase in persecution of Iranian
citizens who are critical of the current regime. ..more .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_Ebadi
Shortly after The Iraq-Iran war came to an end when an Iranian airliner was shot down by the Americans ..
Iran Air Flight 655 (IR655) was a civilian jet airliner shot down by U.S. missiles on 3 July 1988, over the Strait of Hormuz, toward the end of the Iran–Iraq War. The aircraft, an Airbus A300B2-203 operated by Iran Air, was flying from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, when it was destroyed by the U.S. Navy's guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard, including 66 children,[1] ranking it ninth among the deadliest disasters in aviation history. .. more .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
some 7000 MKO attacked Iran thinking the population would support them, but Iranians had had enough of war. Just an other severe silly miscalculation, no doubt imo that the MKO were encouraged in that folly by guess who.
For me, it is virtually impossible to believe that Mukasey was telling the truth when he said ..
"In July, Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, testified at a House Foreign Relations Committee hearing that, "[While] the MEK emphasizes its commitment to democracy and free expression, in neither deed nor word has it forsworn its violent pedigree." Former Bush Attorney General and frequent MEK conference panelist Michael Mukasey disagreed, telling lawmakers that the MEK's terrorist designation is "based on acts that are alleged to have occurred at the time the Shah was in power in Iran," and "the State Department has no evidence of any violent act even attributed to the group since then."
Mukasey’s claim is disputed by a number of sources, .. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/02/the-mujahedeen-e-khalq-controversy.html .. but the question of whether the MEK has renounced its militant origins lies at the core of the State Department's review. A spokesman for the State Department declined to comment on the ongoing examination." ..
that from page 3 .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/08/mek-lobbying_n_913233.html?page=3 .. of your link .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/08/mek-lobbying_n_913233.html?page=1
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